How to Save Your Marriage From Virus Lockdown Stress—Interview With Kimberly Holmes | Crossroads

🎵 Welcome back everyone. Now with the virus lockdowns and a lot of people working from home, one of the issues we've seen come up is that marriages are having a lot of tensions and not just marriages, but relationships in general. Now, one of the narratives being put up by some mainstream news outlets right now is that divorce is actually beneficial to children and other narratives along those lines, which for those of you who've been reading the media for decades now, this is a very strange shift. Now here to talk with us is Kimberly Holm. She's CEO of Marriage Helper and Kimberly, it's a real pleasure to have you on Crossroads. Thank you so much, Josh. I'm so excited to be with you today. So first off, this new narrative coming out, actually encouraging people to get divorced and claiming that divorce actually helps kids. As someone who works in this field, I mean, what were your thoughts when you saw these stories? My first thought when I first saw one of these articles back several months ago, I read it and the feeling in the pit of my stomach, I felt nauseous to be completely honest because I just knew all of the data that I have read from the research I did in my master's and from what I'm doing in my PhD work. And I just, I know the statistics that divorce is not the solution for children for the best outcome, right? Here's what we know when we look at the data. We know that best thing that can happen for children is that their parents are able to work through their issues, work through conflict and stay together. The worst thing that could happen for a child is that their parents end up divorcing and still end up having issues. So they still end up fighting. They still end up not getting along. And the majority of the time, that is what ends up happening when people divorce. And so when I first saw these articles in these different mainstream media outlets and read them and how they were just talking about this being the solution for parents who were overwhelmed, that now with a COVID divorce, you can have two weeks completely to yourself. You can take, you have all the self-care you want, get massages, sleep in, you can focus 100% on your work. And then you'll have two weeks to be a completely present parent. And you can do things with your kids and spend all your time with them. And this is the new way that you can live your life. But when we look at how this actually affects children in the long-term, we know that children need both of their parents together. We know children need to see their parents work through things. We know that that's what they need in order to have healthy relationships in their future and even to be successful in their future. So the change in this narrative and how it's being promoted, how divorce is now being promoted as the first option is mind-blowing to me. I wanna get into a few issues with you. There's one thing I'm curious about is someone who talks to couples and talks to people who've gone through divorce and researches this. There is this narrative that people are happier afterwards. I mean, is that really the case? How does it actually affect people that you've seen? Because we hear different stories on this. You know, for many of the people that we work with, I will say, yes, there is a short-term happiness that people feel. Because whenever someone leaves a situation where there is a higher stress, where they're not communicating well, where maybe they're not happy and they haven't been happy for a couple of months or maybe even years, then as soon as someone removes themselves from that situation, there's gonna be a period of, now I can breathe. Now I'm happy again. Now things are good. But that's until reality sets in. And so with the couple that we, or many of the couples that we work with and that we see, there's one couple in particular, I will call them Joe and Penny. And when I first met them and they came to Marriage Helper, Joe actually was wanting to save the marriage, but his wife Penny was wanting out. She had actually fallen in love with another man. And they had four children at the time. And so she divorced, she ended up divorcing her husband and went to be with this other man. And for that first year, it was bliss. I mean, she would say, it was everything I thought it would be, all of these things, until the feelings started to fade away, which they will, they do. And when those feelings started to fade away, Penny realized that she had given up her family. She had given up her kids and her husband. And now not only was she not happy anymore, she had become a person that she didn't even recognize anymore. So she went back to her husband, asked if he would forgive her, take her back, to which he did. They remarried. She had actually gotten pregnant with the other man's child and her husband still forgave her. He still took her back. The other man ended up not even wanting to be involved, didn't even wanna be a parent to this child. This couple got remarried after divorcing. We were able to help them do that. They now have a beautiful family with five children. And she will be the first to tell you, she will be the first to say, I was chasing something that I thought I wanted. And I thought it was that moment in that time of I would finally be happy, but it didn't end up doing for me what I thought it would. Because what actually ended up making me happy was staying committed to my family, to my children, and building a strong family for us to have that will leave a legacy for generations to come. And so how do you think her children now see what marriage is? When they see how they came back together, the dad was forgiving of the mom. They did what it took to make it work and to put it back together. Those children, when they grew up and get married, when they face hardships, they now are gonna have a different story in their minds of what they can do and how this can turn out as opposed to if the parents had just divorced and stayed divorced. And I love stories like that. Well, and this is interesting because you mentioned that the feelings do fade. And sometimes when people are led by feelings, they don't think outside of the box of those feelings and find themselves in situations they may not have anticipated because they acted on those feelings. Yes. But of course, there's the other one, which is right now you have a lot of people, new forms of stress, whether it's politics, whether it's virus lockdowns. I think 45% of couples around that in America are saying that they're having a lot more marriage stress because of the virus. I'm curious, what are you seeing with how the virus is affecting things in these lockdowns? The virus is a symptom of some larger problems. So yes, it has added a layer of stress to our lives. So have financial issues that have come up because of it. So have the political issues, the riots, the now that there are a lot of conversations happening, that even with a lot of couples are finding themselves that they disagree on some of these political issues that had never come up before. So then questions are coming up of how do we, how do we work through this? Or how do I stay married to someone when we see things so differently? Or how can we make this work when both of us are so stressed? But all of those things, Josh, are really just symptoms of some underlying foundational issues that have already been present in the marriage. We know from research that couples typically divorce because of one of three reasons. Either they don't feel liked, loved, or respected. And when we're in a relationship where we feel like either the person doesn't like us, and so they don't wanna be around us. And this is especially magnified when we're stuck at home 24 seven. Because if I don't feel liked and I can't escape that, I can't have my normal routine, going to work, the gym, all those things I used to do, now I'm reminded of this all the time. Or maybe I don't feel loved. My husband and I, or my, you know, for a husband, my wife and I, he might be saying, we aren't connecting the way we used to, or we don't feel respected. This is a huge one. There's a misnomer I believe that people have said for the past decade or two, that men need respect and women need love. But the truth of the matter is, both of us need both of those things. I wanna feel respected and loved. My husband wants to feel respected and loved. And we have to have that mutual respect in our relationships. And that mutual respect looks like listening to each other. It looks like putting each other's feelings, thinking about each other's feelings before we act, or before we say certain things. Doing things and acting in ways that is gonna show your spouse that you see them as your equal, instead of maybe saying things like, I can't believe you would think that, or how in the world could you vote for that person? Or, right? Like all of those things might be things that a lot of married people are saying to each other right now, but it's communicating a message of, I don't see you as equal to me, and I don't respect you. I see you as lesser than me. And when those behaviors infiltrate our relationship on a day-to-day basis, then that's what ends up causing the problems. But we can go back to, am I showing my spouse that I like them, I love them, and I respect them? And a lot of things can be solved by simply focusing on those three things. Well, you know, this is actually very interesting, because we can look at the virus as the cause of these issues, and we can look at all the new tensions people have, whether it's not having work, and worrying about paying rent, and financial problems because of that. We can look at that as being the cause of these problems, but you're actually saying something different. You're saying that, no, it's bringing out issues that were already actually there, and maybe having to face those issues when you're in that environment is the challenge. What hurdles do you see people usually having in facing this? You seem to suggest people tend to run away from it, typically, but now they're forced to be together 24-7 in some cases because of the lockdowns, and they have to face that, and I assume you're seeing different outcomes because of it. What, I guess, is one thing, how do people usually cope with this, and how has this environment changed that coping mechanism? Well, when individuals experience stress, we have a couple of reactions to it. We either want to, as you said, we wanna run away from it. We want to handle it, tackle it, make a plan so that we can kind of control it, or it may just debilitate some people where they don't even know what to do. And so we see this in marriage. It can play out very similarly, where if we see our spouse as the threat in our lives, if we see that they have become the one who's stopping us from being happy, or stopping us from chasing our goals, or achieving the goals that we have, or anything like that, then we may start to either turn away from our spouse, or turn against our spouse, instead of what we need to do, which is turning towards our spouse. What I believe needs to happen, and what research shows us as well, and we can even see this when we look back at the past year, when we don't ignore the problems, or try and sweep them under the rug, but turn towards them, and really try and work together to overcome things, that is where the beauty happens. That is where you get to that strong relationship. When you just try and sweep things under the rug, it's going to lead to resentment. If you try and ignore things, it's going to pile up, and one day it's gonna get so heavy that you're going to explode. You can't keep that that long. So if someone is unhappy in their relationship, and it's being just completely exponentially made worse because of the events of the past year, then I would encourage people not to stuff that down, which is what a lot of people try and do. I would also not recommend that people use that as an excuse to just do whatever they want to do, to act however they want to act. We've got to find that happy medium of being able to turn towards our partner and say, I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I need you, here's what I need from you, let's get through this together. That's what needs to happen. Now, I assume, of course, people typically come to you not when they're happy and things are wonderful, they probably come to you a lot when things are the opposite. Now, I'm curious, what are some of the cases you've seen with people facing situations where they think that it can't be fixed, that maybe the conversation is broken down and there is that lack of love and lack of respect and lack of trust? How have you seen people bounce back, I guess, from situations like that? And how common is it for them to be able to fix things when they're at that level? A lot of the couples that come to us, they are at that spot of typically where it's only one spouse at that point who is willing to work on the marriage, and even that spouse is very hopeless because either a counselor or a pastor or their friends or family has simply said, just do, you just need to do what's gonna make you happy. You just need to divorce and move on. And so this person typically comes to us very heartbroken, very hopeless. And what we encourage that person to do is to begin by working on themselves. Because in order for a marriage to be saved, yes, eventually it does need to take two people, but to start with, it really only takes one person to begin to start to do some things differently. You see, there's actually a process to falling in love. And if you follow the process, then you can fall in love. And if you vacate or violate the process or stop following the process, then you can fall out of love, even if you don't mean to. And with a lot of the couples that we work with, what we find is they have stopped doing the things that lead for love to flourish, and they have started doing the things that start really pulling them away from each other. And so we teach people the first thing that you can do, the first part of this love for you to start with is the part of attraction. But attraction isn't just about how muscular someone is, how skinny someone is, that's superficial. Real attraction has to do with four areas. And we view it this way, the physical attraction, intellectual attraction, emotional attraction, and spiritual attraction. We call it the pies of attraction because it's easy to remember. And so what we encourage people to do, one of the first things they can begin to do when they feel like their marriage has lost hope, all of these things, is we remind them, you can't control what your spouse is doing or not doing right now. The only thing that you can control is you, your actions, your reactions, and what you choose to do. So start by becoming the best that you can be in all of these areas, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. And I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The most important of those four areas of attraction when it comes to a long-lasting marriage is the emotional attraction. Because emotional attraction asks the question, am I evoking emotions within my spouse that they enjoy feeling? And when we look at it, it is. And a lot of people, when they hear that, they say, oh my goodness, I already know some things I need to change. Just by asking that one question. They start seeing it differently. They start seeing themselves in a different light and how they're influencing the relationship. And so they begin doing things that are gonna evoke emotions, more emotions in their spouse that they will hopefully need to enjoy feeling. And it's amazing that when people start focusing on even just this, working on their pies and working on that emotional attraction in particular, it can have an amazing change in the marital satisfaction as well. So we encourage people, you work on your pies to become the best you can be for you, first and foremost. You do it because it's the best thing you can do for you. As a secondary benefit, if anything works to attract your spouse to you again or to attract your spouse back to you, then this is going to help that happen. And we see it happen time and time again. That's very interesting. Now, I say the other issue is people having kind of short-term thinking of, I know a lot of people think, even the media is saying right now that divorce is actually good for families and such. And I mean, growing up as a kid, my parents were divorced and I remember how hard it was. I think any kid who had family, parents who were divorced, you know what it feels like, right? And it's a very traumatic experience for most people. And the big issue we have with that is actually the side effect, which is oftentimes fatherlessness, where a lot of fathers are no longer present. I guess, first off, how prevalent is fatherlessness from divorce and what are some of the impacts you see from that? When we look at the research of how fathers stay interacting with their children after divorce, it's astounding that one research study said that after a year of parents being divorced, that 50% of fathers no longer had contact with their children. And 10 years later, 64% of children no longer had contact with their fathers. And so it is a lot. And some of the reasons for that could be if the father remarries, then it really becomes that difficult situation of now he's gonna be building a new family and the mother of the child from the first marriage doesn't like that and they might still have conflict of their own that they're not working out. And so it tends to become the easier, although not the most beneficial solution, that the two families just kind of go their own ways. But Joshua, in answering your question of how does this impact people, this losing the relationship with their father, I mean, we can look at the research, right? And see the numbers and the data and the statistics. But I would like to tell you a story of actually my own family. So my parents, they got married in the late 1960s and they divorced and they had two kids at that time, my two older sisters. And they ended up divorcing in the early 1980s because my dad believed that he could be happier with someone else outside of the marriage to my mother. And so they divorced and they were divorced for three years. And in that three years, my dad would still see my two older sisters every other weekend, but every other weekend for three years in the grand scheme of that time is such a small percentage of time. And so he would tell you himself that in that three years, he became a person that ultimately he didn't like anymore. He didn't know anymore. He was chasing that feeling, those good feelings, but in that long-term realization of it, he realized what he was chasing wasn't real. What he was chasing was a lie. It wasn't what society and media and all of those things said that it would be. It was not fulfilling. He ultimately went back to my mother and asked if she would marry him again. And everyone in her life said, don't do it. You can't trust him. You're happier now. Why would you do it? But my mom asked herself one thing. Is my husband, his name is Joe, that's my dad. Is Joe a good person who is doing a bad thing and has done a bad thing? Or is he a bad person who has done a bad thing? And she said, I knew he was a good person who had done some bad things, but I believed that it was the right thing to do for us to try and make this work again. They didn't love each other when they got remarried, but they were so committed to trying to make it work and especially to try and make it work for the two daughters that they had at the time that they did remarry and they figured out how to fall in love again. And it's from their story that they said, how can we help other people not go through all that we went through? Because there was, there was heartbreak, there was pain. And after they got remarried, they had me as a celebration of their second marriage. So I owe my life to the fact that two people who were divorced, who had everything against them, decided to do the right thing and put the family back together. But the other interesting part of this is that I have two sisters who have experienced divorce. And there's me who has never experienced the divorce of my parents. And the differences that we have in our lives. So when we're looking at how divorce affects kids, my middle sister in particular, so my oldest sister is mentally handicapped. So she doesn't completely understand all of the things that happened in the same way. But my middle sister is, of course they have repaired the relationship with my dad. She's repaired the relationship with my dad. We are a very close family. We love each other very much, but she still suffers to this day. And that was 35 years ago. She suffers to this day with feelings of abandonment, fearing rejection. She, I mean, and she still suffers and deals with the pain that she experienced from when she was seven to 10 years old when my parents divorced. And he was there every other weekend, but you can't take all of the things that the child feels during the time that their parents are divorced and say that it's not gonna affect them when they're older, because it does. There's a huge difference between my sister and I. You know, you mentioned two common themes with some of these stories. And it's interesting because it's not something I've really heard people talk about before, which is in both of these stories, you talk about people who after getting a divorce and wanting it and thinking they could be happier, look at themselves a few years down the road and don't like what they've become, that they feel they've turned into a different person and they don't like what they see. What is that change that people, I assume you've talked to people who've had that, what is the change they saw in themselves and what didn't they like about it? Typically, when we start looking at the psychology of what's happening, so I'm gonna geek out just a little bit for you. But typically what happens is when a person is trying to justify something that they're doing, then one of two things has to happen. Because we're driven by our beliefs and our values. So if I'm doing something that goes against what I believe to be right or to be good, then I'm either gonna have to change what I believe or I'm gonna have to change what I do. So in the instance of my father, who wanted to go off and be with another woman, he changed his belief because he wasn't about to change his action. He didn't wanna stop having that relationship. So instead he changed the belief to say, I'm gonna be happier, this is gonna be good. Here's all the reasons I'm gonna justify what I'm doing. But see, when people change their beliefs, which are very core of who we are, our beliefs are deep seated within us. And if I were to change my beliefs that quickly, then over time, I'm gonna be able to justify it for a little while, but there's gonna come a time where I'm gonna enter into what's called cognitive dissonance in the social sciences. Where basically I'm not gonna be able to keep these two things separate forever. Eventually they're gonna touch and I'm gonna have to either change myself or I'm gonna have to change what I'm doing. And so a lot of times people justify it. So to what you're saying, people justify what they're doing, saying that they're happier and it can last for a short period of time. But there will come a point where they're going to realize that they have changed so much about themselves that they don't know who they are anymore. And that's when they get to make the decision. Do I continue down what I'm currently doing? Or can I go back and repair what I've done and go back to the person that I used to be? And that is typically where people hit a fear point in saying and feeling like what they've done is so insurmountable that they could never go back. That people wouldn't forgive them. That they don't even know how to face that situation again or face those people again. And so that's what we see. How people cope with it is for a period of time, they're psychologically trying to cope with it. But there's gonna come a time where they have to make some decisions. And what can really help in this situation when people get to that point, the people like my dad who get to that point and they're saying, what have I done? The best thing that can happen is that they have people around them who are willing to forgive, willing to bring them back into the family and willing to move forward without holding what they've done, who they used to be over their head and moving forward to see a vision of what things can be going forward. You know, this is super interesting. I'm like thinking while you're talking. It's kind of what St. Augustine mentioned in his confessions and what Aristotle talked about in his ethics, which is basically that, and I'm just thinking about that. If you have your values, typically you view what you do or don't like in the world and in society based on your values. If you don't like something, it's because it goes against your values typically. But if you yourself start acting against your values, it's only natural that you'll start to dislike yourself and what you've become. You know, it's, I can't remember if it was St. Augustine or Aristotle who said it, but it's like a soul does a disservice to itself. A soul harms itself when it starts down that path. And this is profound stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. Yes, it is. And what's even more interesting, if we want to use that word, or maybe the better word is what's even more encouraging is that we have been able to see in the work that we've done at Marriage Helper, this happened with thousands of couples where there's been maybe one spouse, maybe both spouses who have done things that have gone against their values where they've wondered, could I ever be forgiven? Could I ever go back to who I used to be? And we've been able to see those marriages restored time and time again. When society would say, just keep doing what feels good. Just keep chasing that next passion. Just keep doing what makes you happy in the moment. And those are the things that have broken down societies. If I'm only gonna think about myself, if I'm only gonna think about what's making me happy in the moment, first of all, I don't even know what totally makes me happy in a moment, right? Cause it's gonna change today from yesterday. It's gonna be different tomorrow. And if I'm chasing a fleeting feeling, there's no way to build strong relationships and on top of that, it is a very selfish and self-centered perspective because I'm not taking into account how my actions and the things that I'm desiring are affecting those that I love around me. So it definitely is a shift in, I mean, society has shifted this way and we see it in many different ways. But the fact that this shift is now affecting marriages and how people are viewing marriages is something I believe we need to put the true narrative out there about and really get society to shift towards realizing that it's not about just focusing on all of my wants and needs, but seeing how I play to be a part of the bigger picture in creating a strong society. Now, when it comes to people fixing things that are broken to about as broken as you can possibly get, it seems, it's interesting hearing stories about people coming back from that. It seems that there's a common formula. There's the spouse coming back and asking for forgiveness, basically, the other spouse being willing to forgive and then the working together to fix things. What is the model you've seen for working together to fix things? You know, I think people can hear that saying, well, we have to be willing to work together to fix things. And it sounds like there comes a point where both people are totally on board, where they're both totally in, totally willing, and actually it doesn't really look like that. Typically, at least with the people we have seen, there's still a little bit of hesitancy or even a lot of hesitancy of saying, they're saying, I wanna make this work, but I don't see how. And so there's a lot that goes into play for that. One of the first things is that we encourage people to bring up the issues that caused all of this to begin with. This is one of the things we talked about at the beginning of this episode. What we've been trying to sweep under the rug for so long were just symptoms of bigger core issues that were happening. And so we at Marriage Helper, we subscribe to the belief that you don't just stuff those things down. Eventually they have to be dealt with, but dealt with in a way where you're not attacking each other, where you're not trying to change your spouse or manipulate your spouse or hold things over your spouse, but instead dealing with things in a way where you're saying, let's see what happened and let's make a plan for how we can work together to make our marriage stronger so that these things don't happen again. So let's look at, we know that some of the first things that can break down in a relationship are communication, where couples can begin fighting more and specifically when they fight, if they do one of four things, it dramatically will increase the likelihood that they will divorce. Things like being defensive, blaming, being contemptuous towards each other, being critical of the other person, or even ignoring their spouse. Those are typical behaviors that people have when they fight where when those start happening in a marriage, it's bad, we need to stop those things. So even when we're looking at getting back together, we're saying, okay, how do you in your relationship stop even just these four things? How do you understand each other's personalities and differences in the way that each of you are wired differently so that you understand how to approach each other and communicate in a way where both of you will feel heard? How do you make sure that you're dealing with anger in a healthy way? How do you make sure that you're making dreams for each other? It actually goes back to the love path that I talked about just a minute ago. I said, it starts with attraction, but once your spouse and you are attracted towards your spouse, your spouse is attracted towards you, the next three steps of the love path are acceptance, where you accept your spouse for who he or she is and your spouse accepts you for who you are, even if you don't necessarily agree with everything that your spouse has done or everything that your spouse thinks or everything that your spouse believes. Acceptance is basically saying, I value you, I love you and I see you for who you are and I'm not gonna try and change you in order for you to feel like I love you. I'm gonna accept you even if I disagree. The next step after that is attachment and in attachment, what we're really saying there is, I'm gonna be here for you when you need me, physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, I will be here for you, period. And then in aspirations, which is the fourth part of the love path and the one that most couples never get to, is saying, what are the dreams that we're gonna have together? Because life wants to pull couples apart, jobs, kids, stress, everything wants to pull us apart and when couples don't have a vision and a dream for something they can do together, that will keep pulling them back together, then it can be difficult to move forward because they feel like they're just running a race that they don't even know where the end line is, they don't know where they're headed, but when you have a vision for what you can do together, it can really pull you together. So that is a path that people can take in order to fix things and be stronger than they were before. Great, hey, Kimberly Holmes, it's been a real pleasure having you on Crossroads. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Josh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.