The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #5

 Decriminalizing Action Tendencies

Adam Young

In the dance of our marriage, we tend to either be the Pursuer or the Withdrawer. These tendencies to either pursue or withdraw are called action tendencies. The action tendencies that each of you do need to be decriminalized. Your task is to get a PhD in your spouse's wounding. 

Your partner gets mad because YOU are the most important person in the world to them.  When your partner withdraws, you must remind yourself that they are acting with FEAR. They are afraid. 

If my partner is afraid, why don't they just stop yelling at me? Well, because of their wounds. And your brain is wounded very differently than your spouse's wounds. We have to an inflow of compassionate understanding for why we do what we do and why your spouse does what they do.  

How do you dance differently?  

1. Bless your neediness. You have to understand compassionately why you feel needy the way that you do. You name is as good, reasonable, understandable, even holy. 

2. Bless your partner's attachment style and action tendencies, as well as your own. Call it good. Even if it has negative consequences for relationships, it is very good that it developed because it allowed you to neurobiologically make it. 

3. Risk sharing primary emotion. You have to bless your neediness. How would your life look different if you stopped hating how needy you are. What if you called it GOOD the way you need your partner emotionally. Most of us believe that a "healthy adult" is not supposed to need emotional connection and soothing from your spouse. And even if you don't cognitively agree with that, it is the sense inside of like "I shouldn't need this much from him. I should be more independent. I should be more self-reliant." Can you turn to your spouse and say, "I really need you to hold me right now? I really need you to comfort me right now?" Many feel they can't do that because you shouldn't need that. Are you still at war with the way God made you? Sometimes we need another person to regulate you and soothe you. If we hate our own frailty, then we can't reach out to our partner and let them know what we need. 

If you are an avoidantly attached withdrawer, do you understand why your spouse gets frustrated/angry and can you bless why they do that? What would it look like if you validated your spouse's anger. "I know your anger tells me something important here that you need me to know." Just a version of that to your partner will help regulate them. That is ATTUNEMENT. 

For the spouse of an avoider: do you understand what it is like for your partner when there is a conflict? They probably have no idea what they are feeling because no one ever cared what they felt. This will change the dynamic of the interaction. "You probably want to leave the room right now because I'm so big and amped up. That would make sense to me if you want to leave." You must risk reaching. "Anytime we finally talk it's because I reached out and brought something out." That is packaged longing within an anger sandwich.  

As you leave here, I hope your goal is not, "I want to be a better spouse." Rather, I hope the goal is: "I want to repair more often."