I’m Shawn Maguire and this is a new vision counseling.live podcast, a place where we help you discover what better looks like for you, and then equipped with the tools to create it. You know, today we’re going to talk about and episode number 38 the biggest mistake in marriage and how to fix it. The biggest mistake in marriage and how to fix it now, we could have picked a lot of things. What’s the biggest mistake? Well, really there’s a lot of big mistakes that you can make in marriage. This is one of the biggest that I’ve seen over the 25 plus years in Edmond, Oklahoma City, and even my days when I was in Florida of helping people through Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City, through relationship counseling, even premarital counseling, and that is to make your spouse, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, the enemy, the adversary, the villain, the Warren who you’re fighting against.
It’s the exact opposite of what God would have you do. You know, I remember in the beginning stages of my own relationship with my wife, Tana, when we first got married and north of Oklahoma City, I really felt like man, when things started to go south, she wasn’t for me and it really did feel like she was my adversary and she was out to get me and didn’t support me. And then I’m looking back. She reacted the same way that she didn’t feel like I was for her. She didn’t feel like that I was had her best interests at heart or I was fighting for her highest good and we went back and forth and that’s the liberal related. Even though I’m a Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City counselor and I’ve been a marriage counselor and I’ve read all these books, it really still had that big of an impact on the relationship because I was in it.
And so I think wherever you’re listening to this today, whether you’re my neighbor and Edmond, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Florida, Paradise in Hawaii, I know this message will be really impactful to you. If you take to heart and you focus on how God can impact you and don’t let your attention be drawn to your spouse or the person you’re in a relationship with. Stay focused on God and changing you and how it, what I’m saying can impact the way that you relate the way that you think, the way that you feel. Because that really at the end of the day is the only person that you can’t control. So one of the things I’m going to go over is really four big areas that we miss it and making our, our spouse or the person that we are in a relationship with or enemy or adversary is one we focused on who is right versus who is wrong.
The focused on, you know, I’m right, you’re wrong. I see this play out probably at least every other day at a high level, in every day at some level that I’m seeing patients, you know, we have, we all have this need at some level that we want to be right. We want to be. We want to be vindicated for the actions we take for the things that we believe in. The way that we think. We all have this at some level, but not all of us will die on a hill fighting to be right. You know what I mean? There are those people that we know, they captain always right. There’s so hard to be around. They’re so hard to be in a relationship with, or even some are so extreme like especially to the narcissistic level, the hardy even be around, even if you’re not in a relationship with them because they’re the best at everything.
They’re right about everything. They’re an expert at everything and you may think I’m using hyperbole, but that’s just because you’ve never been on my side of the counseling arena and all the Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City sessions, I’ve been in the thousands of them with a different individual sessions I’ve been in. There really are those people that they live here and being right as the apex. It’s the primal goal of their life in all situations is to be right and they can’t be wrong. So somebody has to be wrong, and unfortunately when you’re mayor just focused on that, everything eventually begins to unravel because if somebody is always right, then that means somebody is always in a lower position being put down as being wrong, and that just leads to more fights, more arguments, bitterness. Even if you have this passive spouse, the person who is aggressive or assertive, the passive spouse is going to develop some level, even if it’s on an unconscious level of bitterness.
And a lot of times that comes out through headaches, through hair loss, there’s stomach problems through an anxiety, through depression. I could list a list of a hundred things that I’ve seen people suffer from an individual counseling while I’m doing Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City with them as well because of the way their spouse have them relate. You know what? The second way, second biggest mistake under making your spouse the enemy is the focus becomes winning the argument in defeating your spouse. So winning the argument, one way you win an argument is to defeat your spouse and you guys think about it. If there’s a winter, if there’s a winner, there’s always a what? There’s always a loser. And I didn’t say wiener is not a hot dog bun. No. If there is a winner, there is always a loser and I’m not sure about you, but I do not like being in a situation where somebody makes me feel like a loser or I don’t like to lose.
Even if even if they’re not trying to make me feel like there’s, or I don’t like the feeling of loss. I don’t like to lose, especially when I make effort to win. So when I first got married, I can argue very well. I’m articulate, I think rapidly on my feet and my wife is more of a processor. She’s more bent towards an introvert. And so when we were getting into discussions it would not be fair. And so we would argue and I feel like I was right. That’s why we had arguing and she felt like she was right, but she would only be able to argue to a point and then she’d shut down and just get angry and say one word or do some gesture or walk off and then be passive aggressive for the rest of the time until we resolved the issue.
What I didn’t realize is that I was causing a situation because of the unfair advantage I have of is my ability to speak well and articulate rapidly where my wife was never really able to have a discussion with me and and really engage me because I would just shut her down verbally, didn’t know that, didn’t know that. I just, we both just were young and our relationship and we didn’t know that we were doing this to each other. We just felt like the other person wasn’t for us, so just know if there’s a winner, there’s always a loser. Another area that a lot of married couples pro wrestling get into. This doesn’t happen as much when you’re dating because you have this thing called oxytocin really blinding your brain or it really immersing your brain, anesthetizing your brain with all these feel good chemicals that also has an agent of blindness with these endorphins associated with it because when there was a blank to be filled in about your, about your future spouse or somebody you’re dating because you want to be with him, your reticular activating system, which is your brains looking around in the environment to bring in what you’re focused on and when you’re dating somebody, you’re focused on wanting to be with that person and you’re focused on this person could solve all my problems.
This person that could make me feel like Jerry Maguire, my long lost brother said, you complete me. It’s going to fill in the blanks with good things with, with Oh, you’re going to give them the benefit of doubt. They were late because they must have had something really big come up. That was really important because they would never disrespect me like that, but when you get married, you look at your spouse, you’re like, you made us late again to church. You’re the reason why the kids are late to school every day because you don’t get them up on time because you don’t feed them breakfast because you don’t make them do their chores the night before so their clothes aren’t out and it’s a chaos in the morning, whatever the case may be. When you start to blame your spouse, it creates animosity. When you, when you focus on blaming your spouse, then instead of looking in a mirror, you’re looking at a micro through a microscope and the more you look through the microscope and the fine details, the more problems that you’re going to see, the more areas that you’re going to be negative towards your spouse about.
It just creates a culture of blame, creates a culture of toxicity or it’s hard to thrive. It’s hard to grow love and a culture of blame. Another one under there making your spouse the advert. The enemy is we focus on content. We really get into the weeds of the problem. We really get into, you know, you said this, I can’t tell you how many times thousands and thousands of times in Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City. Eben, Oklahoma, when I was in Tulsa when I was in Florida, just no matter where I’ve counseled, I’ve heard this same thing come up. Well, you said that you were going to be home at seven or you said that you’re going to come pick me up or you said that you felt like that was a disaster. You said that you and then this other, the spouse will reframing. They’ll say, well, that’s not what I meant.
What I meant was I felt was it was a disaster because your, your father in law came in drunk. I didn’t say it was a disaster because we were late because of this and instead of believing the person who’s the source of the information, your spouse, because you focused on the content of what was said, the content trumps the authority, which is that person. He said it, who is trying to communicate to you their beliefs about what they meant and you’re so focused on the content, you missed the heart of each other of what’s trying to be king of what you’re trying to communicate effectively. Now, as you listen to all these podcasts, I know there’s several. If you’re in an abusive relationship, I want to be really clear. A lot of what I share is not going to be as relevant. It will be relevant, but it won’t be relevant in all the deep ways that it’s relevant to most other people that are not in abusive relationships.
Because if you have a spouse that wants to annihilate your soul as a narcissist or a borderline or somebody that’s bipolar, then that’s different because they are truly an enemy to you. It’s a fact. It’s not like we’re making it up. You’re not just using hyperbole. So I just want to be clear. I just felt I needed to qualify. What I’m telling you, that there are marriages where your spouse really is your enemy because of how they treat you because of what they believe about you. And for those of you in that situation, I recommend you go to your pastor, you go to a close friend that’s wise or really I’d really recommend my number one is his contact us or contact whoever you trust that is a counseling source today. Like as soon as you’re done listening to this podcast counts, contact them today because for you, the spouse is the enemy and you should focus on some of that content because the way they treat you, it’s still wrong.
And it’s so mean. And because they, you know what I’m explaining it, the source of the person, their heart isn’t bad towards you. And so you want to get the understanding. But there are those of you in relationships today where the heart is bad towards you and you need to do something about it. So there’s my encouragement to you today that I know somebody that’s listening to this needed to hear that. Or maybe you have a friend that needs to hear that. Please share this podcast with them and encourage them to get help because God, he hates divorce, but God also hates abuse. And so I’m not saying I am not saying I am what I am not saying divorce your spouse. Don’t hear that, but I’m just saying God hates abuse. Very simply, God hates abuse. God hates abuse. I’d hate to abuse, but God loves you and so he wants to bring you to a position of living out of that love and getting away from that abuse, whatever your next first step is through Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City.
All right, so we’ve went over the four things and I think they’re great. Now we’re going to go over the well. All right, we’re out of time. We’re going to be at a time soon. So I’m going to do this in part two. So this is podcast 38 [inaudible] 39 we’re going to go over the solutions. What are the antidotes to these four biggest mistakes? You know, the big mistake is making your spouse the villain. And then I gave you four ways that we do that. Four ways we fight for ways that we do that in. The first was focusing on who was right and he was wrong. The second is winning. The argument becomes about defeating your spouse. The third is your spouses to blame. The fourth is he focused on the content instead of something else. He fucked really getting into the weeds and you don’t allow room to hear the heart of what each other meant and their communication with you.
And that’s a real, real big challenge for a lot of people. So guys, we’ve talked about this, the biggest mistake in marriage today and next time we’re going to talk about how to fix it. Hope this was amazingly helpful and maybe you have a friend we talked about earlier that you want to share this with. Go ahead, share it. If you subscribe to this podcast, then you’ll get these every time I do them, you’ll get one and it’ll be right there waiting for you to access something. That would mean a lot to me is if you Google Review and division counseling.live because what that does is it spreads the word that people can change through counseling, that people can change through inviting people and new information and resources into their life that God can sit them day by day decision by decision free. And your story on Google, really, really, I can tell you some personal experience has encouraged so many people by what God’s done in your life.
It’s part of proclaiming the Gospel is we’re called to share the goodness of God through what he’s done through other people, through what he’s done in our own lives. And that would mean a lot to me because our mission at New Vision counseling is to help you discover what better looks like for you and then equip you with the tools to create it. So if you need to contact us today, go to Nivision counseling.live and we will start this journey where we have a team of Christian counselors that Mary Biblical truth with cutting edge counseling techniques to join you and your story today. Take care. And I’ll look forward to speaking with you again really, really soon.