
155 A New Year, An Improved Self, A Better Marriage
Do you think your marriage could improve if your spouse were different? Is it easier to look at their faults instead of considering your own? In this podcast episode, Ron Deal talks with co-authors of his new book, The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Yourself. Terry and Sharon Hargraves and Nan Deal share how the book can help couples understand their part of marital distress, why they react the way they do, how to be more empowered constructively, and how to cultivate more loving and harmonious relationships as they understand themselves better and learn to relate to their partner as a companion.

Show Notes
- Small Group Searchable Map
- Email us for your chance to win a signed copy of The Mindful Marriage. blended@familylife.com
- Get your copy of The Mindful Marriage
- The Mindful Marriage Conference
- Register for Blended & Blessed
About the Guest

Nan Deal
Nan Deal has a degree in Early Childhood Education and is a teacher with over 25 years’ experience in public and private schools. She is a leader with a local Re:Generation ministry and together she and Ron lead a While We’re Waiting support group for parents who have lost a child. Nan has been featured in teaching videos with GriefShare® and FocusontheFamily.com, and speaks with Ron in their The Mindful Marriage Conference in which they share the principles that have helped transform their relationship. Nan and Ron have been married since 1986 and have three boys. They live in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Terry and Sharon Hargraves
Terry Hargrave, Ph.D. and Sharon Hargrave, M.A. are nationally recognized for their work in founding and developing Restoration Therapy and RelateStrong. Terry has authored over 35 professional articles and sixteen books including 5 Days to a New Self (co-authored with Sharon Hargrave). He is a former professor of Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary and his work has been featured on ABC News 20/20, Good Morning America and CBS Early Morning. Sharon formerly served as Executive Director of Pepperdine University’s Boone Center for the Family, works with program development, and was an affiliate faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary. She specialized in working with conflicted couples, leadership relationships and intergenerational issues. Both are licensed marriage and family therapists and have worked with individuals, couples and families for over 35 years.
About the Host

Ron Deal
Ron L. Deal is one of the most widely read and viewed experts on blended families in the country. He is Director of FamilyLife Blended® for FamilyLife®, founder of Smart Stepfamilies™, and the author and Consulting Editor of the Smart Stepfamily Series of books including the bestselling Building Love Together in Blended Families: The 5 Love Languages® and Becoming Stepfamily Smart (with Dr. Gary Chapman), The Smart Stepfamily: 7 Steps to a Healthy Family, and Preparing to Blend. Ron is a licensed marriage and family therapist, popular conference speaker, and host of the FamilyLife Blended podcast. He and his wife, Nan, have three sons and live in Little Rock, Arkansas. Learn more at FamilyLife.com/blended.
Episode Transcript
FamilyLife Blended®
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Season 7, Episode 155: A New Year, An Improved Self, A Better Marriage
Guests: Terry and Sharon Hargraves, Nan Deal
Air Date: January 13, 2025
Terry: I think that we have a proliferation in our society; the idea that marriage is about finding your soul meet and meeting each other’s needs forevermore. The scripture says to bear one another’s burdens. It doesn’t say to solve one another’s problems. It says bear one another’s burdens. It’s more of a companioning word. It really is about sharing intimacy with your partner. Where need meeting is much more like parenting one another, which God just didn’t equip us to do.
Ron: Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I’m Ron Deal. We help blended families, and those who love them, pursue the relationships that matter most. It’s a new year, folks, so get a new self and renew your usness.
What I think is the most important book I’ve ever written for blended families and for all other couples is out. The book is called The Mindful Marriage, and we’re going to be telling you about it in just a few minutes. I’ve got reinforcements with me today in the studio. My wife Nan is joining me.
Nan: Hi.
Ron: It’s so great to have you here.
Nan: It’s good to be here.
Ron: Usually it’s other people, but—
Nan: I know.
Ron: —I like it when you’re here.
Nan: Well, I’m glad you like it when I’m here.
Ron: Yeah, that’s good.
Nan: It’s fun to be here.
Ron: We’re off to a good start, aren’t we? Okay, so we’ve got some good friends joining us for this episode. Good friends and co-authors of our new book are here. We’ll introduce them in just a minute. But before we do, I want to let you know that FamilyLife Small Groups searchable map is better than ever. It’s now very easy to search for blended family small groups, marriage groups, parenting groups, and you could find locations where Gayla Grace is going to be speaking or where Nan and I are going to be speaking. We’re going to put a link in the show notes so you can easily take a look at that new searchable map. I’m excited. Our team’s been working on this for a long time.
Nan: Awesome.
Ron: It’s finally available, so we want to make sure you guys who are listening or watching can check it out. I also want to say thank you to those of you who donated at the end of 2024 to FamilyLife’s mission to strengthen families on a global scale. Our department FamilyLife Blended, I always say this, we live and breathe on the financial gifts that are designated to our departments specifically. You get the tax write off; we get to help families pursue the relationships that matter most. So I’m grateful to all of you who came alongside us at the end of 24 and to say thank you, we’re going to give away three signed copies of The Mindful Marriage.
Nan: Cool.
Ron: To the first three people who send us an email right now. Here’s the email address blended@familylife.com. And if you didn’t quite catch that, go to the show notes. We got a link in there: blended@familylife.com. The race is on. Send that email quick, give us your name and we’ll get a timestamp. And the first three will get a copy.
Nan: I love a freebie.
Ron: Oh yeah.
Nan: I do; I love a freebie.
Ron: Who doesn’t love a freebie?
Nan: And a free book.
Ron: Exactly.
Nan: Signed.
Ron: Exactly. So what is this book that we’ve been talking all about? Well, the title is The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Your Spouse—oh wait, sorry.
Nan: Managing Yourself.
Ron: I got that wrong, Understanding—
Nan: You do not manage me.
Ron: —and Managing Yourself.
Nan: That’s a hard job.
Ron: This book is a result of a collaboration with therapists and dear friends of ours, Dr. Terry and Sharon Hargrave. Now this book is for all couples, as I said a little while ago, but I do think it’s the most important book I’ve written for blended family couples.
And I’ll tell you why folks, because it cuts through all the fluff. I mean, it just gets down to the stuff that really matters, the things that really make us tick. I’m starting to say Nan, that it’s about the human experience.
Nan: Really.
Ron: Yeah, I really think that’s true. It has broad application for any relationship. The book has marriage on the cover. That’s where we’re going to start is talking about marriage and applying it to that. But let me just tell you the book is about a lot of things, and we’ll probably spend a little time talking about that here in just a minute. It’s based on the work of our dear friends Terry and Sharon. They’re now joining us. Terry and Sharon, thank you for being here. It’s great to have you.
Nan: Hi guys.
Sharon: Good to be here.
Ron: Guess what I’m holding? A copy—
Sharon: Yay.
Ron: —of The Mindful Marriage. Like, hello. How long has it been that we’ve been working on this thing and it’s out, January 2025, and we are super excited that it’s finally out. We need to say a little bit more about Terry and Sharon.
Nan: Yes, we do.
Ron: Okay.
Nan: We do.
Ron: So let me get to that. So Terry is recently retired from a long academic teaching career in marriage, in family therapy. He did that for, I don’t know, over 35 years. I don’t want to say how old you are, but he recently retired from teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary. He’s written 16 books, lectures widely, and as to what’s now called Restoration Therapy. Restoration Therapy is the heart of what this book is really all about. We’re going to come back to that in just a minute.
Sharon is a licensed marriage and family therapist and pretty accomplished herself in applying the principles of restoration therapy to coaching and to ministry context. She’s the author of RelateStrong, and that’s the small group material that is based on RT, restoration therapy. So they have become dear friends of ours, but it didn’t start that way.
Nan: No, it did not. It did not.
Ron: How did it start?
Nan: It started, oh wow. It started in Terry’s office is when I met him. I know you knew him previously, but it was 2007 and the bottom had dropped out in our marriage. I’d kind of given you an ultimatum that night.
Ron: No, not kind of.
Nan: I had given you an ultimatum and I said, “Get us some help. It’s either you or me,” and you kind of fumbled around about some people that you may have wanted to help us, and I knew that you needed it to be somebody of quality and Terry was a mentor of yours.
Ron: I read one of his books when I was in graduate school.
Nan: That was encouraging to me and a little intimidating at the same time because when we went the next day you called, and he was gracious to see us. When we went in that day, I remember with the two of you, saying to the both of you, “Okay, PhD and a therapist, no psychobabble craziness. I want you to land the plane.” And I just felt like maybe I was going to get ganged up on with your mentor and that was not the case. And it’s never been the case with Terry when we’ve met with him. He’s always been very gracious and generous and actually that day I’ve never felt more seen in that room. I have nothing but wonderful things to say about him and about Sharon. But that was a pivotal moment—
Ron: It was.
Nan: —in our marriage and it was provisioned because then two years later when our son Connor passes away, we are after that in Terry’s office again. And I will say this, there were a lot of people throwing things out at us about grief, and Terry just graciously sat with us in the pain, and he didn’t trample on the grief, and he didn’t trample over us or the memory of Connor or try to make it better or try to get us to be better. He literally just sat with us and walked with us and I’m just so grateful.
Ron: We are very grateful.
Nan: So very grateful.
Ron: So Terry, do you remember the day that we walked in your office? We tell it like it was yesterday, but sometimes I wonder, do you even remember that day?
Terry: It’s funny, I sort of remember that day. What I remember more is the phone call the day before, I guess. So I remember you calling me up and exactly where I was and what I was doing and arranging to see you the next day apparently. So that’s a lot of fun.
Nan: Because you told me that night, you said, “He’s got a two-year waiting list.”
Ron: Yeah, I just didn’t—
Nan: “We’re never going to get in.”
Ron: I didn’t think it was possible.
Nan: I was like, “Well, call him now.” I mean, it was nine o’clock at night. We were very dysregulated, and I was very desperate for help. It had been a long journey.
Ron: Yeah. I want to say to our listener and our viewer, if this is news to you, I think we’ve talked quite a bit on a number of media outlets about our personal marital story as well as our loss story of losing Connor. But if you’ve never heard it before, I just want you to know this is how we open this book, The Mindful Marriage. It is not our book. It is our story of our mess and how the principles that have come to be known as restoration therapy that Terry innovated, and Sharon helped expand in their work together and how those things came together that made a world of difference for us to the point now where we collaborated with them to try to help share those same principles with others.
Nan: I call it the three therapists and a regular person book. When three therapists and a regular person get together, this is what happens with this book. And the thing that I love so much about it is, is that we’re putting the cookies on the bottom shelf for people like me. It’s just been so helpful for us, and it continues to be helpful with our relationship with others and our adult children. It’s just so refreshing that it’s a book for everyone, not just for therapists and clinicians and training people to do that. And so I’m grateful, and honestly, people said, “You wrote a book?” and I’m like, “No, but I lent my story to this book,” and I believe in it because it’s something that I do every day in our marriage with you.
Ron: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And we’re eager to get into some of those principles, but first I want to talk to Sharon. So far in the story we’ve told you weren’t included in all that. Do you remember when you got brought into this mess?
Sharon: Well, I always knew you all from a distance and certainly especially knew at the time of Connor’s death, your connections to the community, your work in the community. We had done some work, a little bit of work, Ron, in the marriage intensive movement, sat in principles, in groups, how do we help couples get through crisis? And we had that connection as well. But I remember that. And then I remember when we moved from Amarillo, you all came and bought our ping pong table—
Nan: Yes,
Sharon: —and took it home for your family.
Ron: Isn’t that so fun?
Sharon: And I don’t think I have all those things in the right order, but I just want to say those are strong memories in my mind of connection with you all professionally through grief and through pain and through ping pong,
Ron: Through ping pong, and through the years we’ve just been able to hang out. And just a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to be with you guys and just thoroughly enjoy it. We’ve been in your home in Arizona and is that where you guys are now?
Sharon: We are.
Terry: Sedona, Arizona.
Ron: And beautiful weather, I’m sure.
Sharon: Beautiful Sedona.
Terry: It’s gorgeous.
Ron: Hey. Okay, so I want our audience to know that this book is not like other marriage books that they probably have read. What makes this material different? For example, a lot of marriage books, there’s a chapter on this subject, there’s a chapter on this, there’s a chapter on that, and it’s sort of a broad swath of different aspects of married life. This book is really unified in terms of its mission, its goal and what it’s trying to do. Could you guys just comment a little bit; how is this book different?
Terry: I would really say two things. What makes this different from other marriage books? I think that we have a proliferation in our society; the idea that marriage is about finding your soul meet and meeting each other’s needs forevermore. And this book basically says your job—the scripture says to bear one another’s burdens. It doesn’t say meet one another’s needs, nor does it say to solve one another’s problems. It says bear one another’s burdens. It’s more of a companioning word than anything else.
And so what we’re really for is that you really figure out how to get yourself emotionally regulated so that you can actually connect with your spouse, not meet their needs, but actually do something other than meeting needs. Need meeting is good and it’s sometime needed in marriage, but what we’re built for, and this is the other thing that I think that we talk about well in the book, is the idea that it’s not just about getting yourself regulated. It really is about sharing intimacy with your partner. Where need meeting is more about it is much more like parenting than it is partnering.
So we’re really about teaching couples how to get yourself under control and then really share intimacy with your partner rather than just a simple need meeting, which feels a little like parenting one another, which God just didn’t equip us to do.
Ron: Right.
Nan: And can I say that first day in his office, we go in with lots of pain and I unpack my pain. I was very much I wanted to talk first because I didn’t know what was going to happen with both of you being the professionals that you are. I unlaid a lot of pain. Probably from family of origin, definitely from you, and just pain upon pain upon pain. And really Terry dealt with you and your stuff, but he also turned to me. I’ll never forget; I don’t know if you remember this, Terry, but I share this story all the time. I remember you saying, “Nan, if you’ll allow the Lord to heal all of that deep pain that’s within you, it’ll be the most beautiful part of you.”
I remember I was so mad at you that day and I was like, “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. I do not. I want to get him to stop. I don’t really want, I’ve been trying to throw this away, scrape it off, not deal with it.” And it was a journey. It was the beginning of a journey for me to really deal with me. And so that is exactly true in what he’s saying. We both now are seeing some real deep intimacy because we’re both dealing with ourselves.
Ron: The title of the book is Understanding and Managing Yourself. The lights have gone on for us and we now see that most of us spend our entire marriage walking through life, trying to get our spouse to be somebody different for us and therefore meet our needs; back to what Terry was saying about needing me.
Sharon, let me tell you an example of what I think he was talking about and maybe you can comment on that. I was listening to Pretty reputable marriage podcast. If I said the name, I think people would probably recognize it. And they were having a conversation with a couple and one of them was talking about some insecurities that they had been wrestling with. And the host then turned to the partner and said, okay, so what are you going to do about their insecurity? That’s the moment where the message is you’re responsible to help that person feel, not feel insecure. Is that the way you would address it?
Sharon: Well, and that’s, in that question particularly, certainly we do want to be sensitive to our spouse’s needs, but the main issue is that we talk about over and over is we can’t feel somebody else’s emptiness or loneliness all by ourselves. It’s too demanding. I can’t make Terry feel something other than what he feels. I was thinking what’s really different about this book to me is that most of marital therapy—and Terry and I and Ron are all marital therapists so we can say this—is spent in the therapy room with people talking about what they feel, what they feel, what they feel.
And what we found is a lot of times what people are feeling is just what’s going on in the moment. It’s possibly not true. So in your example, Ron, of somebody feeling really insecure, understanding why that person feels insecure may have much more to do with that person than it has anything to do with the marital relationship. So getting to the root of understanding why we feel the way we do and why we react the way we do is really critical.
And the only other thing I’ll say, after being a marriage and family therapist for over 35 years, people come to marriage therapy to get you to change their spouse. And you can’t do that. And as therapists, we can’t do that. We can help people learn how to be a little more sensitive, but the real magic happens, the real intimacy happens when we help people learn how to change themselves and interact in the relationship in a different way.
Ron: One of the things I really like about this material is it’s an integration of a lot of really good ideas. Attachment, we talk about that a lot on this program. Neuroscience and how the brain works; that’s been an eyeopener for me over the last number of years. How relationships really work and how we think they work versus the cultural expectations or messages about finding this person who will satisfy every need you have. I heard that on a different podcast just the other day. Once you fall in love with me, I’m going to be everything you’ve ever needed in life. Wow. I mean there’s just the arrogance in that. It’s just so strong and we don’t even recognize that that’s not even true.
So when you bring all these ideas together, you begin to kind of understand how we actually work and function in relationships. So let’s keep going, Sharon, with what you were talking about. And Terry, you mentioned the word dysregulation a little while ago; neurological term, brain term; help people understand what dysregulation is.
Terry: Yeah, so the idea is that we go sideways a lot in our lives. That’s probably no news to your listener. We tend to do that. We get what we call on a warning system in our brain in two pathways. One is that when somebody threatens our personhood, our sense of who we are as a person or what we call our identity, when our identity’s challenged, if you’re not loving me the way you’re supposed to or you’re not treating me as a worthy person or you’re leaving me alone, man, I get really messed up in my sense of self.
The other way is that we get upset around safety issues when we feel like things are unjust or secrets have been kept from us or people aren’t as consistent as we want them to be. What goes off in our brain is something in the midbrain called a fight and flight syndrome. We just think we’ve got to get this corrected right now and we either think I’m going to put up my dukes and make it or make someone make me feel better, or I’m going to leave the situation, flight out of there.
And those two situations are the basic things when we talk about emotional dysregulation, particularly when you get really close relationships, and your identity and sense of safety is always on the line with someone. That’s how we get emotionally dysregulated. So we would say this very simply. You’re either dysregulated in your sense of self or your identity or your sense of safety in the relationship, fairness, secrets being kept; or you have both of those things going on at the same time. That’s what dysregulates you emotionally.
And let me just press that one inch further. When you feel that way, you’re going to do something. And when you’re dysregulated in your identity or sense of safety, bad stuff is going to come out of you. In other words, that’s where you become blaming and angry. That’s where you become really condemning of yourself. That’s where you over control situations and don’t let people contribute or that’s where you take a bus and leave.
Sharon: And I just want to kind of repeat just what Terry said to Nan’s point earlier of putting cookies on the bottom shelf. Those are the four actions that when you feel yourself dysregulated: blame, shame, control or escape. Those are the four actions over the years that we began to notice that people do. When they feel threatened in their midbrain, they do one of those four things. And that language seems to really resonate with people because all of us start thinking, “Ooh, I do this or I do that,” or “I can see myself in that.” And so that dysregulation plays out in those four characteristics very easily.
Terry: And one more thing about this, that emotional dysregulation is habit forming for your brain. In other words, you practiced over and over again. So if you’ve noticed that you get, when you’re emotionally sideways, if you notice that the same pattern you keep on ending up in the same place, that’s because your brain has learned a particular way of handling issues.
Nan: And it can happen in a nanosecond, and it can go on overdrive and go a hundred million miles an hour. I remember that night. I think it was the same old going around the same old mountain about work and travel.
Our boys were eight, ten, and twelve. So I saw the handwriting you’re talking about this safety and things of that nature. I saw the handwriting on the wall with the boys becoming, they were preteen and teenagers and just this travel and this incessant need to be gone and just going and going and Ron and just our move from one state to the next and changing jobs was going to change all that. And it hadn’t, it was like a straw. But I know that this was this same old fight, same old me trying to control the situation to get him to stop. And then it just had become a major straw that broke the camel’s back. And it was like that night I got suitcases out and said, “You or me.” I was so angry, and I wasn’t going to back down. And there was, I mean it was fight, flight, freeze—
Ron: All of the above.
Nan: —all of the above. And all of those four coping, I was doing all of them. And it happened just like that.
Ron: And let me just say to our listener or viewer that what we’re talking about, we’re kind of referencing this big moment in our marriage, but dysregulation happens day to day, moment to moment. As a matter of fact, it’s very, very easy to be having a wonderful time with one another.
Not too long ago we were out to dinner, enjoyed an evening, and then I don’t even remember who said what, but in a nanosecond then it’s sort of like our body postures turned away from each other. And we were no longer feeling close or safe or connected, or where did all that go? It can happen very, very quickly. And all it takes is for one of us to get dysregulated and usually that taps into the dysregulation of the other person and we’re off and running.
So just to add a little flesh to what Terry’s saying and what Nan just shared; 17 years ago, what was all that travel about for me? Well, I would’ve told you then that it was about providing for the family and doing God’s work. And that’s what I told myself. That’s what I believed. But I can tell you now, what that was about was my sense of not being enough and my sense of, I earned my worth in the world. That’s that identity Terry was talking about. I earned my worth in the world by working hard and excelling at everything that I do. So I became a performer when I was a kid and I still perform, perform, perform.
So that’s my control out of those four: blame, shame, control or escape. That’s my control is to perform well, to do it right, to get it right. And then when you weren’t happy with me traveling or being occupied in my head, not just on the road, but just not fully there at home, then I would get defensive and that would be my, I’d try to control your opinions of me at that point. And so, hey, that’s what I’m good at is that control performer thing.
And we flush this out in the book. And the reason we do that is because we want people to see, “Wow, okay, that’s Ron. I’m not like that, but I can see how one of these four: blame, shame, control or escape; or two or more of them are what I go to when I’m not feeling safe or loved the way I would like to be in our relationship.” And it’s amazing how quickly that whole process—
Nan: It’s a nanosecond.
Ron: —can take off and—
Nan: You’re going down that highway. The original title for the book was Crazy Train and it really is a crazy train that you’re on and you really can’t even pull the lever to put the brakes on. I do all four. I mean, sad to say, but I do. I can ebb and flow from one to the other or do all four in a nanosecond and then I get done and I’m like, I just stay in shame because I’m like, I couldn’t even stop this. Why am I? And it’s that rut you get in to where it, just like you said, Terry, it’s so easy to just—it’s what you’re used to, and how you’re used to, and your brain is wired to react when you’re in pain.
Ron: So I want our listener to note, we’re going to apply some of this to blended family specific stuff here in just a few minutes, so hang with us. But before we do that, Terry, Sharon, you guys are very forthright with your own personal story, your own evolution, not only just as helpers to help people understand this whole process of dysregulation and how we react and how it gets in the way of closeness and intimacy and relationships. But you’ve had your own journey with that. Is there a story you would care to share that sort of represents that journey for you?
Sharon: I think part of what I think and what I’ve thought more about lately in the sense of, how do we help people change, how do we change ourselves, how have we learned how to do things differently, is the whole idea that we want to move beyond the messages that we tell ourselves. Whether that’s messages from trauma or just messages from a repeated something that someone said to us. The lies that we tell ourselves; they can come from the family of origin. They don’t always. They can come from a life situation, or they can come from other experiences.
For me personally, I had a lot of trauma when I was young. My father died when I was three. I had a brother that died when I was four, and I had another brother that died when I was thirteen, and they were all very sudden, very tragic deaths. So this whole idea of being close to somebody in relationship sounded like a good idea. But what I didn’t realize was that my tendency to not want to be close to somebody made me reactive in relationships. So when Terry and I started dating, we’d start to get too close. The inside of me was going, “Wait a minute, people that you get too involved with might die. You don’t want to be close.” But I didn’t know I was telling myself that.
So then I would create fight, I would create a problem, I would create something in the relationship, so I had reason to get away from him. And my coping was to control because I’d had so much trauma in my background. First, I wanted to control my environment. And then when that didn’t work because I needed so badly to have my environment controlled, I’d jump over to being critical. And I over the years have learned this whole idea of being critical. If I can tell you what an idiot you are for not doing what I need you to do, then you might fall back under my control and do what I want you to do.
And I just wanted to say to you, Nan, I am a two stepper. I do two of these things really, really systemically, and I just want to say if you’re a person that does all four of them, that doesn’t mean you have more problems than those of us that do two of them. I just do the two harder when they don’t work. I just get more controlling and more critical. But it’s a lot based on my background and my trauma, and it made me not want to be close in relationship. And that’s where we have to learn how what’s driving us can help us get beyond our trauma or get beyond the lies that we’ve been telling ourselves.
Ron: One of the things you guys have taught me is everybody does this. This is not like, “Oh yeah, some of you dysregulated people, too bad for you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” No, everybody does this. It’s the human condition. And we actually make the case in the book that it’s, I think it’s part of, I think this is reasonable to say it’s part of what makes up the old self that Paul talks about throughout the New Testament; that thing that we were before we came to know Christ. And the thing that we’re becoming in Christ is the new self, but that old self rears its ugly head over and over and over again.
I think part of that old self is neurological. I think it’s the stories that we’ve begun to tell about ourselves from a very early age, perhaps through trauma, perhaps through, for some of our listeners, through a first marriage or a second marriage. It’s the story you’re telling about your kids, that you’re concerned about their wellbeing, about your ex-spouse and all of that sort of sets you up for that habitual neurological pattern where something happens all of a sudden you feel the threat and you go into blame, shame, control or escape.
And it travels with you. That’s the thing I want you to hear us say is all of this travels with us. It’s not like you got rid of that when you divorced that former spouse. No, no, no. Those that habitual neurological stuff travels with you into this marriage, this relationship. And when a stepchild looks at you cross-eyed and says, “Get out of my face. I don’t like you,” and you feel rejection, again, it’s different coming from a child than it was from a former spouse, or from one of your parents as a child, but it still hits the same bruise, the same pain and how you react is still going to be whatever that go to: blame, shame, control or escape is.
And so this is not just learning about yourself in your most intimate marital relationship. It’s about learning how you will respond in parenting, in stepparenting, in co-parenting with a former spouse.
So what’s the hope here? We help people in this book identify what that reactivity is, what they do when they get dysregulated, where they can actually put words on it. And I’ll never forget when I first did that. I remember thinking, I used to think I was kind of a sophisticated person in my arrogance. I really thought, “Yeah, I’m kind of doing all right.” And then I realized, “No, I am just as elementary as the smallest infant.”
We have a grandson.
Nan: We do.
Ron: We do. We have a grandson and he’s teeny tiny right now. And I get teeny tiny stupid when I get dysregulated in my marriage, in my work, in my whatever it might be. And I remember thinking, “I’m not sophisticated at all. I am just basic. And if I don’t get a grip on who I am in those hard moments, I won’t be able to grow beyond them.”
Terry: Well, there is really much hope. You were talking before about this old self is that we all have an old self. We have these patterns. These are predictable patterns, by the way. And Sharon and I didn’t make this stuff up. I mean these are long held patterns. We maybe help people organize it in such a way to understand why they’re so screwball.
But the reality is that everybody has an old self. But if you remember in those set of verses in Ephesians where Paul is talking about moving from the old self to the new self, he says you do that by the renewing of the spirit of your mind. This is the longer version of the Romans. Don’t be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The idea is that if you get serious about it, you actually have a chance to settle yourself around what your true identity is about and what you have to do to be empowered in an unsafe world. You don’t have to go crazy and that almost always guarantees that your identity will suffer more and that you’ll create more unsafe situations.
For instance, Nan, when you were slinging luggage around one night at your house, you weren’t actually making that safer or making your identity more clear. It was making things more unstable. That’s where the hope is, is that we have a chance to actually pay attention to what we think about ourselves and also what we’re empowered to do that’s constructive and through practice actually learn how to do that. We can do differently.
Nan: We can. And earlier when Sharon was talking about the lies that we can start to believe in those narratives. I believed for so long, mine is abandonment. Mine is abandonment from childhood. Mine is abandonment with Ron, and mine is abandonment in the loss of Connor. It just is. I felt abandoned in my family. I felt abandoned by my husband, and I felt abandoned by God after Connor passed away. And I believed that that was because I was unworthy of love. There was something within me that was causing all of these people to abandon me. And I believed that forever. And that is a lie.
Terry: I can relate to that well, Nan. I mean I came from a family that was physically abusive, a riotous family, and I was the youngest of four and nothing felt safe, but my four, five, six-year-old mind said, “That must be my fault. I must be underperforming. I should be better than this.” So my coping reaction is I go straight to shame, and I beat myself up. It didn’t take me long as the little kid to figure out that’s not going to get me anywhere. So I tried to perform my way out of it, but when I would get tired of performing because you’re only as good as your last performance—
Nan: Right.
Ron: That’s right.
Terry: —I would blow up. I mean I would just become unhinged, and I was every bit as angry as the people were that abused me.
Nan: Exactly.
Terry: And I didn’t abuse anybody physically, but man, did I get angry in that same vein. Learning how to say, “Wait a second,” to stop that cascade before it begins, through this process of really renewing the mind, that’s the trick. And that’s what y’all talk about so beautifully in this book.
Nan: And it isn’t a one and done. I want to tell people it is not a one and done. It took practice upon practice a continuing, continuing, continuing and to now it’s like I can feel that coming on. “Okay, what is that?” And then I can say, “Wait a minute, no, my identity is in you God, and I know you’ll never leave me or forsake me. You call me your daughter, your precious one. I’m good. I’m grounded here,” and I can then not get on the crazy train, so to speak. But it was not an easy—the fight, flight, blame, shame. Boy, I just could pick those up and wear those and throw those and do those and throw those suitcases very, very quickly. Those were easier to do than the humility and the self-control. And yet it takes that saying the fruits of the spirit for me and that renewing of the mind daily. It’s not a quick fix.
Ron: No, it’s not.
Nan: But it’s a beautiful dance now, and not to say that we don’t get triggered, but it’s a beautiful dance now.
Sharon: And Nan, one thing I love about this, it is about making your marriage better, but the thing I love the most into your illustration that you gave just now is I like me better. I don’t like the screaming, yelling, throwing suitcase, packing Sharon. Because when I have one of those things where my emotions just overtake me and I do destructive things, I never lay down in bed at night and think, “Wow, wasn’t I good?” I—
Ron: So proud of myself.
Sharon: —lay down in bed—Yeah, I’m so proud of myself. I lay down in bed at night and I go, “Whoa, how did that happen?” And that’s one thing as we’ve taught this material to people over the years, through seminars, through counseling, through sharing the pictures on a napkin at Starbucks, people identify quickly with what they do and their first question is, how can I change that? None of us like that about ourselves. So this is for your marriage, and it really does really increase the intimacy and the joy in your marriage, but man, it sure helps you like yourself better too.
Ron: Oh, that’s so good.
Nan: I agree.
Ron: And it’s so true, and really that’s understanding and managing yourself. So much of us spend our entire marital lives trying to get the other person to be something for us that will make us feel better. And you think about when you say that out loud, you go, “But that releases all the power from me to them, and who am I going to be in the meantime? Well, I’m kind of relegated to blame, shame, control or escape, and I don’t like that person.” I’ve kind of thought maybe a good way to know when you’re dysregulated is when you’re acting in a way that you don’t feel good about. If you have any desire to be like Christ, to put on the fruit of the spirit in your life, to be more of that, and you find yourself in moments the opposite of that, hey, those are dysregulated moments, and the reactivity comes with it.
The personal agency that is offered in this material is just so beautiful. We’ve been the recipients of that. Let me just tell people one of the things you’re going to do is you’re going to actually identify your pain cycle; what that dysregulation looks like for you. You’re going to map it where you can actually put words on it and go, “Yep, there it is. That’s me.” You’re also going to be able to identify when things are going better, when you’re not reacting out of pain, but you’re responding out of the truth of who God has made you to be and how you’re going to get there. And there’s a process that we teach where it helps you go from the old self to the new self in a very practical way.
Guys, Terry, Sharon, one of the things I love about this material is for years we’ve all heard good sermons on be more humble. We’ve all heard good sermons on be more patient and kind and thoughtful and put on self-control, fruit of the spirit kind of stuff. And we walk out, and we go, “Yeah, but how do I do that? How do I do that when the chips are down? —when I feel like you don’t care about me the way I wish you did? —when I feel displaced in my home and I’m wondering where the hope is? —when I feel like I’ve just blown it and there’s no way we’re ever going to make this relationship work? How do I put on that good stuff in that moment?”
That to me is the ever elusive that I don’t think we in the church or in marriage ministry have done a good job with. We just sort of said, go and do it folks and then left people to try to figure out how. This material tells you the how. It drills down into what’s deeply intimate and true about you to help you make different choices and act in a different way. It’s very, very practical.
Nan: And it takes some work. Wouldn’t you say that? What would you say to a couple that’s like, “I’ve got to do these exercises, I’ve got to…,”? What would you say to them when they pick up this book and they see that they’ve got to put a little work into it?
Terry: One of the things we’ve been reading a little bit out of Dallas Willard. Some of your listeners will recognize that name. A great theologian, great discipler of people in the past, and one of the things that he says is we tend to emulate our sports heroes or something like that. After we hit a home run, we do a home run trot or something of that nature. Or after they score a touchdown, we do a flip or something of that nature that seems really crazy. That’s the part that we like to celebrate and try to emulate.
Actually, Dallas Willard says that’s not the important part of what the great athletes do. What the great part of what they do is they practice relentlessly toward that goal to command their body and their strength and their skill to be able to really achieve something that looks spectacular on the sports field. We don’t want to practice that kind of stuff like they do. We want to celebrate the end result. But in reality, we all know that the only way we become a new self is by the hard work and practice the relentless training to remember that I have to control myself. When I get dysregulated, I automatically feel unloved, unsafe and feel like I am not enough.
For me to be able to say, “I know where that’s coming from. That is my old person.” Call that out first. Secondly, I say, what are my tricks? And I’m going to say that out loud. I’m going to say my tricks are I tend to shame myself and beat up on myself. Then I try to over control the situation by performing, and then I get angry. When I say that out loud, I’m actually showing Sharon or my children or my coworkers, I’m saying, “These are my tricks that I use when I blow it.” And it makes me aware to be able to say, “Okay, now who am I really?”
That third step in this process is really saying, what do I say about who I am? And I have to learn how to love myself. I have to learn how to want myself. And most importantly, I have to pronounce myself okay. And my language is always man enough. I don’t mean like, “I’m man enough.” I mean I will find my way if I just hang in there and stay present. And then it’s easy after that because I settle my heart and I say, “What are the natural things that come out of me when I feel that way?”
Well then, I’m able to connect and I’m able to nurture and I’m able to value myself in that process. But like you’re saying now, I have to do that, not 50 times, not 100 times, not 500 times, not 1000 times. I have to make that a lifestyle where when I fall back into my old self, I immediately know the way out is going to the new self and practicing that same four steps.
Ron: To our listener or a viewer, Terry just gave you the four steps that’s in the book as well. It’s a process you’re going to learn. And is there anything magic about the four steps? Well, yeah, there’s a lot of neuroscience behind it. There’s a lot of, but what it’s doing is it’s activating self-control and it’s helping you actually take steps toward the things you know need to do; that new-self activity rather than the old-self activity.
Nan: Going from old to new.
Ron: And so it gives you a mechanism to actually begin to walk that out. And the more you walk it out, it’s just like obedience. The more you obey and do what God has asked us to do, the more natural that becomes. We move into our new redeemed self that God has given us. But the practice is what’s so very important. If you just write it down and never do it, then you don’t get the change.
And what kind of change are we talking about here? Well, we’re talking about renewing your mind, but not just your consciousness or your thought process, but actually rewiring the neural networks of your brain. Your brain can learn new things and it can learn new habits if the old habits are reactive, and the new habits can be new-self activity. And we believe that’s exactly what you’re doing over time. The more you practice, the more you do, the more you move into your new self, the more you’re actually rewiring your brain, which makes it easier and easier and easier to continue to walk down that road. We’re never this side of heaven, right? Nan, Terry, Sharon. We’re never getting there.
Nan: No.
Ron: But we get closer to what it is to follow and be like Christ. And that’s the process of sanctification. And we can move in those directions. And that’s exactly what this book is offering people.
Nan: Well, I lived decades not at peace, not trusting. I love myself now and I like myself and I love the peace that I walk in because things still come. We have adult children. You’re still traveling
Ron: Life isn’t over. Yeah, that’s right.
Nan: But I have such a peace that comes over me when I take those breaths and go, “Wait a minute, who am I?” And it’s really not that, it’s not a nanosecond anymore going to the old. It’s like I can see that old person way back in the rear-view mirror, and it’s the new that’s in the driver’s seat now, and it’s just a different journey. I know she’s way, way, way, way back there. Capable, yes. But I just, like you said Sharon earlier, I just trust this new Nan and I love her, and I feel such a peace. It’s—
Ron: —rooted in who God is and who He tells us that we are. And yet telling ourselves that enough that we align ourselves with that truth so that it becomes a truth for us. There’s the trick in the whole thing. We still get dysregulated. I still get dysregulated.
Nan: That’s just the world we live in.
Ron: It’s right. It happens this side of heaven. And there are moments I got to pull back. There are moments it’s short-lived. I mean, compared to where we were—
Nan: Oh my.
Ron: Sometimes Terry and Jared, Nan and I sit around and talk about how far we’ve come in our marriage and it’s really; it just leads us to our knees to be so grateful to God for his kindness to us when we were idiots and how—
Nan: Well—
Ron: When I was an idiot.
Nan: —you came into our life. I feel like it was God’s provision two years before a true bottom dropped out. And it was a grace that we needed to have and to walk out with you. And just, I thank God all the time for that and Him just loving us so much and loving our marriage and our families so much that He would provide this couple.
Sharon: Well, I just want to say we’re so thankful for the work that the two of you have done on this book and the clarity and the preciseness and the ability that you’ve put into it, not only through your story but also through the, so how can this help other people? It’s a very, very good book and we’re just honored that you would take that opportunity to write about it. So, good book guys; way to go.
Terry: Yeah. Thank you for being vulnerable enough to share that story.
Nan: You’re welcome.
Ron: Well, we love you guys.
Nan: A good team; we’re a good team.
Ron: Yeah, we love you guys, and we are so, so thankful that you have been faithful to what God has led you to do, and it’s been a good partnership. So thank you.
Nan: It is.
Sharon: Thank you for having us.
Ron: Okay, to our listener, it’s a new year. You can go get a new self and you can renew your usness. And we didn’t even talk about usness, but it’s a big concept in the book and we were going to try to help you with that.
Nan: Hey, that could be their word for 2025, usness.
Ron: Usness. Hey—
Nan: We could start a trend.
Ron: —if you’re looking for a word, there it is. Purchase your copy today. By the way, you really help us out if you purchase it soon after this podcast comes out. That’s really helpful. It’s available wherever books are sold. It’s called The Mindful Marriage: Create Your Best Relationship Through Understanding and Managing Yourself. Check the show notes to learn more.
And by the way, Nan and I are doing a Mindful Marriage Conference. You can bring that to your church. We’re going to be speaking in Oklahoma City this month, January 31st through February 1st, 2025. That, many more marriage and blended family speaking events are coming up this year so look in the show notes for locations. As I mentioned earlier that new and improved map where you can look for blended family ministries and it’s going to have all of our speaking events on there as well. So take a look.
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Well, next time I’m going to be talking with author and speaker Brian Goins about playing hurt in marriage. Playing hurt, yeah. That’s next time on FamilyLife Blended.
I’m Ron Deal and that’s my beautiful wife Nan. So thank you for tuning in or listening or watching. And to our production team and our donors who make this podcast possible, I say “Thank you.”
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