Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.

Roger Marsh: Well welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Roger Marsh. Question for you: when you’re angry with your spouse, what do you do with that anger? Do you let it out right away? Do you hold it in? Most of us have been told that it’s healthier just to get it all out, but is that really true?

On today’s edition of Family Talk, we’re going to revisit one of Doctor’s classic conversations with the late Jean Lush, a gifted counselor, family therapist, and a frequent guest as I mentioned here on Family Talk. Jean challenges the popular idea that venting anger is always the healthiest choice. Instead, she offers a biblical, practical approach to handling conflict in marriage before it does lasting damage. Here now is Dr. James Dobson to introduce his dear friend, Jean Lush, on today’s edition of Family Talk.

Dr. James Dobson: I have the privilege today of letting our listeners hear from a friend who’s already gone. She’s in heaven. Her name was Jean Lush, and she was a gifted counselor and family therapist. I had her on the program many times. What a great lady she was. She had such wisdom and such insight into family life.

She authored many books, including Mothers and Sons and Women in Stress. I had her on the program, as I said, many times. Today, we’re going to roll back the clock to the 1980s when Jean and I talked about the subject diffusing anger in marriage. It’s still good stuff after all those years, and I’m anxious for our friends to hear it.

Let me just start with this question. In the late 60s and early 70s, all the schools of psychology, certainly all the secular schools of psychology and most of the counseling programs, were telling people that stored anger becomes hate. Therefore, never store it, ventilate it. If you feel angry, lash out at the other person.

Counseling programs were designed where they taught people to hit each other with what they called encounter bats, which were foamy-like things. Slam the fist on the table and scream and curse and say mean things about your parents and so on. We came through a whole era of that. I never bought it. I know you never bought it, but that was the psychology of the 70s. Where are we now? How do you see anger and when should it find expression?

Jean Lush: I could never buy it because I very quickly found that it escalates itself into a vicious cycle that went on and on, because I think the more anger we’re going to express in a way that attacks another, the more it’ll generate. Now, I feel that we have to find ways of expressing anger so it literally goes into the ground. Do you see what I mean? That doesn’t become destructive to another person.

I feel that many marriages are destroyed through these very theories. Too many people have come and gone through this in their marriages, and then we find that love goes out of the door when there’s a great deal of anger constantly expressed.

Dr. James Dobson: If I could make an analogy, I think the psychologists of the early 60s thought of anger as a quantity. Let’s say you have 10 ounces of anger. So let’s open the valve and let’s release 10 ounces of anger and let it run into the ground, and then you will have zero anger.

But instead, the process of releasing that anger produced 20 ounces of anger. In other words, the very process of ventilating and of expressing it to the other person and screaming and doing all that you do to let it go builds additional hostility and conflict, so it’s not really a ventilation at all.

Jean Lush: No, it isn’t. And a marriage cannot afford that because I’ve always felt that the love in a marriage has got to be guarded very carefully. So I just don’t think that great love can stand too much anger. It can stand some, but the trouble with anger is it escalates until it becomes destructive, and in no time it does.

Because when one person expresses it, the other is only waiting their turn to hit back with more anger. So it begins something that eventually people who once had great love for each other wake up one morning and find it’s simply gone because it’s really, really been destroyed.

Dr. James Dobson: All right, I’ll play devil’s advocate with you. I’m a woman. I worked three hours fixing a meal for my husband, and I had candles on the table, and I fixed the favorite thing that he wanted, and he knew I was doing this. And he came walking in an hour and a half late. It was cold. The evening was ruined. I feel that he’s disrespected me. He could have at least picked up the phone and called me, and I am white-hot with anger when he walks in. How can I keep from feeling that way? And if I feel that way, shouldn’t I jolly well tell him about it?

Jean Lush: I don’t think you can keep from feeling that way, but when it comes to jolly well letting it out, then I’m going to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Let’s see what we can do about this." Perhaps it would be better to wait and think it over a little bit. Because if we do it right away—okay, so we’ll take that point—the brute has disregarded all our feelings and I don’t feel loved here. All right, when he walks in at that time, our tension is high, isn't it? And we’re going to really let him have it. But the trouble is at the height of the tension, we’re going to bring something else in. So this is the kind of thing that we will do.

Dr. James Dobson: What do you mean? You’ll remind him of the last time he did something?

Jean Lush: Right. And I might say to him, "Well, this isn’t the first time that’s happened." Then in no time I’m saying, "You always do this to me. In fact, I remember right back in our honeymoon, you don’t care about the way I feel." You see, in no time when you start in while at the height of the tension, you’re going to bring in a lot of other things.

Dr. James Dobson: You build a case.

Jean Lush: You build a case, and in no time there are accusations hurled. All right, now supposing now I want to really guard my marriage. I am feeling mad. Now, I might decide at that time not to say anything until I’ve had a chance to think this over, because I don’t want this to happen again, but I don’t want to have a row right now.

All right, now the first thing that I might do now perhaps is to call up a very close—supposing I have a very trusted close friend. This is by the way what I call debriefing. This is one thing. We could meet a friend. I remember such a friend calling me up once many years ago about a situation where she was feeling mad about the whole family had really walked out on her. She had reason to be mad over this.

But instead of having it out with the family, she called me first and we sat down just for an hour and a half, and she talked over the situation. Now, the time she talked it over, the tensions were being loosened. They were flowing out. When the tensions now in a sense were let go, she was able to think of a good solution.

The time she got around that was a few days later, and the solution really worked. That was sitting the whole family down and explaining logically what had happened to have made her feel. Now, she might say something like this, not "You don’t care how I feel." It’s "I had a problem with the way things went last weekend. I found that everybody went out and I was left to do the full brunt of the work, and that isn’t really the way a family can run." But when we have let some of the tensions out, then I think we can rationally handle the actual problem itself without all that build-up of tension. We’re not likely to go back and call up all kinds of accusations.

Dr. James Dobson: Now you’re not suggesting that a woman keep to herself and to her friends her anger over a situation like that, but that she ventilate first to a good friend and then confront the issue when she’s under better control?

Jean Lush: Some of the time. Now I’m not saying always. This just happened and it worked beautifully because now this is a very dear, special close friend.

Dr. James Dobson: Your advice is controversial, isn't it? I’m not sure that I know anyone else who is saying when you’re angry, don’t blow it off, wait a bit.

Jean Lush: Very controversial here. Can I go back to when I first learned this lesson? This was a crisis in my life. As I said, I came from a fantastically wonderful home and now I’m going to tell you something kind of very special. I received a letter from my mother, and it was a letter which upset me because it was criticizing everything that I was doing, moaning about the kids' behavior. Two of my children were awfully lively when they were kids, and they were hard-going. Sometimes I used to feel very hopeless about it, and I was having a hard time.

But I got a letter from mother, and it was just the most discouraging letter. Everything it seemed like I was doing was very wrong. Now, I was dreadfully upset by the letter, and in no time I got angry, really angry about what was said in that letter because some of it wasn't even true to the facts. All right, do I get on the phone and call mother up and go for her as it were and tell her the way I'm feeling?

Well, I'd begun to walk with the Lord in such a way that I knew the Lord didn't want me to do that. I went next door to my friend who was doing the washing, and I said, "Please, can you stop? I have to talk to you for a few minutes." I talked it over. She didn't say anything back at all; she's a very wise girl. She didn't say anything, she just let me talk to her for a few minutes.

So I began to wait, and I particularly read Psalm 37. That really's a good woman's psalm because it says "Wait a bit." It says and so I decided that I would not answer my mother at all. I would just wait until the Lord's time to deal with that. Mind you, I was still feeling very hurt and very angry and I think I had every right probably to have called her up and told her how I feel.

By the way, at the height of how I felt, I said, "This is it, I will never see my mother again." You get those feelings when you're first angry. Man can you do damage when you're first angry. So luckily it was the Lord that held me from doing that. All right, I waited a little bit, and suddenly a sister said to me, "Oh dear, mother is fretting. Mother says she wrote a letter to you and she's sure you'll be very angry." Well, I didn't do anymore. Soon mother called and she said, "I’d like to come down and talk to you." Now, this is what happened.

Mother had had some very great strains coming from other members of the family at that time. Mother didn't know how to handle it. Me being a little stronger, mother saw me as stronger than the others, so guess what? She took it out on me. But it had nothing to do with the facts. When mother explained what the facts really were and how badly she was feeling, to this day, I can only thank the Lord for keeping me from responding to my mother in anger.

I have never forgotten that. So I can honestly say I do try to wait on the Lord about this business of anger. Over and over in my life, I'm so glad that God has held me from responding to the anger that I feel.

Dr. James Dobson: You could have picked up the phone and said things that would be remembered till her dying day and yours.

Jean Lush: And do you know that mother was having a heart attack. Mother had did have a bad heart, and it wasn't long after that she had to go back into the hospital for a rest. Can you imagine how I'd feel today if I had called up and told mother off for the pretty hard things that she had said? But the Lord stopped it.

Slowly I debriefed that. And look, another thing, the longer you take over thinking about it brings healing. Time does bring healing when we’re angry over something or with somebody. It’s always wise to wait a bit because I don’t think we’re necessarily storing up anything that’s going to hurt us, especially if we deal with it properly.

Dr. James Dobson: As a matter of fact, it’s been discouraging to me to not be able to remember the details of what I was so angry over a few weeks ago. Have you ever gone back and said with your wife, "You remember that fight we had? What was that again? What had you done?" And your partner says, "Well, I don’t remember, but boy I was sure mad." All of that is grey except for the highlights or the lowlights. The most significant moments, it’s all a blur. It’s the contradiction between the intensity of feelings at the moment and the insignificance of things just a few weeks past.

Jean Lush: Now there’s another thing that I think. Is it okay for me to refer to another experience? It seems to me I learn by these experiences. Now, this experience happened I think about the same time as the one with my mother. This was an occasion in which another Christian friend was involved, and we had been very, very close. All of a sudden, that friend felt that she had to tell me something about another member of my family that hurt me very much.

And I was terribly, terribly angry. I never remembered at any time in my life feeling so angry with a friend that I had never had a cross word with up to this time. Because I think that our immediate response of anger builds up a tension, and the tension is striving toward discharge. Now, at that point, the kind of discharge is often destructive because we sort of get discharged at that point of anger by hurting somebody.

Now, this happened on a Friday night, and I think my husband was at the time away preaching, so I had no one to talk it over with. I was alone with my children at the time. I found next door, I was so disturbed by the anger that I was feeling that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I was like a driven animal in a cage trying this, trying that, and feeling vengeance and hate and all the negative feelings that you can imagine was going through my mind.

By Sunday, I sent all the kids off early to Sunday school. I knew that I had to—I couldn’t touch my Bible at the time I felt so angry. But I decided now that I would explore the verses in the Bible, everything I could find about anger in the Bible. I particularly found parts that mean of let’s see, is it the 13th of Hebrews, 12th chapter of Romans, Psalm 37? Many passages now here that talked about if anger gets a hold, it becomes a root of bitterness and hurts other people.

I also learned that vengeance was mine, saith the Lord, and there were many passages on how you wait on the Lord. Now, at that time, I had no real teaching that taught me how to handle that anger. So I got down on my knees and I said, "All right, Lord, I will do everything in your word that you’ve said to do." And of course, I found plenty of instructions. Wait on the Lord, return good for evil, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

It suddenly dawned on me, now I released my right to have that anger to the Lord. On my knees I said, "All right, Lord, I give it to you. I can’t help the way I feel, but I give you the resolution of this. I won’t do anything now. I'm not going to do a thing. I'm going to give it over to you." Now, that was about on a Sunday. I was able to continue my work that day.

It was so interesting because Monday I found I did quite a lot of work. I still felt pretty mad, but it was ebbing. It was ebbing, and I had a feeling the Lord was going to undertake. Now, a very strange thing happened. When that girl got home, her husband said, "What'd you go all the way up to Jean's for?" And she said, "Oh, I thought she really ought to know about these things that go on, the kind of rumors."

He said to her, "You little fool," is what he said. "Those things are not true." He told her then how they came. There was no truth in what the girl had believed. He said, "I’m so upset with you for doing that. You better get on that phone, you better get a hold of her." Now, the strange part was, never had I been so angry with anybody in my life as I was at that time. By the Tuesday night when my friend called and she said, "Oh, how can I ever put this right? I find now what I said to you wasn't true."

But the funny thing was I said, "Oh, forget it. Just not bother with it." But the Lord had done that. By releasing my anger to the Lord, the Lord truly took it out. We went on with our work tremendously and it was gone.

Dr. James Dobson: Absolutely.

Jean Lush: This is for the Christian.

Dr. James Dobson: Jean, let’s talk about other things for the Christian and the non-Christian. I suppose this would work in both contexts. But not only can you ventilate anger by talking to a friend and waiting, what about exercise as a debriefing or a reduction of tension?

Jean Lush: I call that diffusing. There comes a time when we’re really mad and we’re feeling kind of vicious with all the tension that we can really translate that into action. This is the time to clean the basement out, clean the garage out, go prune those prickly roses, go dig the garden. When I’m with groups and dealing with this, it’s fun to hear the different ways.

Women know how to diffuse very often, and the things they say, a lot of them of course say they just go shopping. They walk round and round until some of this has ebbed out. Women have learned many ways I think already to deal with this. Debriefing I call more talking it out or doing something creative. A woman may play the piano.

By the way, I don’t despise listening to TV either at this time. I think often we vicariously identify with characters on the TV that may be doing something aggressive. It’s almost like we transfer our anger harmlessly to somebody else who’s acting it out for us. So I sometimes think that TV has some uses, a very great use there.

I think men who watching the sports and the cops and robbers, have you ever watched a man watching sport? He leaves his seat, he sometimes jumped into the air, and you can see men diffusing as they watch sports. They are clenching their fists, they're moving with it. You see, they are literally letting go tensions built up during the day vicariously sometimes as they watch healthy competitive aggression in others.

Dr. James Dobson: We know men are more aggressive than women, generally speaking. That’s a generalization, but that tends to be true. Are women more or less angry than men?

Jean Lush: Now, that’s a difficult one for me to even guess at. I think that women have a longer time lag over a lot of things than men do. Like a man can make up his mind and the funny part is his emotions tend to come quickly in behind the decision. But I think with often the woman makes a decision but the emotions don’t come into line that fast. I’ve often called it there’s an emotional time lag that operates I think with women.

Dr. James Dobson: I’ll probably get chewed up for saying this, but it’s happened before, so I’ll cope with it. I don’t know whether men or women have a greater anger. I don’t know in which sex there’s the greatest anger. But I do firmly believe that there is more anger at the mate on the part of women than there is on the part of men.

I believe women are more angry at their husbands than their husbands are at their wives. Husband’s anger may be directed at his boss or his competitor or someone outside the home. But when it comes into the domestic situation, it seems to me what a man most wants from his home is tranquility. He wants to come home to a tranquil home. He wants the kids under control, he wants them clean, he wants the house reasonably straight, and he wants the washing machine working, and he wants his wife happy. And often he comes home instead to a very angry wife.

Jean Lush: Yes, I think I’m going to go along with that too. I think that often women hold over perhaps anger a little longer. As I’ve watched people getting over affairs particularly, I’ve seen sometimes men deal with it faster than women and put it behind them. Where women take a long time perhaps to get over the same kind of hurt in their mate. So maybe I would really go along with that.

Dr. James Dobson: Let me try to summarize what you’ve been saying and you tell me whether I’ve done it correctly. Your message in essence is that instead of doing what your impulse first tells you to do, which is to pull up every dirty, nasty, mean thing you can think of and hurl it in anger at your partner when he has offended you or she has offended you, you are suggesting that they take a few moments or maybe a day or two to work through that anger and then come back to that person and deal with the issue. You are not saying they should ignore the issue and let it be accumulated.

Jean Lush: No, I’m not at all. I am saying though it needs time. Look, I think hurling anger again is a luxury you can’t afford in a marriage. Oh yes, it brings immediate catharsis perhaps, but you’re going to have something bitter there to deal with that goes on and on and on. So it does not pay in the long run.

I feel that people have got to regard love as a tender, fragile thing that has to be guarded all the time, and it can’t handle anger, or very little of it, is the way I feel about it now. I don’t think love is a tough eternal thing at all between a man and a woman. This is why I say, "Hey, husband and wife, be careful how you use your anger." Above all things, your marriage isn’t the place to vent all that anger, even though your other spouse has upset you. That’s the way I feel about it very strongly.

Dr. James Dobson: Jean, thanks for being our guest again.

Roger Marsh: Anger doesn’t have to win, and Jean Lush’s wisdom reminds us that guarding our marriages sometimes means guarding our tongues first. You’ve been listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk featuring a conversation with Dr. Dobson and his friend, Jean Lush.

Both Jean and Dr. James Dobson have gone on to be with the Lord, but thanks to the wonders of technology, we are able to not only hear this program again, but also to archive it for you. So if you’d like to share it with someone who needs this kind of encouragement, just go to jdfi.org and you’ll find today’s program. You’ll also find information there about Jean Lush’s landmark book called Women and Stress. Again for information about the book as well as the audio presentation, go to jdfi.org.

The work of bringing biblical truth into homes all across America is a mission worth investing in. Every day, programs like the one you just heard reach husbands and wives and parents and families who are searching for wisdom they can actually use. The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute exists to preserve and promote the institution of the family and the biblical principles upon which it is based.

To share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible, to stand firm for the sanctity of human life, God-honoring sexuality, and religious freedom. But that work doesn’t happen without the generosity of listeners just like you. So if today’s program was meaningful to you, if it was helpful to you, we invite you to partner with us. You can make a secure donation to offer your support when you go to jdfi.net.

You can also call a member of our constituent care team and you can handle that transaction over the phone when you dial 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. Or if you’d like to write to us, our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, or you can use those initials JDFI for short. PO Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80949.

I’m Roger Marsh, and from all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.