New Life LIVE

Brian Perez: Welcome to the New Life Live podcast. We hope to provide help and hope in your life through God’s word, counselors, and psychologists as we answer questions from listeners who call with the challenges of life. Let’s go to today’s episode. Hello, welcome to New Life Live. I’m your host, Brian Perez. So glad to have you with us today.

In the studio with me, we’ve got licensed marriage and family therapists times two. We’ve got Chris Williams, and we’ve also got Dr. Jackie McKarris. How are you guys doing?

Chris Williams: Hey, good to be here.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Doing well.

Brian Perez: Jackie, what’s on your mind to start us off?

Dr. Jackie McKarris: What’s on my mind is just this idea that I’ve been encountering with people a lot lately. My husband and I were talking about it because of something we’re doing in Bible study at church. He brought up 1 Samuel 18 and 19, the story of Saul and Jonathan and David, and how Saul began to hate on David because David was doing so well. Rather than Saul leveling up, he began to despise David.

I’ve just encountered numerous people who are unhappy in their life and rather than do something personally to change that, they blame others for not pursuing them, considering them, putting them first, or making them a priority. It boggles my mind. I just want to encourage our listeners if you find yourself frustrated in relationship because you feel like you do everything for everybody, but then you look around and nobody’s doing everything for you, then maybe you should take a step back and look at the circumstances you are personally creating.

If it’s in you to be the one that does all the things, great, wonderful, but do that from your heart out of love and generosity because it’s who you are, not because you live in a token society and you want transactional relationships. That’s what we are asking for. I did this for you, or when I’m out and about, I think of you and I would grab that for you. You never do that for me. Well, I’m thinking about me. When you’re on a plane, they tell you to put your mask on first. I cannot be good for you if I am not good for me.

I’m not willing to self-abandon in order to make sure that you feel like I considered you first because a lot of times what we’re asking people to do is to give out of their depleted selves or to do something they don’t want to do, to think about things they don’t think about, in order to make us feel like we are cared for. That means we’ve got work to do. If I need you to do something in order for me to feel loved, where is my God? I’ve misplaced God if I am waiting for you to give me that sense of security and priority.

I just want to encourage people, maybe go to scripture, maybe go to God in prayer, but certainly if you find yourself sitting in frustration because you believe somebody should have considered you, then I want to ask you, when’s the last time you considered you?

Chris Williams: That’s great. That’s a great line because I do believe when we neglect our own needs, that’s when things really start to fall apart. So when we take care of our needs, and it’s a little bit divergent, but I’ve been watching the show *David* on Prime. That got me back into 1 and 2 Samuel. At the end of the day, Samuel got drunk on himself. He lost the narrative and the purpose. The purpose was the thriving of Israel, so he thought the purpose was the thriving of himself as king.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: And then we have so much of that. We’ve got to get back to the purpose beyond ourselves, but we’ve got to take care of ourselves first, for sure.

Brian Perez: I think you meant it was Saul who was getting drunk on himself.

Chris Williams: That’s what I said. What did I say?

Dr. Jackie McKarris: You said Samuel, but we knew you meant Saul.

Chris Williams: No, Samuel was a great prophet. No, Saul, you’re right. It’s easy to confuse because their names sound alike and the name of the book is Samuel.

Brian Perez: Great opening comments from Dr. Jackie McKarris and Chris Williams as well. We are going to go to the calls when we come back from the break. Carrie, you are going to be up first, so if you can just carry over through the break here, we’ll talk to you when we come back here on New Life Live. Thanks for watching and listening.

To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today’s program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live.

Really quick reminder that today is the last day to sign up for the early bird discount for the Rescue online gathering, your first step toward healing. That’s happening on Saturday, August 1st. You can sign up next week or the week after too, but if you want to get a good discount, sign up today at NewLife.com or by calling 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Let’s go to the phones now. Here is Carrie in Colorado Springs. She listens to us on Sirius XM channel 131. Welcome, Carrie, to New Life Live.

Carrie: Thank you.

Brian Perez: Thanks for calling us. What’s going on?

Carrie: I have been estranged from my adult daughter for about two and a half years now. Everything was going great. We were taking trips together, vacations, different things, and then it just stopped. I have tried talking to her, trying to make amends if there was something I did, what I said. Over time, I don’t even think she remembers what happened because when I think, maybe it was this, and I take it to her, she has no clue what I’m talking about.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: That’s a good indicator that you’re trying to solve a problem that’s maybe not yours to solve. You’re picking at like, what did I do? Where did I go wrong? You said two and a half years ago, it all just stopped. You guys didn’t have a conversation, you didn’t have a blowout, she just stopped talking to you completely?

Carrie: It stopped, but she needed my help to take care of her girls when her husband was gone. So she would play this push-pull game with me. She would want to use me. The first time I went there, she just exploded on me out in the middle of the street, screaming at me. I was just like, I’m not sure why. She has a tendency to bring her brother into the conversation, and this has nothing to do with him.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: The first time you went to her house to help her out with her kids after the estrangement is when she blew up on you? In that blowup, did she indicate what was upsetting her?

Carrie: Not really. She just was screaming at me about any and everything. The first thing out of her mouth was, "If you don’t want to be here, just go home."

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Had you said anything when you arrived?

Carrie: I don’t. Maybe I was on edge. I arrived at her house before her, I put my suitcase in the house, and I was getting ready to leave to go pick up her exchange student that she needed me to pick up. And then it just escalated from there. I’m sure I gave her that vibe that I didn’t know, maybe I didn’t want to be there.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Did you just realize that maybe you didn’t want to be there? It’s okay. It is okay. I don’t know if you got to hear my opener, but I was talking about how sometimes we will wait for others to make things good for us. Sometimes we test people. If they loved me, then they would XYZ. Sometimes we feel we’re being tested and we’ll agree to do things we don’t want to do.

I do a lot of work with how we love and so right now it’s making me think of the pleaser. The pleaser agrees to things dishonestly. They say yes to things they really mean to say no to, but some of us have been socialized to believe that saying no is mean, and that if we’re honest about what we want to do and we don’t want to do, if we set boundaries, that we’re being mean and that we aren’t being loving.

But as you’ll eventually learn, one of the most loving things you can do is to be honest and set a boundary. You may not have allowed yourself to even acknowledge that you’d rather say no. I don’t really want to spend my day or weekend or whatever it was doing this, but you also wanted to salvage the relationship and so it became a transaction. If your energy was like, "I don’t really want to do this," she’s grown up with you. She knows that mom. She’s probably got some resentments from childhood that just exploded out of her that day.

Chris Williams: What was the relationship with her brother? Is he older, younger? Do they not get along? How did that get brought up?

Carrie: He’s older and they had a pretty good relationship until he got married and then it all fell apart.

Chris Williams: Carrie, growing up in the home, in your experience with your daughter, did you feel like you had to walk on eggshells around her emotionally?

Carrie: Yes.

Chris Williams: Okay, so she’s always had a higher emotional sensitivity. In that, she may be a highly sensitive person, and that means she feels her emotions at a high level. If I feel them at a five, the highly sensitive person will feel that same emotion at an eight, if we’re doing zero to ten. Her reactions can be as well, but part of what this speaks to is that there’s a lot going on inside of her.

It sounds like she vacillates, meaning she holds very, very high expectations about who should do what, when, where, and how around her. When they don’t, she falls through this trapdoor of disappointment that eventually, if left open long enough, could lead to discouragement or even despair. Rather than dealing with her hard feelings and working through those difficulties, it sounds like she has just retreated.

However, that’s not just a you thing. She’s not going to do that just with you. She’s going to do that with everyone around her. To Jackie’s original point, you may be trying to fix a problem that you don’t have any control over because you’re not the problem. I’m not saying you don’t have things to work on. Like Jackie was saying, if I’m a pleaser, I’ve got to work on learning my boundaries, learning how to say no, so that when I do say yes, it’s a genuine yes.

Being a pleaser myself, I have to work through my experience with anger and build a much healthier relationship to anger instead of constantly avoiding it or pleasing it. But on her side of things, her volatility is hers to take care of. It’s okay if you showed up and you didn’t want to be there. Welcome to life.

Even if she picked up that not only should you be there and do this favor for her, but you should be very glad to do that, that’s a very inaccurate expectation on her part. That’s the thing that you cannot control, Carrie. That’s her work and what she has to do.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: And when our kids launch and go into their life, start their families, get married, things begin to change. There was a season where everything I did, my mom did with me and my mom lived with me. My mom and dad lived with my husband and me. Then one day I was like, I don't really want her to go on this trip.

We weren’t fighting. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but I just didn’t want my mom and my boss on the same cruise. I just didn’t. That had happened a lot and it had always been okay, but I had just reached a point where I wanted to separate some of that. I didn’t want my childhood stories still being told to everyone at every party.

It wasn't that my mother did anything wrong. I adore my mom. We’ve done great work to heal childhood stuff and we are friends, but she’s got her friends and I’ve got mine. She can go and travel and do some things with her friends, and I can go and do some things with mine, and then we do some things together. I would hold out hope for that, that this is just transition. When we don’t know what to do, a lot of us just run the other way.

I wouldn’t close the door, but I would also consider doing your own work because when she was upset at the body language you were giving and your maybe annoyance, that’s okay. There’s maybe some room for you to grow some tolerance for other people’s disappointment, other people’s maybe negative emotions. You had agreed to be there, you were there, you were doing what you had said you would do. You don’t have to do that with a smile on your face or in a happy mood. That’s something she needed.

She needed you to make her feel like you wanted to be there. That would be a conversation: "When have I not made you feel like I wanted to be here, I wanted to be your mom, I wanted to nurture you?" If she’s a vacillator, this could be hundreds of times, it could be something she doesn’t even remember, but you can still always offer the conversation and then you just hold space for her to get it out.

But also don’t put yourself in those situations until you are ready to actually hear her truth, however she’s going to deliver it, because that’s a moment where you’re caring for her, but it could also be hazardous for you as well. I would recommend you taking this to your own therapy and starting to work through it before you start to push your daughter towards doing some reconciliation work. You do work and figure out where am I in all of this? What am I feeling? What am I upset about? What didn’t I like? What do I have to be able to tolerate to be in relationship with her and am I willing to continue to do that?

Brian Perez: I wonder if some of Carrie’s body language, the vibe she was giving off, was just because she was nervous. How is this going to go? And then daughter picked up on that and, "You don’t want to be here, do you?"

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Wait, hold on. I’m just having a reaction. It could be any number of things. You arrive at somebody’s house and you walk in and there’s a lot of stuff in here, or they were like, "Oh, can you do this too?" I wasn’t expecting to do that. That’s a transition, that’s a change. Who knows, traffic could have been bad on the way there. Maybe it was a terrible flight. We don’t know what’s going on in someone’s head, but the daughter had a reaction based on what was going on inside the daughter. She just blamed it on the mom.

Chris Williams: That’s exactly right. I think the other aspect of that, Carrie, when you go into solving her problem for her and she denies she even has a problem, that’s where you just got to be like, okay, how then do I want to show up for myself in this relationship? I know the estrangement is the ultimate pain in the midst of it all, but I do find this, if we play the long game.

Inside of every single one of us is a comfort magnet, meaning that we are going to be drawn to the place of comfort in our life and the place of safety and security. We hope that that’s healthy relationship. That’s our heart and soul here at New Life. But if we are the healthy, safe person, eventually that magnet draws them back. That’s why it’s so important to do our own work. So then you’re healthy and that is attractive.

Brian Perez: What do you think, Carrie?

Carrie: I think you’re spot on, every one of you. I do need to work on me and let her own her own stuff.

Chris Williams: Absolutely.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: You mentioned her brother. She may have some resentment to the brother because he got married and he went on and started his own life. That’s a hard transition. I’m the oldest in my family and I have been accused of abandoning my younger sibling because I left and went to the military at 18. But you weren’t my kid. Like, we were close, but I wasn’t the one responsible for parenting you. So she might have some hurts there too.

Chris Williams: Jackie and I talked about this, and that is the relationship of parent-child changes constantly over the course of an entire life. We usually get stuck in one phase and all of our expectations and patterns stick in that one phase and our relationship never grows up. We’ve got to renegotiate our relationship with our parents and our kids over and over because life changes, the nature of the relationship changes.

Brian Perez: Carrie, thank you so much for calling in today to New Life Live. We’ve got to take a quick break, but when we come back, we’ll talk to Leanne, who is in Philadelphia. You there, Leanne? I think you are. Stay through the break. I think I heard you. Standby, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back with you here on New Life Live.

To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today’s program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live. Hey Leanne in Philadelphia, listening on WBYN. How are you?

Leanne: I’m okay, thank you.

Brian Perez: All right. Hear me?

Leanne: Yes, loud and clear.

Brian Perez: Thanks for calling in today. How can Dr. Jackie McKarris and Chris Williams help you today?

Leanne: My question is more physical, but because it was memory of trauma in my body, muscle memory of trauma. A friend who listens regularly thought it would be worth a try to call and see. She thought maybe EMDR would help. I don't have any idea, but maybe there's some advice as far as how to help a body area heal when there's memory of trauma in that area.

It’s my knee. I had a knee replacement done twice and I have a whole history of it dislocating, starting when I was a child. So it had some really rough experiences. It has a history of muscle memory of trauma and some more recent ones. It was trauma both for my soul as well as my body, but the body is really not responding well. The knee replacement, the second one, improved it some, but it’s growing a whole lot of scar tissue that it doesn’t need, like excessive scar tissue inside the joint.

I think it’s trying to protect itself because of the trauma. It doesn’t want to bend. I know there’s no brain in the knee, but it’s our bodies do try to heal and protect themselves. In the second surgery, the doctor did remove all the extra scar tissue that was in there and there was a lot. But since then, it’s growing a whole lot more, so it doesn’t bend very much. I do work at using the exercises I was taught to use in physical therapy to help keep it from going totally back to straight, so that it does bend a little rather than not.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Leanne, you mentioned EMDR. I think that that would be helpful for you to process your trauma history. I also think you need a somatic practitioner, a therapist that specializes in working with how trauma is acting out in the body.

Leanne: Could you repeat the kind of therapy and maybe spell it?

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Somatic is S-O-M-A-T-I-C.

Leanne: So it’s a type of physical therapy?

Dr. Jackie McKarris: No, it’s a type of psychological therapy. You would see a counselor, a psychologist, marriage and family therapist, one of us, but you would want someone who specializes in somatic experiencing and they could help you work with what is happening in your body and help you to be able to release some of what is ailing you.

You said the knee doesn’t have a brain, but the brain is connected to all the parts of the body. In a way, it does. You’re right to say that the knee is trying to protect itself. That is what scar tissue is. This is a vulnerable area. Once you damage the skin, that area is never the same again. It’s been compromised. So now this scar tissue is thicker because it’s trying to keep from that happening again.

I think you’re absolutely right about your body is just doing what it’s meant to do and the brain remembers trauma and so it’s probably making it worse than it needs to be for the surgery because of how much trauma you’ve had and maybe continue to live in or with. Getting with a therapist that can work with you somatically, I think, is important.

Chris Williams: Yeah, because if we understand that more on the practical level, it’s that pain is protected by fear. I always say this, if you follow the trailhead of fear, it’s always going to show you the source of pain. But also pain gets trapped by fear, meaning it can’t as long as the fear is in the way, you can’t get to the core pain and heal it out.

Now here is where it activates psychologically, is that fear tells stories. It tells a story that your knee can never be better. You can’t trust your knee. Your knee has caused you so much pain and ailment in your life that you should never utilize or put your knee at vulnerability or compromise. So you can’t do anything with your knee, or that your knee’s never going to get better and it’s never going to.

That is all fear-driven narrative that keeps the pain trapped. That narrative is based on experience, so it becomes really, really strong. That’s why EMDR, that’s why somatic experiencing, that’s why even maybe psychodrama, some of these other therapies that address what’s happening in our body can be very helpful because if they can resolve the fear and change the story, the pain also changes. We see it over and over and over again. Your brain believes what you tell it and your brain is telling your knee it’s not safe. You’re probably even walking in a way that favors it and pain is reinforced by that. That’s a story. We don't want to say it's not real. It's very real, but you've got to change the story. And it's even harder because you have true injury.

Leanne: I have a lot to think about. I appreciate that input and I wrote down the somatic therapy.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: I would recommend *Take Your Life Back* too. I think she could get something out of getting in a group with other people.

Brian Perez: Very good. *Take Your Life Back* is a book available in the NewLife.com store. We’ve also got a course coming up in just a few weeks. Every day we hear from people all over the world who are looking for hope. They’ve been lost in a relationship struggle, addiction, anxiety, depression, all kinds of ways. Wouldn’t you love to be part of a rescue team? Don’t miss your opportunity to be part of something that changes lives every single day, because every one matters.

Your generosity helps find them. And we’ve seen God work in the lives of so many people over the years here at New Life, and we want to invite you to be part of what God is doing. 99 For The 1 is our partner program that you can give to the ministry on a monthly basis to make sure that we continue to reach out to the lost. Call 1-800-NEW-LIFE, 1-800-639-5433 or NewLife.com/99for1. Join the mission, rescue the one and restore the many.

To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today’s program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live. Brian Perez here, along with Dr. Jackie McKarris and Chris Williams. Grace, you’re going to be up next, but first let me tell you guys about Life Recovery. It isn’t just for people struggling with drugs and alcohol. It’s for everyone.

If you are struggling with drugs and alcohol, we can help you with that through Life Recovery. But it might be overeating, sex addiction, codependency, anxiety, issues with boundaries, lying, people pleasing. Life Recovery is for all of these things. Life Recovery is a 12-step program based on a set of biblical principles in addiction treatment that outline a course of action to tackle problems. And we all have problems in life.

You can find out more at NewLife.com or by calling us at 1-800-NEW-LIFE. There are groups that meet in person, there are groups that meet online. Find the group or groups that’s best for you when you contact us at New Life. Back to the phones now. Here is Grace in Huntington Beach. Welcome to New Life Live and thanks for listening on the New Life app. How are you today, Grace?

Grace: Good morning. Yes, I’m calling regarding, I got your guys’ app notification and so I wrote a little summary on my little notebook on my phone. I don’t really know my question, but these are the feelings I’m wrestling with. I’ve gone through so much and I know what doesn’t kill you in life makes you stronger. I’ve always had my hand in ministry and God has blessed me with a lot of different opportunities. I got a BA in youth ministry and I went up north to a school up there. While I was there, it was a small neighborhood college which now has become a bigger university. From there, I got involved in urban youth because I didn’t have a car, so I got involved with a ministry there.

They wanted to hire me, but I felt God calling me back to Orange County. Bart Campolo came to our school at the time and he introduced us to a ministry where you live and work in the inner city. I thought this would be a great way for me to test the waters, so I did that and I went and lived in Georgia and did inner city there. I absolutely loved it and they wanted to hire me. I had three job offers at two different schools as well as my church. I prayed and fasted on that, but I still felt called to go back to Orange County.

I let go of those opportunities and I went back to California not knowing what I was letting go of and why I was coming back. I moved back home, which was an adjustment, but I did that temporarily. I got hired at the Crystal Cathedral where I was born and raised and they hired me as urban outreach director and an assistant youth pastor. It was not really inner city and my dad’s knocking me over the head. He’s like, "They’re offering you a package that I’m almost retiring with, and you’re just starting out. You need money in order to help people, so take and run with this."

I got enough money to buy my first Jeep Wrangler and anyway, I'm trying to fast forward my story. On the way to a counselor before I went to work, I ended up getting into a severe car accident. A delivery truck wasn't watching the way he was going and he was speeding and he work the intersection and he should have killed me. God was treating me like a cat and he gave me nine lives. I had a torn aorta main artery in your heart. The doctors said that they never seen an aorta torn as bad as mine. It was hanging by a thread.

He told my family only one out of three make it alive to the hospital and the majority never come out. We don't know how this kid survived. I was in the hospital for six months and three different hospitals. I broke all the ribs on my left side. On top of that, I had a brain injury and paralyzed vocal cords, so me telling you the story is a miracle. I couldn't talk for three months and even though I know some sign language, if you come to visit me, you’re not going to know what I’m saying. I just carried a notebook everywhere I went and wrote.

Long story long is I’ve now been married and I was always praying for a marriage and ministry, doing something like what you guys are doing. Anyway, I got a master’s degree in pastoral care and counseling and as I was married and had a kid who’s now 12, but I started to see signs of abuse. You don’t recognize things when you’re in them. I didn’t marry a drug addict, I didn’t marry these things so I just didn’t.

Brian Perez: This is abuse from your husband to you or to your child?

Grace: To me. Anyway, I got connected with Leslie Vernick and her support group and helped me. In August last year, I ended up getting really, really sick and I had to go back to the hospital and I was in the hospital for 40 days. There I found an attorney. Two weeks after I came home, I had to file a restraining order. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I always say I’d rather go through all the medical stuff I’ve gone through than what I’m going through now.

I don’t really know what my question is, but my feelings are what I’m wrestling with. Why is everything I do so hard? I feel like everything I’m doing is falling apart and I know Job wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I just want to make sure that I’m not.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: Grace, it sounds like you did all the right things and didn’t get the reward in the end that they promised you. You were the good girl, you went to the good school, you did all the ministry stuff, you are following after God’s heart, you got married, now you’re a mom, you’ve been loving and serving in urban ministry, serving the less fortunate and marginalized and it’s not necessarily gone well. It seems like you’ve given up some opportunities and chosen the harder route. And the question is why, but the answer to your why is inside of you.

Each one of those steps you took was a choice and it sounds like you chose because you genuinely wanted to do good in the world.

Grace: Now I’m struggling just to make ends meet and now my daughter’s gone to Calvary Chapel all her life and my husband struggled to keep her there and I told him it’s okay we can live less and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, now we have two. Now I’ve kicked him out and I feel horrible about that. But I’m like, okay, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make her be able to stay at private school and I want to public school my whole life, I was always a public school teacher, it’s okay.

Chris Williams: Grace, that’s just it. If I do the right things, life works out for me. I did all of the right things and it’s not worked out for me. That’s the way life is. Period. When we live with this expectation, that goes back to an exchange economy again. It’s a token economy. God, I did all of these right things, you have to do it right for me. And unfortunately you were socialized to believe that was truth and that was just not.

One thing that your story is very clear to me on, you never trusted you. Grace, you spent a long time telling us your backstory. You spent a long time justifying why this stuff shouldn’t happen to you and why you’re such a good person and made all the right decisions. You need a lot more space than what we can provide you on this call. You need space to tell your story to see the wisdom and the lack thereof and new directions in your life.

Grace: I tried so hard to find a counselor and it seems—

Chris Williams: Let us help you out with that because right now there is what I call a lot of victim energy inside of you that’s keeping you trapped. I want you to be empowered. Empowered in Christ, empowered in this because right now you’re looking for the solution outside of yourself and it does not exist. God has placed something inside of you that he wants to work out of you and I think that this is a good time of life to do a reset. When it hasn’t worked to this point in time the way I have been doing it, so I’m going to start looking for solutions in a different way. I need a reset.

Brian Perez: Please stay on hold and we’ll find someone there in your area. Talk to the school because if you explain your circumstances to them, they might be able to offer a scholarship for your daughter. Thanks so much for calling in today. We’ll be back on New Life Live.

To find out more information about New Life or to order any of the resources mentioned on today’s program, call 1-800-NEW-LIFE. Now back to New Life Live. Brian Perez here along with Dr. Jackie McKarris and Chris Williams. Please keep Grace in your prayers if you’re watching and listening right now. You can also support New Life financially. You pray for our listeners, you can pray for us as well. But you can also support us financially, either with a one-time gift or you can become one of our 99 For The 1 partners, those are the monthly supporters of this ministry. We thank you so much for whatever you can do here for New Life.

Back to the phones now. Here is Shirley in Bloomington, Illinois. Hi there, Shirley. Thanks for calling New Life Live.

Shirley: First of all, I would like to say I’m very thankful and I feel blessed that you took my call.

Brian Perez: Well, we’re thankful and blessed that you called us, Shirley.

Shirley: Okay, I’ll try to be quick. I am a blended spouse of a blended family. We’ve been married almost 42 years. Took us a long time to get it right. Thank God, it’s much better now. I have a challenge. My husband has not always had a phone that he could use the internet on. He never used to be interested in it. He is now, but he uses that phone so much. I would just like to know how I could draw him back without being a nag, without sounding bossy.

Brian Perez: What are you doing now?

Shirley: Well, we always have devotions every evening and I’m thrilled that we have because they’ve drawn us very close. And so when it comes to devotion time, it used to be it was a certain time that you just knew it was time to stop what you were doing and put it away and open the Bible. And so now he doesn’t. And I say, "You know what? If we don’t get our Bible reading done, we’re not going to have much time to watch any TV." And we’re not TV watchers, we watch part of a show each night. And so then I tried that, that don’t work. Then another time I said, "What if you decide a time, we’ll set aside that time that we just put our phones up?" Well, that hasn’t worked either.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: I’m going to invite you to maybe invite him to some other things. When it’s time to do devotion, what if you just said, "Hey babe, it’s devotion time," and got started? Now if you’re reading together and you guys are having a conversation, he can’t be on his phone while you guys are having a conversation. I think one of the problems might be is that he gets on the phone even though you guys are doing something. You’re reading, he should be reading too, but he’s using his phone.

But he’s grown, so you’re still going to do your devotion and you’re still going to invite him to the devotion and you’re going to ask him questions about what you guys are reading. Engage him in conversation. Don’t focus so much on the phone because now the phone is getting too much attention from both of you. So you’re going to focus on him. He’s found something on his phone that is very interesting to him. You’re not able to compete with that, so stop trying to compete with whatever it is and start trying to enjoy his time and energy and focus when you guys are together.

Chris Williams: I would take a little bit different slant on that. I’m not going to compete against something I don’t need to compete against. But I also want to shift the way you’re going at it because the way you’re going at it is like you’re either making suggestions for him or telling him what he’s doing wrong. I don’t think either one of those things are going to be helpful. The most powerful thing you can do is tell him the impact it has on you.

I want you to invite him into your experience. And so what that looks and sounds like is, "Husband, when you’re on the phone and I want to spend this time together, I feel like I matter less. I don’t feel connected to you and I just want to feel connected to you." And so therefore we start these setting boundaries around that. When we’re doing devotions and we’re talking through all of this, I need your engagement. So if the phone could be put away or I need the phone put away while we engage in that.

I say all this because embarrassingly enough, Shirley, I’m your husband and this is exactly what my wife had to do with me and say, "Chris, if you’re buried in your phone, I feel like you’re not interested in me." And I’m like, "Whoa, that’s not what I want." And so as similar to Jackie, I talk all day and I can veg out on my phone and my sports stuff, that’s fine, but that doesn’t preclude me from needing to be engaged with my family. Technology can work both ways. I could get lost in it in an addictive cycle or I can use it to set boundaries.

Dr. Jackie McKarris: People don’t realize that we’re getting dopamine from the phone. So you’re getting a hit of this hormone that makes you feel good. And that’s what he’s after. Help him to understand what you are experiencing. Not blaming him, not accusing him, but, "Hey, when you’re on your phone and not engaged with me so often, it just makes me feel like you’re not interested and that’s lonely for me." Also, think of the comfort circle. Using that comfort circle tool to talk about it, so it’s not directed at this person as being bad, but, "Hey, when this is going on, I feel these things and this is what it does in my body."

Brian Perez: Shirley, thanks for calling us today. And you know what, call us back. We’d love to hear how this worked out for you. God bless you guys. We’ll see you at church on Sunday and we’ll talk to you again on Monday here on New Life Live.