The Mindful Marriage—Overcome Pain Cycles and Discover the Surprising Secret to Lasting Love with Ron and Nan Deal
Episode Notes
What’s the secret to healing marriage struggles and fostering deep connection?
In this heartfelt and incredibly vulnerable conversation, Ron and Nan Deal share their journey of rebuilding a marriage that almost unraveled. Drawing from their new book, The Mindful Marriage, they reveal how understanding and managing your own pain cycles can transform relationships. Whether you’re married, single, or navigating any relationship, this episode offers profound wisdom and practical tools for emotional and personal growth.
Episode Highlights:
* Explore one couple's journey through shame, blame, and rediscovering connection.
* Learn 4 Pain Cycles that disrupt relationships and how to break free from them.
* Uncover practical steps to nurture your relationship’s “us-ness” without losing yourself.
* Learn what to do when you're willing to do the work—but your partner isn't.
Take the free assessment Ron and Nan mention in the episode here
Get your copy of The Mindful Marriage here.
Resources:
- The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Yourself by Ron Deal and Nan Deal
- www.worthypub.com/assessment
- Matthew 7
- Philippians 21
- Corinthians 13
- rondeal.org
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 115: 4 Ways to Transform Your Relationship: Expert Tips to Heal Pain Points and Deepen Intimacy
Thanks to our sponsors:
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here this week. This is a first for The Best of You Podcast–it's the first time we've had a married couple on, as they tell their story of how they came back from the brink of their marriage almost unraveling.
It's also the first time we've really had an episode devoted to the topic of marriage. Whether you're married, divorced, or single, this episode has something for everybody. My guests today have written a brand new book that is all about the secret to a healthy marriage.
This episode touches on so much of what we talk about regularly on this podcast, which is learning to manage our own emotions, learning to be more in tune with our body, with the messages we're telling ourselves, more in charge of our own responses to other people.
All that work is, in fact, the foundation for a healthy, long-term, two-way relationship with someone else. So in this episode, we're going to get deep into what my guests call the four pain cycles–the four ways most of us tend to cope when we feel threatened or hurt or fearful or controlled or even annoyed with another human.
We’ll see how it's our responsibility to learn how to shift from that pain cycle into a healthy response that honors the other person, but also reveals the best version of who we are in that moment.
My guests today are an incredible couple, Ron and Nan Deal. They've been married for 38 years and they've worked for decades to bring wisdom and incredibly practical advice for couples everywhere.
Ron is a licensed marriage and family therapist. He's a bestselling author and podcaster, and Nan is the co-founder of Connor's Song, which is a non-profit organization founded in honor of their son, Connor, who died at the age of 12 in 2009.
In this new book, The Mindful Marriage, Ron and Nan partner with pioneering therapists, Dr. Terry Hargrave and Sharon Hargrave, whose transformational restoration therapy has helped millions through the practice of emotional mindfulness applied to marriage. The book is called The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Yourself.
That subtitle really says it all. The more we grow and heal and learn to manage our own inner turmoil and become the best version of who we are, the more we show up effectively in our most cherished relationships.
This is such a rich episode from start to finish. Ron and Nan share incredibly honestly and vulnerably about each of their own journeys and how there were periods of time where neither of them was doing their own work and it really hurt the other one. They share how they not only survived those rough patches, but learned to thrive as a married couple.
This method that they're laying out in the new book and that they share with us today on this episode is what helped them heal their own marriage. You will hear us talk about an assessment you can take to help pinpoint your own pain cycle, which is the way that you tend to react out of pain when you feel hurt by someone else.
I took the assessment and we discussed my results in today's episode. If you want to take that assessment, it's free. It's at www.worthypub.com/assessment. I will send that link out along with an excerpt from the book in this week's email newsletter. It's free and it goes out every Tuesday. You can sign up for it at dralisoncook.com.
Without further ado, I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Ron and Nan Deal.
***
Alison Cook: Let's dive into this because you're both very real and honest in the book, which I so appreciated. Ron, you've worked with couples for years as a therapist. You’ve helped so many other couples and yet your own marriage was at a real crisis point.
Could you take us back to that moment where Nan, you really sat down with Ron and said, this isn't working. We've got to change. What was happening in your marriage at that moment?
Nan: I like to go back to the beginning. We both brought in some real hard baggage to the marriage, and we didn't unpack it back then. We actually didn't know how much baggage we were bringing in from our families of origin. I honestly wanted Ron to fix it.
He did go through graduate school and became a therapist, and I wanted him to fix it and I didn't want him to fix it. I wanted him to fix it on my terms, when I wanted him to fix it. You know what I mean? We brought in a lot. We brought in our pain, and we started unpacking that on each other, unknowingly.
There was a season, a decade or more, where Ron was really overworking. I would say he was a workaholic. There were multiple times I tried to get him to see, or I tried to coerce him into seeing, or I tried to blame him or shame him into seeing this bad pattern.
It was never enough for him. He was going after the next thing and the next thing, building this kingdom, so to speak.
Alison Cook: Good things.
Nan: Right. Yes. Our boys were middle school and under. So I'd say they were 8, 10 and 12 at the time. It was like, wait a minute, they need their dad. These are young boys who are going to become young men, and where is Ron? Why are we always walking into church by ourselves?
Why am I feeling so lonely on this side of the couch? He's gone all the time, and when he comes home, he's completely exhausted because he's given 150%. I had had enough, and we had made a move, too. I thought the move would make things better, when in fact it made it worse.
I met him one night with a suitcase and it really wasn't a kindness, it wasn't even a care-frontation at that point. It was, you get us some help or you're out of here. Or maybe I'm out of here, I don't know, but it’s either me or you kind of thing. I was done and in real desperation. He was like, okay, I'll get us some help. And that landed us into Dr. Hargrave's office the next day.
Ron: Alison, a lot of people can relate to some of that story. We just drift in our marriage and wake up one day and go, wow, you're way over there. How did we get here? That was certainly us then.
What we came to learn from Dr. Hargrave and the principles that we are now sharing in The Mindful Marriage, is that what was driving us, underneath my working, underneath her loneliness, was far more important than the fact that I was working a lot of hours.
It was far more important to understand that, because what was driving us would have continued to drive in all kinds of wrong directions, and we needed to get at that root.
Alison Cook: Yeah. The root. You had to get at the root.
Nan: That's right. In that office that day, I met them both at the door and I said, because I'm an early childhood education major, I have this doctor and a therapist staring at me and I said, no funny business.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that.
Nan: I'm like, none of this psychobabble stuff. Terry said, by all means, go first. He let me unpack and unpack my pain. Then he turned to Ron and he really nailed him to the wall.
Ron: He did. He really did. He was talking to Nan. He was doing a reflective statement to Nan, but boy, he was talking to me.
Nan: At that moment, I sat and I thought, yay, somebody's finally seen me and heard me. But Ron starts crying. At that moment, he starts a journey of humility. And I'm sitting there in my pain and in my anger going, good. You sit in that. You sit in that for a little bit because you have been so awful to me.
I did not see his pain. I was so glad that somebody else saw my pain and was calling him out on it, which was wrong on my part. So fast forward two years to when the bottom drops out and our son, our middle son Connor, passes away. We are back in Terry's office, hanging on by a thread.
I will say this about him. I love him dearly for how he tenderly and gently stepped into that space and was present for us. I am so grateful because of how hard it was for us and how broken we were. I hate the stat that people throw out when people lose a child, and they come at you and go, well your marriage is in a terrible crisis now.
95 percent of all marriages are gonna end because you've lost a child. First of all, that's not true. If you're in a crisis like us, you could become a statistic, but Terry was God's provision for when this crisis, this deep dark night of the soul comes on. I'm thankful for those two years we sat in his office and worked.
But I will say this about those two years. Ron starts his journey of humbling and Terry turns to me that day and he says, Nan, this brokenness in you, if you'll allow God to heal it, it'll be the most beautiful part of you. I sat there and I looked at him and I went, what? I've been trying to scrape this pain off my whole life. What do you mean the most beautiful part?
It wasn't until 2020 that I understood that for the first time. Oh, this is what you meant. So this journey with him and restoration therapy and our journey of grief has been a long windy one.
Alison Cook: Yep, I appreciate the honesty. You said something really interesting, and this is so relatable for people. When you were upset with Ron working all the time, not being available, that was real. It was valid.
But you also said that the way you were trying to get him to see that wasn't helpful. This is what gets tricky, I think, for people when we're in a marriage, when we're in a relationship—where it's not that what we're seeing in the other person isn't valid.
We hear the tropes of, I need to do my own work, but maybe he actually is the one with the problem!
Ron and Nan: You're right.
Alison Cook: It gets into what you lay out as these reactive styles.
Ron and Nan: Yep. Reactive coping.
Alison Cook: So this is where we can lose each other as a couple. It's a subtle, but really important shift. It's not that we're trying to gaslight ourselves and say, he's got to do him, I've got to work on myself. There is an issue, and we need to figure out how to come together in that. That feels like such an important spotlight you're placing. I want to dig into that a little bit.
Ron and Nan: If there's abuse, then there definitely needs to be safety. There needs to be boundaries. I sat with a woman last week at a recovery meeting, and she was setting a boundary because her partner was doing drugs. She asked me, do you think that was okay? Am I not showing forgiveness? I'm like, oh, most certainly you need to get to a safe place.
Alison Cook: I love that you're giving that caveat. We're not talking here about patterns of abuse or toxicity. We're talking about disappointments. Maybe the other person is really growing or doing their best. Maybe they are hurting us, but it's not in that category of abuse. I really appreciate that caveat.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. We never want anybody to hear us saying that. So let's get into that reactivity. Sure. First of all, this is the universal experience. Every person on the planet does it, anywhere from a couple of times a day to multiple times, if not constantly during the day.
Dysregulation is a natural part of our life. It happens when somebody cuts you off on the freeway. It happens when your 2 year old or your 16 year old or your 25 year old looks at you and says, I don't care what you say, you're stupid. You feel that disrespect. Those are moments of dysregulation.
When your spouse looks into their phone rather than looking into your eyes, you feel that gap. Where'd you go? That's a moment of dysregulation. What happens neurologically is our brain goes into fight or flight reactivity. Everybody's heard of that these days. We talk a lot about trauma, and you're an expert, Alison, at that.
Fight or flight really takes on four different expressions. Blame, shame, control, or escape. Those are the categories. There are different things underneath that. But blame is basically that I'm against you. This is your fault. I'm going to point out what you did wrong. It's Adam and Eve in the garden. It's somebody else's fault.
Shame is, it's my fault and I'm unloading on me and there must be something wrong with me. So it's not the feeling of shame. It's the activity of shame. It's putting ourselves in a corner and saying, this is about me. I'm not good enough. That's why you would rather spend time on your phone than talk to me. That's shame.
Control is, I'm going to take charge of the circumstances. I'm going to try to prevent this thing that's causing me pain from happening anymore. So I'm going to tell you to do that. It's criticism. It's defensiveness, where I talk you into liking me better than you like me now. It's argumentative-ness. That's what control looks like.
Escape is 20,000 things that you can run to that will numb you to your pain. So it's running into working all the time, or running into alcohol or drugs or porn or your kids, or lots of things. Food, overeating, exercise, all the things that we can do excessively because we're running away from something.
Now, some people are one of those four, and as it turns out, some people do all four, or a combination. That would be me. This is the start of understanding yourself, which is why we have an assessment now online that people can go online and do. I know you're going to put a link in the show notes for that. It's very eye opening.
In about 10 minutes, you'll go, wow, that's me. As I've been on this journey, I did a lot of blame and shame when I was younger. I'd vacillate between the two, because I was in a very shameful home. I would blame the situation, but then I'd shame myself because maybe it was me. I did a lot of blame, shame, blame, shame.
Then when I got with Ron, it was like, I'm going to blame, shame, but ooh, now I want to control you. After our son passed away, this was the straw that broke the camel's back for me as far as the pain. There was nothing I could do. I went to escape, and for a decade, I numbed with alcohol and prescription medication because it was instant.
But the pattern was already established with the blame and shame and control. This took on a life of its own. I can still, though, in certain situations, find myself going, what are all four of these things doing? Why are they still here at the table? Alison, did you get to take the assessment?
Alison Cook: I did. I found it very eye-opening. I actually had parts of me that were like, wait a minute. So I want to get into that. I'd love to get into that and let you guys dissect it a little bit for me, because I have one very clear one. Part of me can feel like, how is this hurting anybody? The escape one.
So I want to get into that, but before we go there, I want to ask you, because you're saying something really important with these reactive styles. I'm going back to “Ron's working too much”. There's something legitimate there. Maybe feeling you're wanting to blame him. You're feeling shame inside.
What I notice in marriages, and I'd love for you to speak to this, is often it's not *what we say to our spouse. It's the place from which we say it.So if I'm feeling shame, the way that I come at my spouse is going to come out of that shame. That shame is what's going to spill out of me when I get tipped over.
I'll say to people, as you get healthier, you may be even more able to go to your spouse and be like, hey, what's going on with this? You might be more empowered to actually say, this isn't working for me. It doesn't diminish your voice.
Ron: It gives you agency at the end of the day. You have more agency to speak into the relationship from a position of calmness, from a position of strength, rather than dependence. See, that's the thing. I'm leaning on Nan to finally act right and do right, so that’s my sense of inadequacy.
There's my pain. That's what drove me to work all the time. I didn't know that. I knew I worked a lot, but I didn't know why. But once I discovered my pain, inadequacy, that was driving my control, I had to face myself with that. Rather than going, Nan needs to love this out of me, which is what most of us do our entire lives. I've become convinced of this.
We spend our marriages saying, if you were more _____, then I wouldn't feel inadequate. I wouldn't fight. I wouldn't be controlling. I wouldn't work too much. And the truth is, that's not accurate. You have something driving you from within that you gotta learn what it is and take charge of it.
Nan: Believe me, I tried. I tried so hard to love that out of him, or be what I needed to be for that. All of a sudden you look up and you go, but he's still working a ton. Wow. That didn't work. Mine comes from abandonment. I have so much abandonment in my family of origin story.
I'm with you and I'm feeling abandoned by you. Then we lose Connor, and I'm feeling abandoned by God. It's this abandonment, abandonment, abandonment. Then, Ron’s drive to work and travel and be gone and conquer and do for all the other people in your world taps into my abandonment.
It is nasty and ugly–I don't even want to call it a dance. It's dysregulation, a cycle we can't pop out of.
Alison Cook: That's such an important nuance, because we do need to speak into our spouse's lives. That is part of it, but we have to be able to do it from a place that isn't coming from my wounds.
Ron and Nan: Right.
Alison Cook: It is coming from my love, and this isn't okay.
Ron and Nan: Alison, we are dancing around Matthew 7. Judge not that you be judged. By the way, the measure you give will be the measure you get, so when you stand in pride looking at your spouse saying, you're the one with the problems, I'm okay, but you're messed up, then what happens?
They return fire, and now you have a cycle. So what does Jesus say to do? Stop focusing on the speck in the other person's eye. Start dealing with the log in your own eye. Then, what happens when you take the log out of your own eye? Then you will be able to help them with the speck.
When I take agency over my pain, I manage me, rather than expecting Nan to manage me, to fix me, to help me, to love it out of me, whatever is going to happen there. When I take agency over myself, deal with my own log, my own pride, my own issues, my own pain, I am in a better position to be self-giving toward her.
It empowers my ability to love her at that point in time. So this is not about me pulling away and fixing me and not worrying about you. No. At the end of the day, it moves us.
Alison Cook: That's right.
Nan: It happened last week. I'm getting ready to go to a meeting on Thursday night. I asked him, what are you going to do? I'm going to be gone for two and a half hours. He's worked a full day. He's had a long week. It's Thursday, the book's coming out. There's a lot, and he said, yeah, I'm going to work.
I said, no, why don't you watch something? You love that. Just get lost in that and give yourself a little evening. You work so hard and you should do that. He’s like, okay, yeah, I'll think about that. Then I left him to it, because that's not mine to manage, but I can love you.
Old Nan would have said, yeah, that's what you're probably gonna do and you do that all the time because all you can think about is work. That's the love of your life. I came home and I said, what'd you do? He goes, I took the evening off for myself. I was like, this is a miracle. In my mind I'm going, God, did you see that? He's like, yes. I didn't need your help. I need you to love him like I love him. Then you need to back away.
Alison Cook: That's a great example. You were in that moment trying to love him, not control him, not blame him, not shame yourself. It is so much more freeing and so much more powerful. That's an incredible example.
Nan: I wasn't trying to get something out of him. That was genuinely for him.
Ron: I can tell you on my end, I immediately felt her compassion and I know the difference. A decade ago, it would have been contempt and anger, and it’s what motivated me at that point to take her suggestion.
Back then, I would have said I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and here we are against each other again. Both dysregulated, both reacting at one another, and nobody is giving love. But when she came softly and gently, and we've done so much work together, I knew where that was coming from.
I heard it, and I didn't think I had to do it. I wasn't being controlled by her. I had complete options. But it landed on my heart in a way that I could entertain it.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that difference is powerful. Early on, and I've shared with you a little bit in previous conversations, Ron, when I was dating my husband, he'd been married before. His wife had died and he was a widower, so he had a little more experience than I had coming in.
Some of my own abandonment and attachment issues came to the surface that I tried to put on him. He very early on would say, I don't think this is about me. And he was right. There was something about how he said it though, because he said it so clearly–there wasn't a hook, there wasn't blame, there wasn't control.
It was the truth. I could feel that he was actually loving me in that moment, because I then had to go, wait, if he can't solve this ache in my heart, I’ve got to get to the bottom of the ache then. Because this marriage isn't going to solve that. That's going to set us up for defeat. That was life changing to me, to do my own work.
I love that you're putting your fingers on this in the book. You do such a beautiful job through your own stories, through such practical wisdom on how to apply it. I want to talk a little bit about this assessment and encourage folks to take it. I took the really short version, and very clearly came out as someone who escapes.
It’s my primary go-to. I was feeling so proud of myself because I don't try to control people. I don't try to blame people. I don't really shame myself.
Ron and Nan: Hahaha!
Alison Cook: Oh and here's what's interesting about that one. I'm curious about your thoughts for those of us who avoid conflict, who escape it. There's a way in which we can tell ourselves, the only person I'm hurting is myself. I do it through disappearing. Nan, you talked about this in the book, disappearing into books and movies.
I know when I'm disappearing into a world of my own instead of wanting to face what's hard in a relationship. It's taken me a long time to recognize, and I can tell myself, I'm not hurting anybody.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. Let me say, there are some things that are socially more acceptable to escape into. Binging Netflix. Shopping. Religiosity is something people escape into, and they call it being Christian, and really they're running from their pain. They're still running from something.
Yes, some things have more negative consequences, such as drinking alcohol and doing drugs. That's not the point. The point is, what is this telling me about me? That is what we call chasing your pain. That question has been life changing for us. Not when our marriage came to a crisis, but every day since.
If I'm driving down the road and somebody cuts me off, and I have a few choice words for them, as if they could hear me, why do I do that? What is that? That's dysregulation. There's no thoughtfulness to that. It's reactivity. Then I ask myself, Ron, what is that telling you about you? What is going on with you right now? Why did it bother you so much that the guy cut you off on the freeway?
That little question will lead to amazing insights and discoveries about what you're running from. Then I know what to do with it. I know how to face it. I know how to move myself. We've mapped the peace cycle out of my pain. The book helps outline that for people.
I'm learning the vulnerabilities in me, the issues in me, and I'm seeing what I can choose to do to put on my new self and not be that anymore. With both control and escape, what I was doing was defending my pain. Because I had found something that took the edge off that made me feel better.
It was a false sense of better. It has to do with trust in God. Because in this life, we're gonna have trouble. We're gonna have pains. We're going to be disappointed in relationships. Grief and loss are going to happen. God has to be the carrier for me.I had to trust Him with my loss, with my grief, with my pain.
He doesn't take it away. There are some things He has healed. He has healed our marriage. There are things in my pain He has taught me from childhood. With the loss of our son, he's not taking it away this side of heaven, but I can trust Him to help me carry it.
Boy, if one glass didn't help, or 10 shows didn't help, or three blouses that I bought, or whatever the numbing is, it can be pornography, it can be food, it can be all kinds of things. That's me not trusting God to heal or help me carry or take on that pain and to learn from it. You do that for 10 years and you get further and further and further from what the truth is and further from the light.
That's what was happening with me. I didn't trust him with it. I got one more thought, Alison, and then I'd love for you to respond to what we've been rambling about here as it relates to you being an escaper.
Yes, sometimes you can escape into things that aren't really immoral or causing great difficulty. You think, I'm the only one who's suffering here, so it's not a big deal. But the other thing I would say is, what are the opportunities you miss as a result of not taking agency and facing whatever pain is behind it?
What are the things that you're having to give up? Yes, you're the one suffering, but are there other choices you could have made that would have brought about different things if you faced the pain rather than ran from it?
Alison Cook: I love what you're both saying, and it takes me right back to the core of your book. In my case, because I can be very autonomous, I can exist in my mind. You talk about us-ness in the book. My escape is not only depriving God of the opportunity to enter in, but it's depriving my most significant people of the opportunity to bear those burdens together, or to bear the hardships together. It's preventing intimacy.
Ron and Nan: That's beautifully said.
Alison Cook: One of the things I love about your book that is so different is that you talk about how a marriage becomes its own entity. There's an us-ness that's its own thing that we have to nurture and nourish. I love that because it takes us out of the 50-50 or compromise or negotiations.
It's this thing that's bigger than me or my spouse that I need to nurture. When I'm in avoidance or escape, I'm not nurturing that us-ness, because I'm leaving somebody out of that. I thought about this after I took your assessment, as the Lord has tapped on my heart. You are depriving yourself and others of something when you refuse to walk into pain with others.
My husband's very active. I could curl up on a couch forever. He's very active. He loves to hike. He loves to be outside. He's always out. To nourish our us-ness, we do those things together. I could tell myself I'm doing those things for him, but that's the escaper part of me. The Spirit-led side of that is, I love solitude, I love contemplation, I love to ponder, and when we're cross-country skiing together, I get to do that in a far healthier way.
I take his invitation to us-ness and we're doing something together that I might not choose on my own. There's fruit in that for me, and I've discovered that. Suddenly I'm like, when can we go hiking again, and he's like, that’s what you want? I’m like, not only because I want to be with you, but because the us-ness that we've created to establish those rhythms is also good for me.
Ron and Nan: That's exactly it.
Alison Cook: That's what I realized. The us-ness invites me into, wait a minute, this hiding that I do actually can be redeemed into something that's more contemplative. These things I want to be, I do that far better when we're an “us” and we're coming together. It's so much deeper than, “I’m doing this for him. He does this for me.”
Ron and Nan: Exactly. Us-ness is like a baby. It's a thing you gotta feed and care for and grow and nurture, and it's a living, breathing thing that you created on the day that you got married and dedicated your lives to one another. The word picture I would give you is the unity candle.
Normally people walk up and they grab their individual candles and they light the “us candle”, if we could say it that way, and then they blow themselves out. Which never should you do in marriage; it is not designed to blow you out. Marriage is designed for you to be able to thrive and flourish.
But now there is this third entity that you both need to feed and care for and fan that flame. By the way, that flame, as the us-ness grows and gets stronger, feeds each of you individually so all three candles are lit. That's the design for marriage. All three candles are lit and your us-ness becomes that thing that requires something of you to give to. And it gives back.
Here's my quick example, similar to yours. My wife was a runner for years and had a little injury. She became a walker, and she's not a walker, folks. She is a walker. I can't hardly keep up with her. I've had knee surgeries and now I'm doing better than I ever have physically and I'm joining her.
Guess what? Ron does not like walking. Ron gets tired. Ron gets sore. Ron can't keep up with Nan. But our us-ness likes walking because it's time together, it's conversation. I know it feeds her for me to be with her. It feeds me to hear her thoughts as she walks and talks.
Yes, I pay a price for the us-ness to be fed and our us-ness enjoys it. Ron probably won't walk at all, if it were up to me. I probably wouldn't do it. But together, that's something that really feeds both of us.
Your us-ness is gonna ebb and flow and change and grow and look differently than it did 39 years ago. You're gonna have seasons where it looks different. You've got to be a student of your us-ness too. We're an empty nest right now. So that's a different season and we're grandparents. So that's a different season with our us-ness.
Alison Cook: Yes. I love that. You have to be intentional about it at each of these seasons in your marriage.
Ron and Nan: To tie it in with our previous conversation, when I am at my worst, when I'm bringing dysregulation and reactivity, blame, shame, control, and escape to our us-ness, I'm not feeding it. I'm not nurturing it. I'm not contributing to something that is loving, stable, and emotionally safe for both of us.
I'm bringing the worst of me to us. I need to manage myself to bring the better parts of me to us. And, at the end of the day, that's the message. By the way, this is the New Testament calling us out of our old self into the new self. We already have the new self in Christ, but not yet, because I'm still trying to work out my salvation every single day of my life.
It's a discipline of putting on the new, putting on the new, putting on the new. At the end of the day, that's why we are so grateful to the Hargraves for their work, to help us take off our old selves and learn how to put on the new self. Every once in a while, we slip right back into the old because that thing doesn't want to die. It resurrects every single day.
We gotta kill it all over again with humility, and try to put on the new one more time. It gets easier as we grow and change. It was really hard in the beginning, but it's so much easier now. It's easier because we've practiced and worked at it and worked at it. Like muscle memory, when you're building a new skill, it does get easier.
Alison Cook: I love the word practice. The title of the book is The Mindful Marriage. What you're teaching us to do is to be mindful of these patterns in ourselves. It does take practice. That's a good word. I love that you talked about how in marriage, we don't snuff out the individual candles. They still exist.
The us-ness doesn't take us over. But it takes mindfulness. So for example, it takes mindfulness for me to say, what is feeding our us-ness? It actually feeds the us-ness for me to have this interest, or for my spouse to have this interest over there. It actually feeds the us-ness.
Versus when I'm being selfish and I don't want to do this thing. It takes that mindfulness to really stay on top of ourselves. You lay out in the book four practices, essentially. Could you talk us through those a little bit?
Ron and Nan: It's a little bit of a workbook. People are going to do exercises. They're going to put pen to paper, and they're going to identify, oh, wow, this is my old reactive self. This is what I do. Huh. Wow. Then they're going to map out, what's the truth?
What’s rooted in God, rooted in the truth I'm learning about myself, about our us-ness? How then am I going to respond differently to the same circumstance? I'm still going to get dysregulated. She's still going to do something that from time to time triggers something in me.
It's my job to manage me in those moments. Not to expect her to fix it, because it's my job to manage me. That culminates this whole journey. This book is one journey. Not a chapter on this or that. It's one journey to help you identify these four steps.
When I know what they are, then that is my way out of dysregulation, back into self-regulation or self-control, so that I can put on a better me, so we can deal with whatever the issue is at hand. That's in a nutshell the journey that the book takes you on. Those four steps are very intentional to say out loud.
Your old self. The new self you're trying to work into. You're going to love this as a clinician–the psychology of this is when you get dysregulated and go into fight or flight mode, you're in your midbrain and your prefrontal cortex isn't working anymore and you need to turn it back on.
The four steps actively turn back on the better part of your brain. The part of your brain that knows what love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and goodness are. You can say, I gotta move toward that. You are using mindfulness and taking back control. You're renewing yourself by renewing your mind. It’s helping you stop being the old and start being the new.
The four steps do that.
Alison Cook: Love that. It's so practical. Because we can’t really will ourselves into being more loving, which is often what we try to do. Like you were saying, Nan, earlier in your marriage, “I'll try to love them out of my own willpower.”
Ron and Nan: So let me give a quick example. When I get triggered about something, it often sounds like, okay, here's step one. Say what I feel. I'm feeling inadequate. Now, by the way, I used to say, I'm feeling controlled by you and you need to knock it off.
See, I focused on the speck in her eye. Now I'm focusing on the log in my own eye. I feel inadequate. Because that's at the root of it. What I usually do, Nan, with my inadequacy, is I usually blame or control you by making it your fault or pointing out the one thing in your argument that's wrong. That's what I normally do.
The truth is, I might have something I need to listen to in this moment. The truth is, God loves me and I'm not inadequate and I'm actually very capable of managing myself in this moment. Number four, this is the key. What I'm going to do differently based on the truth, is I'm going to slow my heart rate.
I'm going to slow down. I'm going to listen. I'm going to try to hear what it is you're trying to share with me and put my defensiveness aside. Okay, deep breath. Alright, you can go. So what I did is I talked out loud to myself and to her. I talked to myself. I told myself, get in charge of your log, Ron. Don't go into reactivity. Move in a better direction.
Number two, I talked to her out loud and told her what I was doing in the moment. She's used to me being reactive right back. But when she hears me saying this, she goes, oh, Ron's putting on humility. Ron's taking charge of himself. I don't have to control him. He's controlling him. That's a good thing. It relieves her of any hook, to try to jump in and do what she used to do. So now we're both on a better plane.
The biggest thing it does is neurologically, it's slowing you down and reactivating your mind. We are transformed, Alison, by the renewing of our minds because our mind renews our brain, and the brain renews the body and how we respond. When we get the mind, then the rest of us follows.
Step four is, so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna calm down in this moment. My example is, I'm gonna try to listen to you and put aside my defensiveness. It's the doing that helps us reinforce this.
Neurologically, again, the more you do it, the more your brain gets used to the new activity rather than the old, and it replaces the old with new. That's the neuroplasticity of our minds, that we're actually able to restructure the neurological ruts of our brain.
Literally, you're not just renewing the consciousness of your mind, you're renewing your brain structure. It is physical, what happens as a result of this process. Not immediate, but over time, the more we do this, the easier and easier it gets.
Alison Cook: When you're both doing that, you're aware. It's a cue when one of you takes that first step, for both of you to essentially slow yourselves down and be present to the other in a different way.
Nan: Or it could be, I went off the rails, and I really got dysregulated, and I may go into blame. I may go into control. I've caught myself, and I'm gonna come back, and I'm gonna say, hey, earlier, here's what was happening with me. This is what I did. For that I am so sorry. That is old Nan talking.
I know I had to have God speak to me, the Holy Spirit, and I needed to hear from Him, and I know now that it was pain, that was my abandonment talking. I hate that I do those old things, but I'm gonna move towards you, I'm gonna ask for forgiveness. I'm going to move towards you, and I am going to now walk in truth.
Sometimes we get dysregulated. Some of those things happen in a nanosecond. Those ruts can be so powerful. Early on, when I was in my recovery and I was implementing these practices, I cannot tell you how many times I would get dysregulated and go, man, I could use a drink right now.
Years down the road now, that's the last thing that comes into my mind. And yet I still get dysregulated. It's the last thing, because that rut is not there anymore. But there are others, and you're peeling back the layers. It's a humility posture.
It's still triggering to me. Let's talk about this. What I want to do is this, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to move towards you. I'm going to trust God with it, and I'm going to come to you with it.
Ron: Alison, what do you think happens in my heart when I hear her doing all that work out loud? It absolutely softens my heart.
Alison Cook: A hundred percent.
Ron: A hundred percent. Like, all of a sudden, instead of being on guard and dysregulated, I'm going, okay, wow, beautiful. I see you working. I see in that moment her sacrificing something about her for our us-ness.
That moves me toward her. That makes me want to invest in this and look in the mirror at myself. All of a sudden, both of us are putting on humility, which softens the whole dynamic. Again, I don't want to pretty this up for people. This is a hard journey.
If you've been to really hard places like we've been, this is not a turn on a dime sort of stuff. This is sledging for quite a while. But my goodness, what used to take us two weeks to even begin to try to deal with happens in a minute and a half in this season of our life. It's so different.
Alison Cook: I'm so glad you're saying this for people, because especially when we've dug those ruts internally and with our partner for a long time, they're deep. I so appreciate your honesty and vulnerability, both of you, about your personal struggles and how that affects the marriage.
This picture that I get as you're describing the process are these circles where we go into our individual selves with all the reactivity, but you're coming into that us-ness circle, and that's the space where the defenses melt away.
Let's come back to us, and the word you keep using is humility. You talk about it a lot in the book. It melts the ego and the pride. Oh, I got to apologize to him. Let's go back to the us space. This is for us.
Ron: What does Philippians 2 tell us about our Lord, who put on humility and became obedient to death, even death on a cross? In that whole section, Paul lays out, this is how you do your relationships. This is how we do marriage. This is how we do friendships. This is how we do parenting.
Humility says, I'm not going to rule over you. I am managing me. Did you know the Latin root word for humility is grounded? You get grounded with humility. You know who you are and what you're not. You know where you fit in the world. You know who God is and that you're not him.
That posturing softens my heart, and it absolutely makes it easier for her heart to soften towards me.
Nan: I want to say this, because it's not perfection you're going after, because you're not going to get that. It's not that we do these steps and then Ron never blames me for anything. Our flesh is there, but, when he blames me, I can go, wait a minute.
This is causing me pain, and what do I normally do in my pain? I'm gonna come at you. I'm gonna go in this loop of, you always do this to me. No, I can slow this roll down, and I can say, that's shaming, and that's on you. I'm not going to receive that.
But I don't have to withdraw. I don't have to control him. I don't have to beat him over the head. I don't have to do all of the stuff that's in 1 Corinthians 13, the record of wrongs. I love to be an archaeological digger, and just, yeah, you've been doing this for years. Your dad did this, and on it goes.
Alison Cook: Even if it's in your own mind and it's not coming out, it's still building that rut.
Nan: That is the pain talking. What does Nan normally do? She goes to all four of these things. No. Take a breath. Look at him as God looks at him, because that's the truth. He's having a moment here. I don't know why, but I can say, you don't need to be shaming me right now. I'm not gonna withdraw. I'm gonna move towards you, and I'm gonna listen to the truth.
Alison Cook: There’s that agency piece. He may or may not take accountability for that. Hopefully he will as time goes on. You don't need him to, because you know what's true. That's so empowering.
Nan: It’s so empowering. It unhooks you from that loop and that rut. We hear from couples all the time, “we do the same thing all the time”.
Let me tell you, there are times when he can say something and my flesh goes, oh, here we go again. It's so freeing to go, wait a minute, no. I'm going to walk in truth. I feel a lot of freedom in that. By the way, I want to go full circle before you ask that next question.
We said earlier, we never want somebody in an abusive situation to hear us saying, suck it up and stay. Oh no. I want them to listen to what we just said. The empowerment is in recognizing what is true about me from God's point of view. God says you're a worthy person. That means you're not worthy of being hit or beaten or pressed down upon, or whatever you're receiving in your current marriage relationship.
That is not how God sees you. It's not what you're worth. So God's truth empowers me to take agency to act out of my worth. That's very important. If I'm acting out of my worth, I'm not gonna stand here and be subject to that.
At the same time, I'm not going to close myself off to the relationship, or the possibilities of change, or whatever. But I am going to take action, so that doesn't happen anymore. Boundaries.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's such a nuanced thing because sometimes, for women who are in abusive relationships, the shame makes it hard for them to leave. Being able to get to this point of, “I have to remove myself from this situation–this is unsafe for myself and my kids”, comes from this work of turning inward and the confidence that it can give you.
I have a question for you before we wind down. I appreciate you staying a little bit longer. I can hear a listener in my mind wondering about, let's say it's not an abusive situation. It's not toxic, but one member of the couple is not willing to do their own work.
One is sitting there going, I'd love to do this. I want to do this. Let me start tomorrow. But my spouse or whatever is never going to. They're sedentary. They're not growing. What do you do in that situation?
Ron: We do address that in later chapters of the book, and it's a very important question. Let me say, in our own journey, both of us had seasons where we were not doing our work, for sure. In 2007, when our marriage blew up and we found ourselves in Dr. Hargrave's office, I wasn't doing any work on me.
She was the one who needed all the change as far as I was concerned, and that was my pride talking. Dr. Hargrave helped me begin to go on a humility journey that continues to this day. During the worst season of her drinking, I was every day trying to self-regulate. Every day I was trying to say, how do I put on love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness in this moment with her?
I was working on me, trying to take off control and blame–stuff that I was really good at. It was a lonely experience. My prayer was, Lord, since I'm not doing the same dance with her anymore that I used to do, let her get tired of dancing all by herself.
I don't know if that ultimately played a role or not. I know eventually she came to the end of herself and she made some really hard, amazing decisions that brought about recovery for her. I do think I was doing what I could. She was “managing me and staying in my lane”, as she's come to say it.
I love that state. I needed to stay in my lane instead of crossing into her lane, and eventually that created an environment where it was more likely that she started looking in her own mirror, doing her own work. But I'm not gonna guarantee that to anybody listening. I wish I could. I can't guarantee that, but I do think it is the right way to respond.
Nan: It doesn't do anything for your us-ness. If we can go back to that season where Ron wasn't ever seen, when I would say, hey, this is too much. I think, what about us? While I'm doing this for God, and he was so into his pride, that did nothing for our us-ness. Our us-ness was stagnant, and it was very isolating and there was not any intimacy.
Same with the season that I was in it. There's gotta be some grace there. There's gotta be prayer on the part of the other person for that person, but ultimately it's got to be them doing the work together, and God working in them.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Again, it's just, you're being so real about this. We're talking about nuanced situations, but if I can do my own work, stay in my own lane, I might be more able when the other person is ready to meet me there.
It's not easy. It's hard. Marriage is a marathon, not a sprint. It might be a series of marathons. It's a long journey, but these are tools. I like what you're saying. These are tools that really can help you regardless of the season you're in.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. The alternative is to be reacting out of your own pain. When you react out of pain, that ignites their dysregulated pain, and now you're in the couple pain cycle and you are stuck. When one person starts pursuing peace by self-control, it has to change something. You're not doing the same dance anymore.
It has to change something. Ultimately, it will. You don't know exactly when or how quickly, but it will. There is power in taking your agency.
Alison Cook: There might come a moment, like for you, Nan, where you say, I'm not doing this anymore. Or where you have to say to a spouse, this isn't okay. I'm not going to leave you, but I'm not okay with this. Again, it's coming out of that self-regulated state.
Ron and Nan: You're right. That's right. My prayer for couples is that they will do the work together, and that they will do the work. I do like to tell people, don't gloss over it and read it real quick. Do the work and dig in and stay in your lane.
Do the work for you, but also if they're doing the work and you come together and share, it's going to be beautiful. Don't do the work because you want that person to stop doing whatever they're doing or get off their phone. Don't pick up this book if you want your husband off his phone.
No, it's a Lord, what do you have for me? What do I need to work on so that I can bless my spouse, my significant other, and our us-ness? That's my prayer for people. But I'm not going to lie. It's work. I'll never forget this man that came up to us at a conference that we did. He said, thanks for helping me open Pandora's box.
He goes, I'm dealing with the pain of a mother. They had lost a daughter. He's like, man I had shoved that so far down, and I don't want to deal with that. Here's what I would say to him. Oh, man. Buddy, you have been living in light of that pain. You don't think you have, but it affects you every single day. So do the work.
Alison Cook: This is an invitation to a more beautiful, vibrant flame for each of us, for the us-ness with the people in our lives. Thank you so much for putting the work into sharing your story with us and creating this resource. Tell people the best way to find you and find the resource. We'll send some information out in the show notes as well.
Ron and Nan: Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. We appreciate it. rondeal.org is our website where people can get tapped into the book. We have bonus material available there for free. We're doing a mindful marriage conference for churches where we're talking and walking couples through this process. We'd love to get connected to anybody interested in that.
Alison Cook: I love it. That's great. I'm so glad you're bringing these tools into church spaces, because I sometimes feel like we don't get the richness of what you're trying to describe here. It’s the paradox that as we tend to our own healing, our own selves, we are nurturing us-ness.
Ron and Nan: Yes. Thank you so much for your time. It's been an honor.