Chapter 11

What Do I Do That Shuts You Up?

I HAVE BEEN SEEING couples in therapy for twenty-five years. Ninety-nine percent of all first sessions follow the same pattern. After taking a brief history of each person’s background, I ask, “Tell me why you’ve come to see me.”

Immediately one spouse launches into a recitation of the other spouse’s faults. I listen for five minutes as this spouse rakes the other over the coals, covering every possible mistake he or she has made. Then I interrupt (and believe me, I have to interrupt) and say, “That’s enough. I get the picture.”

Turning to the other spouse, I say, “OK, your turn.” That spouse typically starts weeping and responds, “All those charges are true! I’m guilty of every one of them! Guilty, I tell you! I’m a pathetic excuse for a husband/wife!” That spouse goes to his/her knees and begs for a chance to change.

Right. Like that is ever going to happen.

You know what really happens. The other launches into a litany of the first spouse’s weaknesses and mistakes. After another five minutes I say again, “That’s enough.” Then I give my little speech that is the actual beginning of marital therapy, which goes like this: “You’ve done an excellent job describing each other’s faults. You’re both right. We will address all the issues you mentioned, but focusing solely on your partner won’t lead to real change in your marriage. Change comes when you look in the mirror, admit your faults, and make the conscious decision to work on them. So let’s hear what each of you has done wrong in this relationship.”

Oh, they don’t like that. They don’t like that at all. But I know what I am doing. It is fair and very important that you tell your partner what you want him/her to change. Yet it is equally important to face your own contributions to marital problems and do your own changing.

Your Turn in the Hot Seat

Women, to this point in my Husband Transformation Strategy the central focus has been your husband—the needs in your life you want him to meet, the mistakes he has made that have hurt you and caused resentment, and the changes you would like him to make.

As I have indicated, zeroing in on your husband is the best way to begin. If you start by revealing all your weaknesses, he will quickly write the whole thing off as your problem. So prior to this you have gone after your husband in a very direct, upfront way. And you will keep being honest with him about your needs and what he can do to improve your relationship.

However, the time has come to shift the focus to you. It is your turn in the hot seat. While there is no question that your husband does things that kill intimacy, get ready for some bad news: so do you. Yes, you! Even though you are the partner in the relationship who is working as hard as possible to achieve intimacy, you are just as guilty of snuffing it out.

Without realizing it, you are enabling your intimacy avoider to remain an IA. You are doing specific behaviors that turn your husband off, push him away from you, and shut him up. I know you don’t want to destroy opportunities for closeness with your husband, but that is what you’re doing. What you must do is discover what behaviors of yours are killing your hopes of achieving intimacy and then eliminate them. Here is how to proceed.

Please, tell me the truth about me.

Go to your husband and tell him you want to schedule a meeting. He will likely cringe and say, “No! Not another meeting!” Give him your best smile and reply, “Don’t worry, honey, I think you’re going to like this one. It’s not about your mistakes. It’s about my mistakes.” Don’t give him any more information, and set a meeting three or four days later.

At this meeting there are five messages you want to deliver. Here they are, in the order in which they are to be communicated:

1. I’ve been honest with you.

“Honey, as you know, I’ve been brutally honest with you over the past several weeks. I’ve shared my needs. I’ve shared my resentments over your actions in the past that really hurt and angered me. I haven’t held back anything. I haven’t softened the blow.”

2. I’ll keep being honest with you.

“For the rest of our marriage I’m going to keep on being honest. When you do or say something that significantly bothers me, I’m going to tell you. That’s good for me, and it lets you know what I need from you.”

3. Be honest with me.

“Now I want you to be honest with me. I want you to tell me what I do to stop you from being the husband I need you to be. Although you’re half of our marriage problems, I’m the other half. I know I’ve done things in the past to hurt you, offend you, and turn you away from me. I know I do things now, every week, that bug you and keep you from opening up and talking with me. I know I’m guilty of killing our chances for intimacy, but I don’t know exactly what these things are. You do.

“Honey, I need you to tell me what these things are. When I know what I’m doing wrong, I’ll be able to stop making these mistakes. Don’t tell me now (as though he would, anyway). Take this next week and think and pray about it. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Go for it. Don’t spare me. Let me have it. I want to know. I need to know.”

Do not tell him at this first meeting what mistakes you think you have made. It is important that he work on this assignment himself, without any help from you.

4. Here’s what I want from you.

“There are three areas I want you to cover in your response. I’ll tell you what they are. Then, so you have something to refer to, I’ll give you this three-by-five card with the three points written on it. Please write down your answers so your message is clear and I can have a written record to refer to.

“First, tell me what I have done to you in the past to offend and hurt you. (If he has already written a letter of resentments, you can skip this category. Being an IA, he probably hasn’t done this, so you will need to ask for his resentments again.) Go all the way back to the beginning of our relationship. I harbored grudges against you for years. I’ll bet you have some grudges against me too. Please write them down.

“Second, let me know what I do these days to turn you off and shut you up. Be as specific as you can: my behavior, my words, my attitude, whatever. How do I irritate you and prevent you from talking personally with me and meeting my needs?

“Third, describe what I can do, specifically, to help you open up and be closer to me. I know there are actions I can take that you’d love me to do. Actions that would help you talk to me, pray with me, and be a team player with the kids and the housework.”

5. If necessary I’ll talk to others.

“Sweetheart, if you can’t come up with specifics for me next week, I’ll do my best to gather information on my mistakes from our kids, family members, and friends. These persons are close to us and have seen me interact with you many times.” (Sometimes a husband will work harder on this assignment because he would rather you not talk to others about your marital issues.)

Schedule the next meeting for one week in the future. Close by asking him to pray with you about this step in the program. If he won’t, go ahead and say a brief prayer—out loud—asking the Lord to help him write down the mistakes you have made and are still making that kill your intimacy.

How to Kill Intimacy

Before the next meeting spend some time taking a good hard look at yourself. Without talking to anyone, think about how you kill intimacy with your husband. What do you do that prevents him from connecting with you on a deeper level? After praying about this, brainstorm and write down all the possible ways you turn him away from conversation, romance, and treating you the way you want to be treated.

To help you with this task, I have included below four common ways wives kill intimacy. I describe each killer pattern and what you can do to change it. See if you recognize yourself in any of the following descriptions.

The sweetheart of the rodeo

You are “the good little woman” who accepts her husband just the way he is, even though he doesn’t share personal feelings, you are not a priority in his life, and he is about as romantic as a block of wood and has no idea of your personal needs. Unhappy in marriage, you feel as if you are living with a nice, decent male roommate, and don’t know him that well. Your marital relationship can be described as safe, stable, superficial, and . . . boring. So boring it has killed any hopes of ever forging deeper, more passionate bonds.

OK, cowgirl, if you believe your husband can’t change and are tolerating a mediocre marriage, then you are part of the problem. You are enabling him to remain an intimacy avoider! Since he knows you are OK with who he is and will never demand he change, he has zero motivation to do anything differently.

If you have been the sweetheart of the rodeo, it is time to hang up your cowgirl hat and spurs! Stop being so nice, forgiving, and fake all the time. Let the other “sweethearts” you know continue to grin and bear their IAs. Choose instead to believe three truths: 1) you can wield tremendous power and influence in your IA’s life, 2) he can change, and 3) you should never waver in your commitment to follow the strategy in this book.

The nagging witch

You are way too aggressive in your attempts to get your man to open up and talk personally. In your drive to get some intimacy with your man, you are too direct and apply too much pressure. You pepper him with questions, press him for responses, and insist he tell you what he thinks and feels—right now! You bring up the same topic repeatedly in the hope that he will finally give you an answer. If he won’t respond, you follow him down the hall, yakking away and pressing for a response.

You are a nagging witch, and without realizing it, you are killing conversations and robbing yourself of the intimacy you so desperately desire. You constantly back your husband into conversational corners. He feels threatened and controlled. Not surprisingly he won’t yield any dialogue. Instead he clams up and says nothing, snaps at you in anger and frustration, or leaves the room. Sound familiar?

Your style of trying to force your husband to communicate is a complete failure. It only succeeds in shutting him up and driving him farther away. He thinks you are attacking his manhood and independence. You know something? He is right. Your intensity becomes the only issue in his mind. As he fends off your high-pressure approaches, the thoughts rocketing through his brain are things such as:

• “What a nag!”

• “What is her problem?”

• “Back off!”

• “I just want to get away from this Screaming Meemie!”

You may be a nagging witch who periodically turns into a volcano. You stuff, stuff, stuff your frustration, anger, and hurt over your husband’s lack of communication. Finally you get filled up to your eyebrows with pain and erupt. You blast him with a verbal barrage of rage, disappointment, and bitterness. Critical, sarcastic, and belittling, you want to hurt him the same way he hurts you. Believe me, you do hurt him. But in doing so, you push him even further away.

The cure for nagging witches is to practice the one-way communication technique I explained in the previous chapter. (You may have just read it, but it won’t hurt to take a quick refresher course.) Stop pressing him for responses. Develop the healthy habit of going to him, expressing what you want to say—briefly, directly, and honestly—and walking away. Tell him your needs and walk away. Share your feelings when he hurts or angers you, and walk away. If you struggle to control your intensity with certain topics, write a note and give it to him, and then walk away.

She who can’t be pleased

Like most wives, you assume your husband knows exactly what your needs are and chooses not to meet them. Without giving him any clues, you expect him to somehow figure out what you need and come through for you. You think, “If he really loved me, he would just know what I need.” Not only are you living in a fantasy world, but you are also being unfair to your husband.

As I mentioned in chapter 4, your husband has no idea what your needs are. Here is a man who can’t find his shoes in the morning. A man who is about as sensitive and intuitive as a marble paperweight. A man who doesn’t even know what his real needs are. How in the world do you expect him to identify and meet your needs?

My wife, Sandy, has been just as guilty as you in this area of expecting too much of a husband. Here is one small example. Until recently Sandy would start a load of laundry on a Saturday afternoon. After getting the washer going in the garage, she would come into the house to tell me she was going out shopping for a while. I would say, “Great, honey, have a good time.” She would respond, “Thanks, I will. See you later.”

Sandy would leave and expect me to finish that load of laundry. The only problem was, I had no idea she even had clothes in the washer! How could I know that? She never said a word about it! Unless I happened to stumble into the garage and hear the washer, I would never have known.

Sandy would return home and say to me in a sarcastic tone, “Hey, thanks a lot for finishing the laundry for me.”

“What laundry?” I would say with a straight face.

Sandy (I’m not kidding here) would actually think that I knew about the load of laundry and had selfishly ignored it. (Women!) I finally convinced her that she has to tell me about the laundry before she leaves if she expects me to finish it for her. Like most husbands, I am happy to meet a need as long as I am told what it is. If Sandy doesn’t tell me, that is her fault, not mine.

I do try to focus on Sandy and anticipate some of her needs. If she leaves the house on Saturday without mentioning the laundry, I still run to the garage sometimes to check the washer. Sometimes there is a load going, and I can surprise her by finishing it. It is fun to meet one of her needs without her saying a word. But that is a very rare occurrence. The old saying “Even a blind squirrel finds a few acorns” comes to mind. You can’t build a great, need-meeting marriage on those few times a year when a husband meets an unspoken need.

Tell your intimacy avoider in written form exactly what your basic, unchanging needs are. (Again refer to chapter 4 for a sample list of these “core” needs one wife wrote to her husband.) Also tell your IA verbally each day what you need. Be clear and specific. Do it every time. Follow these instructions, and your husband will have a decent chance to please you. And you will generate some genuine closeness.

The woman who talks too much

There is no delicate way to say it: You talk too much. You fill the air with words, tossing topic after topic after topic at your poor, overwhelmed husband. You don’t even pause; you just keep on going as if you think conversation is like throwing spaghetti against the wall. Sooner or later something has to stick. I mean, one of these topics has to arouse his interest, right? He has to respond to something you say!

No, he doesn’t. And most of the time he won’t. He simply can’t process all the sentences and paragraphs gushing out of your mouth. Your waves of words overwhelm his tiny brain, and it will explode. He shuts down. He gets distracted, tunes you out, and goes into the “zone,” staring into the distance with no expression on his face. When you notice you have lost him, you will get upset. Conversation over. Actually there never was one. It was only you talking.

During those infrequent times he speaks, you don’t let him finish. You interrupt, ask too many questions, demand more details, want him to clarify statements, and make too many observations. You cut in and ask him to share his emotional reaction to the events he is describing: “But, honey, how did that make you feel?”

You are driving him crazy. More importantly you are choking off any possibility he will keep talking and maybe get a little deeper. Your interruptions make him lose his train of thought. When you ask about his emotions, that is a question he literally can’t answer right then. He has no idea how he feels about what he is saying. He may be able to find some feelings about the topic a few hours (or a few days) later. But if you press him to identify his emotions on the spot, he will stop talking.

If you are in this “I talk too much” category, you will have to concentrate on reducing your flow of words. Talk less. Remember the two-minute rule for difficult messages I mentioned in chapter 10? For regular, no-conflict conversations, try the five-minute rule. Talk for five minutes with your husband and then stop. Give him a chance to think, digest what you said, and prepare some kind of response. He might say something back and he might not, but at least by pausing you give him an opportunity to engage with you.

If he says nothing during the pause, let a few minutes go by instead of jumping back in with more comments on the same topic. Discuss something else for five minutes, and pause again. If he doesn’t respond, let ten or fifteen minutes pass. By being silent more often, you might motivate him to initiate more conversations. He will notice your silences (they are so rare!) and may talk more to draw you back closer to him.

Let him talk without interrupting. Don’t worry, chances are he won’t talk for long. When he finishes, give him your reactions and even ask a few questions. Say, “You don’t have to respond right now. When you’re ready, I would like to hear your answers to my questions.” Give him time to process, dig down to a more personal level, and get back to you.

If you really want to hear back from him on a certain topic, whether you brought it up or he did, give him a reminder: “Remember that issue we discussed? When you’re ready, please find me and tell me what you’re thinking, and how you feel about that.” Then drop it.

A Meeting of the Minds

The week is over. You are sitting face-to-face with your husband in the second meeting. Ask him to share the information he came up with in the three areas: his resentments against you, how you turn him away from conversation and intimacy, and what you can do to help him open up. Sit there with a pad and a pen. Write down everything he says.

If he gives you some solid input, do two things. First, thank him and promise him you will work hard to improve in the specific areas he mentioned. Second, tell him how you think you shut him down. Ask for his comments on your assessment of your role as his wife and work with him to create a list of new behaviors you will put into practice.

It is very likely that he will have little or nothing to say to you at this meeting. After all, he is an intimacy avoider and doesn’t like to delve into personal matters. If he turns out to be less than a fountain of information, express your disappointment—again, using one-way communication—and schedule another meeting in two weeks. Do not share with him the ways you think you kill intimacy. Ask him to do the same assignment again and to come prepared in two weeks. Tell him you will now get input about your role as his wife from others who know you well.

Broaden the net

Don’t just threaten to discuss this topic with others. Whether in person, by phone, or e-mail, contact your children, family members, and close friends and ask them to tell you how they think you push your husband away from intimacy. Make it clear this is very important to you and you must have the most honest, no-punches-pulled evaluations of your intimacy-killing behavior. Inform these individuals that you want to stop making mistakes, so you need their help to do it. Write down everything they communicate to you.

Catch me being good, catch me being bad

In the third meeting ask your husband for his report. When he finishes, share your own ideas and those supplied by outside sources. With his help (if he will give it), nail down the leading six or seven ways you stop conversations and closeness. Also identify the top six or seven ways you can motivate him to become intimate with you. Write these down and give him a copy.

Ask him to alert you to your conversation-stopping behaviors. Explain that you don’t know when you take these negative actions and need him to tell you immediately. Ask your children, family members, and friends to also alert you when you are turning him off. Have your accountability partner ask you once a week if you have committed any of these relationship crimes.

Ask your husband and these individuals to catch you doing positive, intimacy-enhancing behaviors. Urge your husband to tell you every time he feels close to you and is willing to talk on a more personal level. If he will share this vital information with you, together you can pinpoint what you did to put him in this intimacy mode. If he doesn’t provide this information, you will have to study his behavior yourself and try to come up with a list of things you did to nudge him closer to you.