My Spouse Is Like A Child
Let’s say your birthday is coming up, and you would like to be able to go out for a nice meal with your spouse. That requires that one of you arrange for a babysitter and choose a restaurant. You also would like your spouse to get you a birthday gift. However, you know that none of that will happen unless you take the initiative to do it yourself. So you buy yourself a gift, wrap it, and give it to your spouse to give to you. And you call the sitter and make the reservation at the restaurant.
So now you’ve gotten your birthday date and your present, but only because you put forth the effort to make it happen, when what you’d really have liked is for your spouse to take the initiative to do all of that. So why did you do it? Because you know your spouse wouldn’t, maybe even can’t. Because you believe that maybe your spouse will learn from your demonstration of how to put a date together. Because you feel like they’re busy and just don’t have time, so you’ll help them out. Yet, somehow, even with you helping them, they don’t learn, they don’t get better at knowing how to do those things, and when you point out that you’d like them to do those things for you, they make excuses or shut down or somehow make it your fault that they don’t do it.
And that’s how a lot of interactions go in your relationship:
When you try to prompt or teach your spouse to do something, they get annoyed or offended
When you share difficult feelings with them, they act like there’s nothing they can do about it
When you correct them, they feel like they can’t do anything right
When there’s a problem, they avoid it and hope it blows over
When you want to discuss something, they get defensive
When you want them to lead, they act like you won’t let them
It’s a victim mentality - a way of thinking that says “I can’t do anything about it” and “If I’m not getting praised, then I’m no good.”
Why Your Spouse Acts Like A Helpless Child
Many people who are married to someone who isn’t putting in the effort that it takes to maintain the relationship may be dealing with a spouse who is stuck in a lower stage of moral development.
Lawrence Kohlberg was a psychologist who asserted that, from childhood through adulthood, people progress through moral stages of development that coincide with the development of their cognitive abilities. As their cognitive ability expands, so does a person’s capacity to increase their understanding of morality.
In the earliest stages of moral development, children ages 3-7 or so develop the sense that some things that they do produce pleasure (stealing a yummy cookie from the cookie jar) and some things produce pain (touching a hot stove). They make decisions to increase pleasure and decrease pain. Until….. something that typically produces pleasure is paired with pain (e.g. getting punished for stealing a cookie). They then begin to pursue pleasure and avoid pain based on what seems to be in their best interest. If stealing a cookie results in punishment, they may decide that it isn’t worth it.
Around the age of 8 or 9 years old, not only do they seek their own self-interest, but they begin to become aware that if they please others, that can increase their pleasure and help them avoid pain. It becomes important to gain the approval of those in their lives who can reward “good” behavior and inflict pain for “bad” behavior. It’s no longer just about seeking pleasure or avoiding pain, it’s also about winning favor in order to increase the pleasure of rewards and avoid pain.
This desire to be seen as “good” eventually gets internalized to produce an adherence to law and order by the early teen years, which is unconsciously understood to help avoid pain and increase the ability to engage in pleasurable activities, provided that a person stays within the lines.
However, by the time this stage of development (the internalization of how to achieve law and order) rolls around, some children have had the experience that rewards and/or punishments do not consistently reward or punish any given behavior. Instead, rewards and punishments feel random. Or, alternatively, rewards feel unachievable and punishments are meeted out even for things that the child thought (s)he would get rewarded for.
When this happens, the child is unable to develop an internal sense of what is right and wrong, and their sense of what feels good and what feels bad creates emotional instability because their experience of “good” results and “bad” results does not align with what is true about “good” and “bad.” In other words, some good behavior gets bad results (e.g. a parent criticizes a hard-earned “B” because it isn’t an “A”) and some bad behavior gets good results (getting in trouble at school goes unaddressed by a parent).
Instead of internalizing a moral code, they connect “good” and “bad” with who they are as a person: If they do something they get punished for, they are bad; if they do something they get rewarded for, they are good. This leaves their emotional wellbeing (and whether they see themselves and others as good or bad) hingeing on whether they are pleasing the powers that be - those who have the authority to reward or punish. But without consistency, the child doesn’t have a sense as to how to achieve the results they want, so they feel constantly defeated and their own behavior becomes sporadic and unpredictable as they try to hit a moving target.
[Get my eBook that goes into more detail about why your spouse creates constant tension, argues about everything, gets angry so much, has trouble taking constructive criticism, needs constant attention, wants sex so often (or not enough), ruins every special occasion, is selfish, and barely gives you any attention.]
Splitting
Along with the inability to internalize what is right and wrong, good and bad, comes the phenomenon of splitting. Splitting occurs when a person bases “good” or “bad” on how they feel. If someone makes them feel good (e.g. they get a compliment or positive attention), then they see themselves as good and the person that makes them feel good is seen as good. But if someone makes them feel bad (e.g. provides constructive criticism or sets a boundary), then they see themselves as bad and the person that made them feel bad is seen as bad, and protective mechanisms kick in. [Get my list of over 40 of these protective mechanisms of emotionally unhealthy people].
Whereas someone who is emotionally healthy can understand that sometimes someone who is good can do things that make you feel bad, a person who is stuck in a lower stage of moral development cannot do that - in their mind, someone is either all good or all bad - they can’t integrate the possibility of someone who is good making them feel bad. If you’ve experienced what it's like to try to please someone but know that if you do one thing “wrong” it erases all the good that you’ve done, then you have experienced someone “splitting.”
Children who get stuck at this moral stage of development of “good boy/good girl” grow into adults whose lives are centered on self-protection and the avoidance of pain. They haven’t discovered anything that produces consistently good results, so they have learned not to trust the responses of others, and they stop pursuing solutions, because in their world there are none. They’ve internalized the belief that they will never be good enough to get a reward, so they are afraid to try and may be so overwhelmed by the idea of trying that their nervous system goes into fight/flight/freeze mode: They become hostile (fight), they retreat into self-defamation or blame-shifting (flight), or they avoid (freeze).
People who get stuck here…
Say they want to get better but don’t seem to do anything about it
Avoid discussions and perceive them as conflict
Check the boxes when pressured but don’t seem to have a genuine investment in change
Give up easily
Get defensive
Get offended and take everything as a personal attack
Don’t seek to understand you, they just seek how to do things the “right” way to smooth things over
Seem to suddenly flip from “everything is OK” to “everything is bad”
If you make them feel good, they’re good, but if you make them feel bad, watch out
Like Being Married To A Child
Trying to make a marriage work with a spouse who is stuck in a lower stage of moral development is like being married to a child. You find yourself trying to coach them, encourage them, reason with them, help them, and be a good example to them. But they don’t respond to these “helpful” things because they, like children, are still operating on the basis of increasing pleasure and avoiding pain. They aren’t operating on the basis of social contracts or principles that produce a sense of belonging, cooperation, and the satisfaction that comes from making someone else happy for someone else’s sake instead of simply to get what they want or avoid what they don’t want. Cognitively, they’re just not in an adult mindset.
And reason will not help them get there. Their lived experience has taught them that pleasure and pain is unpredictable, that it’s in someone else’s control and not theirs (despite their efforts to control it), and that they can’t actually effect any positive outcomes, they can only temporarily avert pain.
So how do you help someone move out of this pre-adolescent stage of moral development? You may not be able to. But if there is any hope that they can continue to grow into higher stages, they will only have the opportunity to do so if you stop trying to reward good behavior and stop overlooking bad behavior.
When you try to coach and validate and love and affirm and give grace, you continue to reinforce the external reward-seeking behavior (and pain-avoidance behavior). What needs to happen instead is that your spouse needs to move from an external locus of control to an internal locus of control. They need to stop seeking approval from others and begin to internalize their own sense of what is approval-worthy. This only happens when life teaches the lesson instead of others in their life trying to help through rewards and correction. Natural consequences are much more consistent and effective than your attempts to reward good behavior and correct bad behavior.
Here’s what you can do:
Stop trying to help them.
Every time you try to READ (Reason with them, Explain yourself, Argue your case, or Defend your thoughts/feelings/opinions) you are just confusing them. Reason doesn’t work for them because nothing in their lives has made sense relationally. And you’re not going to change that through your explanations. They need to experience life on life’s terms because life provides consistent feedback when there is no interference from others.
Don’t do for them what you want them to be able to do for themselves.
If you want them to pick out your birthday gift and schedule a sitter and make reservations, then don’t do it for them. Give them the opportunity to do it. If you treat them like a child, they will remain like a child.
Be prepared to be disappointed and frustrated.
When you start putting the onus on your spouse to do the things they should do, they may not do them. Don’t make it about you by getting upset. Have compassion without doing anything enabling. Allow the natural consequences of their failure to take their course. For example: If they don’t make arrangements for your birthday date or gift, go out with your friends on your birthday instead. Don’t mope around or get upset - keep living life without them.
Resist the temptation to step in to try to reward or punish.
If your spouse doesn’t do what you want them to do, don’t give in to the temptation to punish them by expressing your anger or frustration; but also don’t try to encourage them by pointing out that you believe in them or that they did some things right. This will turn their attention back to an external motivator (you) and detract from their opportunity to look inward. Instead, sit back and observe.
Mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for the possibility that they may not move forward or finish their maturation process.
Some people get stuck and are unable to get unstuck. This is a sad reality, but it is a reality. Begin to consider how (and whether) you will attempt to live in a marriage partnership with a child in an adult body. Keep in mind the effect this will have on your children, on your relationship with Christ, and on your vows (can a child make a vow?).
Ultimately, although you might feel that, if your spouse changes, it will give you hope for your future, it isn’t your spouse changing that will make things better - it’s the changes that you make that release you from unhealthy patterns and relational dynamics. It’s then that you will find that…
Hope is not found in our situation changing; it’s found in our situation….
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