This is a common scenario: a husband and/or wife go to a pastor or counselor to get help with their marriage. They describe a disagreement they had and what was said, and the person helping says “husband, you shouldn’t have said this” and “wife you shouldn’t have said that.” And the helper explains how each of them are affecting the other spouse and tries to get them to communicate better.

In a healthy marriage in which both spouses have the capacity to see things from the other’s perspective, this approach could be eye-opening and produce a new awareness of how what they do affects the other.

But, in an unhealthy marriage in which one spouse (we’ll say the wife) has the capacity to see everything from her husband’s perspective (even to the point of forsaking her own perspective) and the husband does not have the ability to see any perspective but his own, this approach is going to sound like this:

• The wife hears: “if you wouldn’t have said that, then he wouldn’t be treating you this way.”

• The husband hears: “she shouldn’t have said that . . . so . . . I wouldn’t have had to say what I said if she hadn’t said what she said.”

In other words, the wife takes all the blame and the husband gives all the blame.

• When this happens, here’s what the counselor thinks: “Ah, they get it and are really willing to work on it. If the wife changes what she says, the husband will follow suit and everything will be OK.”

So they go home, and the wife tries harder to say all the right things. She remains ultra-sensitive to his perspective so that she can adjust her approach to satisfy what he desires, and she becomes more and more at his mercy.

The husband gets more entitled, believing that until his wife gets it right, he is justified in the way he treats her. He becomes more demanding and harder to please, especially with all the tactics he uses to keep knocking her off balance in order to keep her guessing as to what he wants so that he never has to face his responsibility to help create a mutual relationship.

And the person who “helped” them? He thinks that he has given wise advice in helping them each understand their role in the problem. But be warned, Isaiah 5: 21 says “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.”

As you read this scenario, does it sound like the problem has been solved? No, indeed. In fact, the helper’s “wisdom” has done nothing but create a greater imbalance of power in the relationship. The wife has found “conviction” (false conviction) around what she could do better, and the husband has found an authoritative excuse for his behavior (“the counselor said that she shouldn’t have said/done that” - even if that isn’t what the person helping intended to happen). When no one calls for justice or pleads a case with integrity, people stay in the dark about the truth (Isaiah 59: 4, 9), and God is appalled when no one intervenes (Isaiah 59: 16).

You see, it is imperative that you have an understanding of the dynamics of an unhealthy relationship in order to know how to counsel the couple in a way that will bring balance of power and mutuality to the relationship. If you don’t understand this, the relationship may look like it is temporarily getting better (the wife is trying harder, after all), but it just increases the period of time that the relationship suffers before the inevitable happens, sometimes drawing out the suffering and dysfunction for years or decades.

How to really help an unhealthy marriage

Let’s start by looking at how you can discern whether a relationship is unhealthy and whether there is an imbalance of power present, because knowing how to discern that is crucial to understanding what kind of counsel to provide.

Right off the bat, you can assume that if a couple is coming to you with conflict, the relationship is not healthy and is very likely destructive. Too often people helpers start with too generous a view of the capacity of the individuals to change course and get on track with a few simple shifts in perspective.

In reality, people don’t typically come for help until things are pretty bad. And if it’s been a pattern, it’s a problem.

Healthy people are able to navigate conflict and try different approaches until they find something that works. People that haven’t been able to do that and are now coming to you: it’s because one or both of them do not have the capacity to change course. This should completely influence how you approach counseling with them, because you can see from the scenario above how destructive the outcome will be if you start with the wrong assumptions.

One simple question

One simple question that you can ask each spouse that makes it very obvious whether someone has the capacity to be emotionally/relationally healthy is this: “What is your spouse’s perspective?”

This one question will reveal a lot . .  . IF you listen well and can discern whether someone is diverting the question.

Here’s an example of a diversion-tactic answer: “She doesn’t tell me her perspective, she just keeps trying to change me all the time.”

His choice of words are trigger words to counselors who believe that spouses shouldn’t try to change each other, so the conversation could easily get re-directed to how the wife shouldn’t be trying to change him and how she needs to clearly communicate her perspective to him.

That is not an appropriate direction for the conversation to go. It is not the wife’s responsibility to ensure that her husband sees her perspective. The belief that she must communicate her perspective to him is what leads to unending attempts to try to help him see something that he is committed to not seeing. Reasons, excuses, arguments, and defenses yield no further understanding on the part of the husband despite the many angles that the wife uses to try to “communicate” better.

Another diversion-tactic answer: “I don’t know – she’s so unstable and irrational and has so many mood swings that I can’t tell what she’s thinking from one moment to the next.”

He is blaming her . . . and slandering her . . . in order to excuse his ignorance and avoid answering the question.

OK, you get the point.

Here is what you can expect in answer to that one question from each spouse if the relationship is destructive:

The spouse with a high capacity for emotional health (let’s use the wife, to stay consistent) will be able to explain so well the perspective of her husband that it could be the husband himself explaining his perspective. She uses words, emotions, and facial expressions to put herself in his shoes in such a powerful way that she could be an actress impersonating him.

The spouse with little or no capacity for emotional health will have no real clue as to what the other person is thinking, feeling, observing, or the effort that the other person is making. He will use diversion tactics, and, when pressed, may attempt to make something up in order to not be seen as unable to answer the question.

Listen carefully for whether there is identification/empathy with his wife’s emotion. A simple “head answer” is not sufficient for a description of someone else’s perspective. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking “he’s a man, so he can’t verbalize things as well.” What an insult to manhood! Real men have depth of insight, feeling, and compassion. Look at Jesus’s ability to empathize with the hurting! Don’t dumb down the gender to excuse a destructive spirit.

One final warning when it comes to discerning each spouse’s answer to this question: do NOT rely on the wife’s acceptance or affirmation of her husband’s answer in determining whether he answered well. The wife is likely to err on the side of doing all the things she’s been told she should do: affirming him, believing the best of his intentions and ability, building him up, etc. She is not a reliable thermometer of whether he was accurate in his description. (And if you don’t have the experience or ability to know the wife’s perspective, please do everyone a favor and refer the couple to someone who does!)

Once you have determined that one of the spouses does not have the emotional capacity for health, here are some do’s and don’ts.

DON’T

1. Don’t try to see both sides

I know that you were trained to see both sides, but taking a neutral stance in which you see the perspective of both spouses only serves to help the oppressor and further victimize the victim (back to the scenario at the beginning of this article).

The Bible says to call sin what it is (Isaiah 5: 20), to defend the oppressed (Psalm 82: 3), and to bring justice (Psalm 103: 6). Seeing both sides will prevent all of those things from happening. And you have to understand and believe that the very use of the words “sin, oppression, and justice” reveal the truth that there ARE, indeed, sides that are right and sides that are wrong - and you can’t side with both. 2 Corinthians 6: 14 says “what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” You can’t take both sides. 1 Corinthians 10: 21 says “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too.” 

2. Don’t point out what the wife should or should not have said or done

If you say “you shouldn’t have said this,” the wife hears:

• “you have no right to defend yourself”

• “if you hadn’t said/done that, you wouldn’t be in this situation”

• “you are wrong, too”

• “you and your husband are equal sinners”

And that’s simply not true. People are not equal sinners, nor are they equally wrong or at fault. The Bible makes a distinction between godly people (who do sin) and wicked people. Godly people can recognize their sin and repent because of the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Wicked people cannot recognize their sin and, therefore, cannot repent. The one who consistently sins against the other is not equal to the one who sins and repents.

Now from the husband’s standpoint, if you say to the wife (even if you also say it to the husband) “you shouldn’t have said/done that,” he hears:

• “Ha, I’m right! She had no right to do that. I’m justified in how I acted.”

Both of these “don’ts,” if you do them, are damaging not just to the wife, but to the husband, too . . . and to the marriage.

Here’s what you should DO

1. Affirm to the wife that you understand why she said/did what she said or did

Affirm her even if you know that what she said or did only added fuel to the fire or was an unhealthy response. Remember that you are working with a woman who has the capacity for emotional health but is currently operating in a traumatized state and is using survival mechanisms just to get by. Don’t condemn her for that. She will be able to learn a better way – but only when she no longer has to defend herself, because someone else is standing in the gap for her. That’s where you can come in. And a more complete knowledge of God will help, too.

2. Tell the husband that there is no excuse for what he said or did

Let him know that, as the husband, the Bible charges him with being considerate and respectful of his wife (1 Peter 3: 7) (If you are working with a couple and the wife is the unhealthier one, let her know that there is no excuse for what she said/did - that it was degrading to her husband and is preventing him from having the freedom that he needs to have in order to love her well, as described in Ephesians 5: 33).

3. Explain to both of them the way the wife feels

It is important for the wife to hear that someone can put to words what she cannot even describe, and it is important for the husband to hear that someone understands his wife.

Tell them that what the wife said or did reveals that she feels helpless, that she feels that she needs to defend herself, and that she feels unarmed in the wake of an assault and is trying to arm herself – because that is often exactly what is happening. In a situation of chaos and conflict created by the husband with the intention of keeping her off balance so that he gets his way, she is attempting to protect herself from the accusations, projections, and onslaught of other tactics that her husband uses to make himself feel like the winner. [Click here for a list of the tactics that an unhealthy person uses]

4. Make it OK for the wife to feel the way she does

The way she feels is a natural, instinctual fight/flight/freeze response during a time of traumatic conflict, made even more complicated by her struggle to fight against that instinctual response because she wants to handle it correctly. Also make it OK for the wife to want to arm herself and defend herself and avenge herself (again, all natural responses).

Until she learns how to stop the fight/flight/freeze response, that is her only option, so do not condemn her for it. If she feels understood and is able to temporarily transfer her protection to someone other than herself, it will help her get out of the need to be her own unarmed sole protector and will allow her to begin to arm herself appropriately and heal. And it is in healing that she will be able to learn a better way. Be patient, the right response will come in time.

5. NOT in front of anyone else, guide the wife into dialogue about how she felt during the conflict

Give her words to verbalize her feelings (she’s spent a long time denying them because she believes they are wrong). Some words for how she may have felt: emotional, worked up, enraged, assaultive, powerful, desperate, (see infographic for more).

These feelings are signals that her freedom and personal power have been taken away from her, and she is trying to get her power and freedom back.

Then (still NOT in front of anyone else) talk about the outcome/result of the conflict and whether it yielded the results she expected or wanted. She is likely to admit that it kept the conflict going, that she ended up feeling walked on anyway, and that it didn’t produce any real change or positive shift in the relationship, etc. What it comes down to her for her is this: when you vomit all over someone, you might feel better, but all it does it make a mess.

Finally, talk to her about other ways she could have taken her power and freedom back. Discuss boundaries and consequences, winning her husband without a word, areas of woundedness, and what God wants for her in her marriage. A phrase I use a lot is: The only way to win is not to play. You can’t win an argument by trying to explain yourself to someone who is committed to misunderstanding you. She needs to learn a different way.

6. Rebuke the husband outright

Rebuking him in front of others provides for some accountability for him and shows the wife that you’ve got her back. Let him know that his tactics were unacceptable. This will throw the husband off-balance so that he loses some of his power, and it will help the wife feel defended.

Criticizing both spouses only re-victimizes the wife (making her not only the victim of her husband’s assaults, but now also the victim of yours) and gives the oppressor more power, as explained above.

What Happens When You Counsel Like This?

Understand that when you approach couple’s counseling like this, conflict will escalate, possibly to a much more dangerous level. Proverbs 9: 7 says that “whoever corrects a mocker invites insults; whoever rebukes the wicked incurs abuse.”

Counsel the wife to have a plan to escape to safety, and be available to help her implement the plan. Also know that, even though conflict will escalate, as the wife gets support and learns how to handle the conflict in a more productive way (since she is the only one with the capacity to do this), it will have a positive overall effect on the relationship in the long run. [Click here to read my article “Why the Boundaries Approach and not the More Love Approach?”]

The short-term pain of healthier conflict is well worth the long-term gain of emotional and relational health. It is far better than putting on band-aids that keep getting ripped off for the duration of their marriage. Most people won’t survive that – the marriage might survive, but the people in it will be raw and hurting. Learning how to handle conflict correctly with an emotionally unhealthy spouse will help people not only survive but thrive, because . . .

Hope isn’t found in our situation changing; it is found in our situation . . .

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