[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason, and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 05:00 p.m. Or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m. If you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, you can find us
[email protected] dot. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: All right, this book right here, about a year ago, maybe close to a year ago, I saw that John Gottman was fixing to put out a book on fair fighting, and that it would come in at the end of January. And not long after that, I knew we were doing this class, and I ordered it because I like John Gottman. I think all of us referred of gotten quite a bit. And the book came in the end of January. And I highly recommend it for, you know, anyone who struggles with not knowing how to fight, because that's what we're going to talk about tonight, is how to fight. Right? So this book is Gottman's book. That's Gottman in the middle. Sandra, when she taught her class on marriage, she referred to this book that's also Gottman.
And some of you may have even seen this book. Eight dates. That's Gottman. So all of this material up here is Gottman material. And Gottman says how we fight predicts the future of our relationships. So for over 40 years, doctors John and Julie Gottman have devoted their life to research and practice of building healthy, long lasting relationships. The couple has been married happily for 35 years. Although they will tell you in their books that they wrote that when they first married, they had a lot of conflict and they didn't necessarily know how to handle it. Doctor John Gottman is considered one of the most influential people in couples psychology over the past 25 years. And if you've ever heard of his love lab, I'll talk a little bit about that. He ran the love lab, which is where he did all of his research on more than 3000 couples. And what he would do is he would hook them up to biofeedback, and he would measure how their body responded. And then he would tell them to talk about something they had a conflict with. And then he would, you know, he would sit there and measure everything on them, and he would be behind a two way mirror, so they couldn't see him in there, and they would just talk, and he would watch how they interacted in conflict. And so he was a mathematician before he was a psychologist, and as a mathematician, he liked to turn things into numbers, and he found that he could predict with 91% accuracy those couples that would divorce. I think Sandra talked about this. In her talk, he found that even the most happily married couples. Now, this is important.
Even the most happily married couples never, ever resolved 69% of their conflicts.
We'll come back to that in a little bit. Of the couples that survived, he coined the phrase masters of marriage.
And then for those who didn't survive, he coined those disasters of marriage. Now, I want to give this disclaimer right now.
If you are in an abusive relationship, this is not. This class is not going to get you out of that abusive relationship. I'm talking about couples who are not in an abusive situation. If you are in an abusive situation, the first thing for you is to get to Safety. And you can talk to Karen, you can talk to me, you can talk to Sandra.
Feel free to call, but this is not a class for that group. In a few minutes, I'm going to introduce you to three of his conflict styles. He actually has five. The other two are abusive styles, and that is not what we're going to be talking about tonight.
All right. Masters of marriage. Gottman says that conflict is a natural part of every human relationship. And, in fact, he says it's necessary for every human relationship that we must have conflict.
And he says that we tend to relate low levels of conflict to a happy marriage. But in reality, that's not true. In reality, it's probably just the opposite of that.
The absence of conflict does not indicate a strong relationship.
This is all okay. And, in fact, it can lead to very much a different scenario. So what are some of the characteristics of those masters of marriage? Well, with conflict, wives raised issues gently and brought them up sooner than later.
Neither husbands nor wives became so upset that their heart rates rose above 95 beats per minute.
These couples broke tension with jokes, reassurance, and distraction.
In Gottman's study, 80% of the complaints came from wives, but successful husbands didn't dominate that relationship.
Now, here is a key that we're going to be talking about throughout the night, and that is, for every negative comment, every negative gesture, every negative remark, the masters of marriage made at least five positive remarks. That ratio you're going to see in just a minute is very important. One negative to five positive. And then during calmer periods of time, one negative to 20 positive. Yeah, the positives just go up and go up and go up.
Masters of disaster. Not so much the case.
All right. I don't know about you. I was pretty young when I married Mark, and I married. He was a month away from turning 20, and I married on my 20th birthday.
And, you know, we went through some pre marriage counseling, which really wasn't done much. Then we did go through some pre marriage counseling. And, you know, we had one of my favorites. Some of you may even know the man, brother, JB Whitaker, who was principal of Madison Academy for a while. He did our ceremony for us. And nobody gave me a manual that said, this is how you fight.
So if your parents never argued in front of you, and all of a sudden, you get in this marriage and you find yourself arguing, you're probably sitting here going, oh, no, what is this? You know, you're blind to the fact that couples fight.
If your parents did argue all the time, it's quite a different scenario, because then when you fight, it might trigger the trauma that you went through because you lived in that kind of a home. And so we're not told how to fight. We're not told how to deal with conflict. That's not part of that. You know, what we go through when we're readying for marriage. And so most of us are still trying to figure it out. So what mistakes do we make? And Sandra talked a little bit about these. You know, when she talked. We stew on resentments far too long before we even bring them up to discuss it. So we are overflow. We're flooded and we're overwhelmed. And then finally, by the time we go and we try to talk about it, we're over the top.
We begin the confrontation with harsh criticism. You jerk. How could you have done this to me?
We start out harsh.
We don't know how to self soothe. So when our fight or flight kicks in, we become overwhelmed. We become flooded. We become really emotional. We don't know how to handle it because we don't know how to self soothe ourselves.
We get very defensive. We stonewall. Okay, four horsemen. We'll talk about that in just a minute. We don't even know what the fight is all about. Have you ever had a fight with your spouse? And when it was all over with, you went, what did we fight about? I don't remember I hear that all the time in my office. I don't remember what we were fighting about.
We miss our partner's attempt at repair. They're trying to make amends, and we're flooded, and we're overwhelmed, and our fight or flight is going off, and we don't even accept their attempt at repair.
We can't figure out how to compromise without thinking we're having to give up too much.
We apologize too quickly because we don't like confrontation. And here's a big one.
Gottman says that one of the big things that we do is that we ignore past fights, or, as Gottman likes to call it, regrettable incidents. We don't talk about them. We don't heal from them. We don't learn from them. We just move on. And what happens then is we're bound to repeat them. The end result is that when we're in conflict, we hurt each other.
When we end up wounded by past conflicts, we're farther apart from our partners than we ever were before.
Or we avoid conflict altogether. We just don't have conflict. We just decide that we're not going to deal with it. And then the gap between us and our partner just gets bigger. We don't know how to do conflict.
Okay. There's basically, Gottman says there's two basic types of problems that we deal with. Solvable and perpetual. Okay? The solvable fights have a solution. What are we gonna do for thanksgiving? Are we gonna go to your parents house, or are we gonna go to my parents house? What are we gonna do for thanksgiving? You have a solvable situation. You solve it. Those are solvable. They're fixable.
Perpetual fights never go away.
Perpetual fights we have over and over and over and over again, because perpetual fights are going to tap in to something deep within us. It's something that's in our core being.
And the deeper the differences in personalities, priorities, values, and beliefs, the deeper that core is.
Can anyone guess the percentage of problems that are perpetual that we deal with?
Throw me out some numbers really loud, because I can't hear.
1%. 1%.
70%. What did you say? 70. Okay, 70%.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: 30.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: 30.
Okay, Heidi, you're the winner.
69% of our conflicts are perpetual. We're not going to solve them. We're going to just deal with the same thing over and over and over. There's no easy solution. There's no fix.
And 16% of those problems become gridlocked. We go round and round and round, about the same problem. We don't get anywhere, but we continue to cause hurt, anger, and distance in our relationships. And we need to learn how to fix the problem, because how we fight is how we communicate.
All right?
When we're in a fight, when we're in a conflict, we need to understand that when we're fighting, we need to try to create something better if we're to have. If I've got an argument going on with Mark, we need to be able to work on that argument and improve our relationship. We don't need to go backwards. We don't need to stay the same. We need to have something better come out. We need to create something better for us as a couple. Now, I love to put theological with psychological, because, after all, God made our psychological beings.
So when I consider conflict from a theological standpoint, 40% of the psalms are laments, and many of them are people shaking their fist at God. Go read psalm 22.
They're shaking their fist at God. They're angry at God.
Okay.
Job challenged God. He said, I don't deserve what you're doing to me. Let's put this on trial, because I didn't do that. I haven't sinned against you. Job was challenging God, and he was challenging God pretty strongly.
Moses argued with God to find someone else to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Abraham argued with God about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. In each of these cases, the person arguing with God developed a stronger relationship with God.
Okay, listen to that. In all of the. Go to psalm 22.
In all of these cases, the person who is shaking their fist at God resolves it and has a stronger relationship with God.
Maybe Abraham had to go through Sodom and Gomorrah to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Psalm 88 is the exception. Read psalm 88. There's no resolution. It's dark.
Don't know what happened there. But the biblical principle is that arguments fought well can actually increase the intimacy in our marriages with our spouses.
Conflict has a goal, and that goal is mutual understanding. Without conflict, without fighting, we wouldn't be able to understand or love each other fully. Gottman calls conflict. I love this. I love when he ties in biblical stuff. Gottman calls conflict the royal road to understanding, and he takes it from the ancient highway built in the fifth century BC by none other than the persian king Darius the Great. Now, he built this road, this royal road, to facilitate rapid communication throughout his very large kingdom. And Gottman says conflict is the royal road to understanding, because in conflict, if we fight well, then we learn about our spouse.
We grow closer to our spouse. This is what our fights can do. They can sharpen our ability to love.
All right, remember I told you he has five different types of conflict styles? I'm only using three of them. The other two are abuse situations, and we're not going to deal with that. So here are his three main types of conflict styles. All right, so you've got the conflict avoidant couples, and they tend not to have any conflictual discussion at all, because they just prefer to agree to disagree. They prefer to keep the peace rather than get all messed up in a potentially upsetting conversation.
Validators fight, but they fight politely. They discuss issues collaboratively. They're interested in finding a compromise, although at times they might not be able to.
Volatiles erupt into conflict more frequently, burn hotter, and are generally more intense and dramatic.
Now, interestingly, in Gottman's love lab, avoidant couples had the hardest time with his question talk about a recent conflict, because they don't do conflict.
And so even if they could come up with a conflict, they were supposed to talk for 15 minutes, and they couldn't find the 15 minutes worth of talk to keep it going, because avoidant, that avoidance style, you don't deal with it.
A second type of avoidant couple is a little different. They can come up with a topic, talk about it, give both sides, but then they move on. So if they have big differences, they just deal with them. They just live with them. They don't do anything about them. And as long as the waters are calm, they are cruising with no real issues. And they were the happiest of the couple singing in the love lab.
Now, validators look a whole lot like this second type of avoidance. And with them, when they disagree, they're not afraid to address it. They will debate both sides. They'll accept each other's influence and work on a compromise, and they will try to be persuasive regarding their own point of view, something avoidance, have no desire whatsoever to do.
Validators, they're going to problem solve, and they're going to be calmer in conflict, but they don't agree to disagree.
They want resolution.
They can face escalation of their emotions, but when that gets heated, they're going to shift to being positive or validating to calm the interaction down. A classic hallmark of validators is they're willing to abandon their position on something in order to stay out of the big volatile emotions.
The question they ask is, am I giving up too much to keep the peace?
Then you have the volatile couple, and they have no problem whatsoever expressing emotion. Their fights move quickly to heated debate, high emotion, and raise voices. However, they can also use humor and positivity. They debate and verbally wrestle over their domestic roles frequently. I'm going to talk about that in just a minute. Volatiles appear to enjoy arguing because it's how they connect. You ever been around a couple that you just sit there and go, is that how y'all communicate? You just argue, really?
All right, so here's a vote again. Which of the main con. Which of these main conflict styles do you think is best avoiding, validating or volatile? How many of you think avoiding is the best of the three styles?
How many of you think validating is the best of the three styles?
How many of you think volatile is the best of the three styles?
How many of you didn't want to answer the question because you thought it was trick? Y'all are the ones who are the most honest.
All right, according to doctor John Gottman's research, any of the three styles has an equal shot at being masters of love, as long as they have the five to one ratio.
Okay?
You have to have. For every negative interaction, you have to have five positive interactions. And it appears. It appears that the success or failure in a relationship has more to do with the ratio than the conflict style. It's all about the ratio, five to one. So when you have a conflict and there's some harsh words or there's some emotional words, five positive things can counteract that.
It's called the magic ratio. All right?
So it doesn't matter if you're a volatile, a validating, or an avoidant. You just gotta have the five to one. That's huge. How many of us can come up with five nice things to say to our spouse?
Yeah. Good. Raise your hand.
Come on. You're married to them. Five to one. You can't come up with five things? Oh, dear. She's not making it, huh?
Bring her in here.
All right, now, the question is, can you change your conflict style?
What do you think? How many of you think, yes?
Whoa, your hands are not high. Stick them up there. How many of you think, yes, you can change it?
How many of you think, no, you cannot change it?
Okay, the question. The answer is yes. Yes, you can change it? I've been all three of those, by the way. I've been all three of those.
I don't know where I am now. It takes a lot of work.
But if your conflict style with your spouse is a mismatch, it's worth doing the work to change your conflict style.
Mark's probably been the same thing all through our marriage, but not me, man. I can change.
Julie can tell you that.
To change our conflict style, we have to carve out a new road. An alternate route to compromise.
All right, so let's go back to the five in one ratio, because this is important. What are we talking about? What are the five things I have to do when he's been such a jerk over here?
I don't recommend that you say that.
Maybe an apology.
Maybe a smile, a nod. A joke. Laughter. Empathizing. A reassuring physical touch.
Recalling your past successes and conflict. We've done this before, honey. We can do it again.
Validating your spouse. You are. You are a great mate.
I'm glad that I'm spending the rest of my life with you.
Emphasize commonalities. Okay, maybe we're different over here, but over here, man, I love doing this with you. I'm so glad we get to do this for life.
Take responsibility for your part of the problem.
It's rarely one sided.
I love this one because my son in law says that's fair all the time saying, good point, or that's fair.
Yeah, okay, good point. You made a good point with that. That's fair. I can handle that. And pointing out what you both do, right?
Because again, the simple truth is that in conflict, the negative carries a lot more weight than the positive.
All right, what do most people fight about? Yell it out, raise your hand and do it loud so I can hear it. What do most people. Money, children. Children.
Time.
What?
What did you say?
What, you gotta go loud? I'm deaf.
Deaf is a doornail. Sex. Sex.
We argue about sex. What else? What do we fight about?
In laws. Come on. In laws. Anything else?
Holiday. Oh, mercy. Holidays. Where are you going to spend Christmas?
I understand that Mike Winkler. The first question he ever asked in a marriage counseling situation was, where are you going to spend Christmas?
Boy, would that ever get it going. Oh, well, we're spending it with my family. No, we're spending it with you. Mm.
Okay, so you want to know what we fight about the most?
According to Gottman, nothing.
What do I mean by that? In reality, anything can trigger conflict if the conditions are right. But most often, the problem is not the thing we're fighting about, but something going deeper beneath the surface. For example, a couple is in a heated argument over the dishes in the sink. It's your turn to wash them. It's your turn to wash them. And they get in this big argument.
And the argument isn't even about the dishes. In the sink.
It's the division of rolls.
It's the division of domestic labor. All right, so let's look at a picture to help clarify this. And if you don't know this yet, counselors like icebergs.
We all like icebergs because we can do everything with icebergs. They're great ways to show things. So when you look at the iceberg up here is your conscious. This part right here is 10% of the iceberg. It's what you see above the water. Okay?
The 90% is all down here. This is your conscience. You are all in here, and you're listening to me talk about Gottman and conflict.
This right here is your subconscious. Karen, you coming to work tomorrow? She can pull that right up. I'll see you at lunch tomorrow. She can pull that right up. That's a little bit beneath the surface, but then you've got that unconscious, and that is that deep part of us. That's the part that's. She didn't make it either. They all want to be here with me.
That unconscious is so often the driving part of our conflict. And we're all concerned that it has to do with the dishes in the sink.
And so we've got the 10% that's showing. We've got the 90% that's below the surface.
The fight is the 10%. And it's pretty trivial. It's who's going to do the dishes. It's pretty trivial. But according to Gottman, what we fight about most is our values, our unrecognized needs, and our hidden dreams. Wow.
Are we fighting over the dishes in the sink? No.
What about our values? What is love?
If you love me, you would do the dishes. You know, I've worked a long day and I'm tired. What does it mean to be a family?
What is a home? Who is God?
Unrecognized needs. The need for play, connection, and romance. Okay, Shannon, you're going to like this.
80% of couples starting couples therapy say there's no romance in the relationship anymore.
80%. That's huge.
That's huge.
They have a need for romance, and it's gone. The light went out. Hidden dreams. What are my hopes and dreams for both today and in the future?
What is my life's purpose? What is my reason for being here? The object of the fight might not have anything to do with the reason for the fight.
Maybe we just need to be appreciated. Maybe we just need a stronger connection.
But if we don't talk to one another about our inner values, our unrecognized needs, and our hidden dreams. Then our fights continue to be over nothing.
Gottman says that all fights that go wrong typically have one major thing in common.
What do you think it is? I gave you those three. Well, let's see if I get there. What do you think? Which one do you think is the number one?
How many of you think it's unrecognized? Knees. That's everything I'm hearing. Okay.
All right. Let's see what Gottman says.
Actually, it's none of those.
I'll get there in a minute. We dismiss our partner's negative emotions. Knee jerk reaction to a person directing strong emotions.
If Mark's coming at me with some strong emotions, more than likely I'm going at Mark with strong emotions.
But our tendency is to minimize, invalidate, and dismiss.
We have to learn to listen to our spouse's emotions.
It's not about what they're saying. It's about how they're feeling.
And when negative emotions aren't listened to, they intensify because we can't get our partner's attention. So we escalate. We're flooded. And then the four horsemen appear. And Sandra talked about the four Horsemen. I'd love to spend time on the four Horsemen. If you didn't hear her talk and you want to talk about the four horsemen, I'll be happy to do it. Something I deal with all couples with is the four Horsemen. But when we get in this state, we end up in conflict that's difficult to repair and heal from. And that's what Gottman calls a gridlock.
When we're gridlocked, we become completely shut down to one another. There's no listening, no opening up to each other, no collaborating, and no understanding.
Now, here's my question that I asked you a minute ago. I'll give you the answer now. Gottman has found that almost all gridlocked conflict comes from a similar place.
Unfulfilled dreams.
Unfulfilled dreams. I want you to take a minute to think about the gridlock conflict in your own marriage.
Do you think that it might be due to unfulfilled dreams?
Do you think there's a solution to gridlock conflict?
When conflict is about dreams, we have to start looking for a pathway forward that honors both dreams. But in order to be successful, we have to learn to talk about the vision we both have for our lives going forward.
We have to look at dreams, our dreams, our unfulfilled dreams before. For our conflict.
Can both dreams be accommodated in retirement, Mark really wants to stay home and work at church and do his yard and do his garden and all that kind of stuff because he has traveled his whole career. Know what I want to do?
I want to go to Rome.
I want to travel. I want to go.
He's got his dream. I've got my dream. How do we work it out? How can we accommodate his and mine? Because our unfulfilled dream is not the same in this particular situation.
Ten myths about conflict I might get through.
Tell you what, before we go into this, any questions? Comments? I think I'm doing pretty good on time.
Yeah. Not you. Not you. Nothing, anything.
I knew that.
I knew that. In my heart of hearts, I knew that. Shannon.
Yes.
[00:33:22] Speaker C: I know. For me, like, whenever I have had an unfulfilled dream and I've presented it as a complaint or a disrespectful, like, if I said, we never get to go do this and I wish we could go this, it always comes across as disrespectful. But I think it comes for us as females, it's so important that we present our desires for those dreams as a desire instead of a complaint. Absolutely. When we frame it that way from the get go, that's what starts that snowball a lot of times. If we said, I would love to do this, and lesson at that, usually they're willing to meet our desire and make us happy. And so I saw a big change for me whenever I decided to present it more as a desire, leave alone with no expectations, and then just, you know, go on from there instead of expecting it to be my way, informing.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: It as you would be one of the masters of marriage.
A lot of the other stuff.
Yes, absolutely.
It's learning that the problem is beneath the surface, and how do we bring those dreams up and how do we present them or our unrecognized needs? What happens if I'm the person that has this need? Okay, let's go to the five love languages.
Mark's love language is. Wait a minute.
Oh, words of affirmation. Words of affirmation. That's Mark's love language.
I don't get that. I'm sorry. If words of affirmation is your love language, I don't get it.
But that's his minus quality time.
How do we blend it? How do we meet my needs and how do. And his needs when we don't share that same thing? So, yes, Lori Ann, I'm totally with you on that.
All right. Most conflicts are perpetual. I already said that. Oh, let me read it. Once we find a solution to the big fight we are having right now, we'll be all set. No more fighting.
No, because most conflicts are perpetual. Even that one over sex. Both conflicts are perpetual. We need to learn to approach conflict differently at a fundamental level, not how to solve one fight. If you're in a disagreement with your spouse, it's not about that one fight.
It's about what are you seeing over and over and over again in the pattern that you need to address?
What's beneath the iceberg?
If conflict exists in our relationship, we're not supposed to be together.
Conflict is unavoidable, even for the happiest of couples. Although conflict avoidant couples might say we don't have any conflict.
Conflict is unavoidable. People conflicted with God.
Think about it. That's a good pattern to see. And we see what happens when we work it out. A conflict is a problem to be solved. Wait a minute.
We've already said that we manage 69% of our conflicts because they're perpetual. And we do it through dialogue. We do it through continuing dialogue. We don't resolve them. We learn to manage them.
One of us is right and one of us is wrong.
No, not in most conflict. Both partners experiences and points of view are valid. Both of their realities are true. What matters is how we see things, how we feel, what we need, and if we can hear and validate each other, this is far more important than who is right.
It doesn't matter who's right.
It matters that we listen.
I like this one. Men are more logical than women. Women are more emotional than men.
How many of you agree with that? Don't raise your hand.
This fallacy persists to this day, and the stereotype can be very damaging, limiting, and simply untrue. I can tell you mark is more sensitive than I am. By far. By far. We're watching American Idol the other night, and Emmy Russell, who is Loretta Lynn's granddaughter, is singing coal miner's daughter.
He's got tears.
Studies show that logic and emotion do not have genders. Men have emotions and need to express them. And women need to be listened to and believed when they describe their reality. So let's take this fallacy and let's throw it out the door, because I bet if I asked for a show of hands, there would be other people in here who would say, say their husbands are more sensitive than they are.
The best conflict management. Y'all love this one. We're in a congregation of engineers.
I'm married to one. The best conflict management is logical, rational, and unemotional.
How many of you agree with that?
This is a more common view among conflict avoidant couples, but it can show up in all the styles. The best conflict management allows us to understand each other better through listening to each other's feelings and ideas.
Okay? Feelings. If you've heard me say it once, you've heard it several times. We need to listen to their feelings, and they need to listen to our feelings, and we all need to listen to our kids feelings.
Okay?
Negative emotions are bad and should be avoided.
We tend to think that anger is bad. It's one of those negative emotions. But there's nothing wrong with anger. Jesus had anger. We see situations where Jesus had anger. We see situations where God had anger.
Anger is not bad.
It's what we do with the anger. I tell children that all the time when they're in my office. It's okay if you're angry. It's not okay how you behave when you're angry. So we have to change the behavior. We should never express anger through criticism or contempt toward our partner.
That's one of the. That's two of the four horsemen.
I love this one. Nobody can hurt you unless you let them.
How many of you believe that this emerged through the new age philosophy? And a lot of people believe that you have 100% control over your own emotions, and that is Hogwash.
You choose. They believe that you choose to feel hurt by a comment. You choose to feel betrayed by an action. And those that take this approach believe that emotions can be controlled and changed, especially the negative ones. There are no negative ones. And if you choose to not feel hurt, then no one can hurt you.
That is not how people work. I'm still gonna get through. That is not how humans work. That is not how God made us. That is not how God made us. We do hurt each other, but it's how we draw closer together.
The difference between the master couples and the disaster couples is the master couples process what happened, and they repair it.
You have to love yourself before you can love somebody else.
We all have vulnerabilities that are enduring, triggers, traumas that might not ever fully heal. And these vulnerabilities may lead us to not perfectly love ourselves.
We can still have lifelong relationships like that. Our work as a life partner is to care for each other, even in conflict, and to love our partners, even when they can't love themselves.
To be allowed to have needs, we have to justify or explain them.
So much of dysfunctional conflict has to do with this ingrained belief that we're not entitled to have needs. Many of us have grown up in a culture where need is a dirty word. We're supposed to be independent, stand on our own 2ft. And I don't need anything from you, nor from my husband. And yet that's not biblical.
God created the church.
We need each other.
God created marriage. We need each other.
The reality is that we survive by coming together and communicating with each other in order to nurture one another and ward off danger.
We're built to have needs and we don't have to justify those needs. But we do need to learn to communicate those needs with our spouse. One of the big reasons conflicts escalate is that we don't ask for what we need. Because I expect that Mark knows everything. I expect he knows what I need in any situation. He should know why those dishes are in the sink.
He should know why I want to go and travel. He should know the. I shouldn't have to tell him these things.
I've never met a mind reader.
All right, how to move forward. Number one, feelings. Share how you feel. Don't say that you feel that way. And don't say why you felt like that way. Don't comment on your partner's feelings. Just describe feel hurt when you do this. Those are the I feel statements Sandra talked about. Okay.
Realities described your reality. Take turns. Listen. Listen to them. Not to respond, but to learn and then speak so they can learn and summarize and validate their reality.
At least parts of it triggers. If something is triggering you share that with your partner.
Share your experiences that, so that they understand how that trigger escalates your emotions. And that's stories, not whatever I put up there. Okay. Why are these things triggers? We're all. I'm all, Karen and I are always looking for triggers. Because when we find the trigger, we're going to find that stuff beneath the surface of the iceberg, and then we can do something about it.
Responsibility. Acknowledge your own role in contributing to the. To the fight.
Fights are not one sided. There are two sides to every fight. Acknowledge your part in it. Take responsibility for your part in the fight.
And finally, constructive planning together. Plan one way that each of you can make it better next time. We're going to have perpetual problems.
I know what my perpetual problems are. Do you know what your perpetual problems are?
Figure out. This is how we did it this time. I wonder how we could make it better next time.
When I got this book, I was kind of shocked because I was expecting this size book. And I got this size book. And I think I did pretty good to get through my every sleep. That's 33 slides I got through tonight.
Thank you. Thank you.
I want to recommend that if you're married, if you're living in. Like, if you've got a best friend you're living with in an apartment. We all have conflict. The closer you are to one another over and over again. The more you're going to have conflict. I would highly recommend this book. The biblical stuff I added.
And he does have some biblical stuff in here.
But I would highly recommend you read it. Because all I could do is 33 slides. And look how thick that book is.
I want to thank you for this quarter. I think I'm speaking for Karen as well. And for Sandra. Sandra had surgery today. I have not heard. I was hoping that Jennifer would be in here. But I bet she's with Sandra. She did have surgery on her knee today. So we all appreciate. Julie. Julie. The two julies. We all appreciate that. Your good attention, your being here, your support. We hope this has been helpful to you.
The bell's rung, but if there's any last minute comments or anything. Karen's over here. I'm here.
Okay.
I hope you have been benefited. By the things that we talked about. And good night.
