Discovering Your Love Style (Part 1 of 2)

Until we understand the route with attachment and we started working at the brew and I took ownership of that of waiter part of me and he took ownership of the pleaser and we begin to individually work on our sanctification in that way. Iron sharpens iron, so one man chirped his mother so we talk to each other better years how we scared each other. Mylan NK your cribbage describing how you can discover your love style and there with us today on Focus on the Family, your host is focused president Dr. Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller okay the first thing makes you chuckle to think about what your love the rivers. For those of us old enough to think of the love boat or something, but your lifestyle is really important and you know just like so many personality traits that we possess each of us have a love style. We talk to your chap about your love language and today we want to talk about those things that are both positive and not so positive the terrier relationship apart and this is a really encouraging discussion think we have ahead of us is so if you're in which feeling like kind of a ho-hum marriage. I think you get some good tools to really take it little deeper and and to have greater intimacy of the your cribbage is to have written extensively about this concept of love style and the book that will be talking about today.

Most specifically, is how we love discover your love style and enhance your marriage Mylan Kate welcome back to front, I think you are glad to be here. Let's start right there.

You first I wanted asked that question for that fairly newly married couple, but I think it applies to all of us, I mean Jean and I've been married almost 30 years and this kind of information is still very relevant and helpful to us, and I'm assuming even a couple married 50 years will benefit, but when you're looking at the years of gone by EE.

It would've been so great to have this kind of discussion or to know about this information 20 years ago. You know the first report 10 years of our marriage. So let's talk about those styles that you discovered and how we love talk about the five that you expressed to couples to help them communicate better first secure attachment style is a person that has a decent sense of self that they're worthy of someone doing something for them and they can go and ask for help. They tend to see relationships as a place that they want to get relief through some of the people in this world don't go to relationship for relief.

They go to substances addictions to make those uncomfortable feelings go away and if we look at the person of Christ.

He could give to people he could receive he could say what he needed.

He could ask for help.

He was the secure attachment. He's our model is what secure attachment looks like. I think we don't really appreciate that only a few of us would have an experience at our homes that would cause us to look like that as as adolescents and adults in your book you talk about how our childhood really does form the Zada is in and behaviors in us and then we see that, I mean, that's one of the things that we see here Focus on the Family so often and how do we begin to arrest and understand that well. I think the first thing we have to learn is that early experience K is what really sets us up for future expectations and Wheeler had that secure attachment only had one that wasn't quite as secure. I don't think people really understand how important those formative years really are.

We take everything in those first two years of our life and a nonverbal way. We don't have words yet so were taking and facial expressions and voice tones and their building implicit memories which are something that we remember and a feeling state in our body.

There sort of wordless memories.

We actually remember them for our entire lives that they are remembered in the estate of feelings in response to other people and sell in the first two years of life, those of the implicit memories that date there with us for the rest of our lives and I was talking to a young man this week and he just had a new baby and he couldn't tolerate her crying. I mean, he literally went through the roof and we began to talk and he says I don't understand.

My response was we begin to look at his own history when he was to he had a baby brother born that never stopped crying for two years. He was so difficult and I said can you imagine the feeling that you're having in your body is almost like something you would feel the two-year-old when you just wanted to hold your ears and scream and he started weeping and he said he never thought of that but he said my mom told me that I used to go hide in the closet. So these are the power of these early memories and we do, we don't always know how they impact us later in life. So the secure connector is working ahead, but these broken lifestyles, things that we often don't even remember, so there so normal to asked that we don't even know are doing okay let me press you will share because folks that are listening our thinking psychology, sure, no. Does that really count the number two-year-old at the point the Lord can work out let out talk about that blend from the outset here because so often, you know, in the Christian community can be critical of science is really what the Christian belief system does prove what scientists are discovering.

We have an outstanding as Christians about what scientists are looking at as we believe in the creator were believers order in the universe and those kinds of things but talk about that junction for the skeptic right now it's hearing is going. This is psychobabble well we we may not like science until we need a heart bypass and sign me up because it really hurts right now, but really all this is is observing how the mind should be developed. We don't think of parents as brain shapers, but there truly shaping the brain of the child in the early experiences God invented this. This is about God's invention of attachment. The human being has the longest attachment.

Of all the mammals on the planet and God created this extensive period of time were a child would be looked at with this lit up mom and the child would respond back and so there's a strong sense of togetherness that is built very early on not just in her left brain which is our cognitive reasoning in the right brain of feeling states. It feels comfortable to be next to you or feels uncomfortable to be annexed to so really all science is done is they've observed God's creation of attachment and names have made studies to say what has gone really well and when it doesn't go so well. What are the ramifications in a person's mind and then that leads us to many things. Of course, in the whole department of sin and brokenness, but one of the things it leads us to were these broken or wounded attachment stocks.

Now we talked about that that secure attachment.

Let's talk about the others that are coming out of the pain.

In fact, vasodilator is another one talk about is a later Levesque leader is a person who came from a home where perhaps they had intermittent connection with her parents intermittent connection.

Meaning I see you give you attention and then all of a sudden I pulled away from you and love gone dark gone dark because I and attentive on preoccupied myself as a parent I am busy I am have my own issues of where I cannot see you because on preoccupied with something else.

So the child never knows, or if I have an addiction or in fighting with the spouse is white. I've been the child feels alone then the parent re-engages with them at a time unpredictable to the child and the child feels this ambivalence from the parent and ambivalence of I don't know when I'm in a be connected with, but they tend to value connection at a very high value and that becomes her primary desire is to have intense connection that never goes away. So when they grow up and enter into relationship the enter into relationship with a very high expectation and hope of a connection that will never feel as though it's going away or will stop or will cease will be intermittent and so they have a intense desire for perpetual connection when their spouse averts their gaze turns their back is busy. They get very agitated on the inside than they get angry at the spouse for somehow abandoning them know they don't use the word abandon. They just say I don't like how it feeling right now and you made me feel that way. And so they get angry there. The protesters that say why did you do that.

Why did you make me feel this way so they are the love-hate hot cold in out on off spouses bright dark in the moments check, like the weather here in Colorado Springs. Maybe, maybe on a on a sunny day in the summer were it's a beautiful day. Then all of a sudden the clouds come over and is dark and this would be the best leader imprints also in the literature called the ambivalent or preoccupied because I'm in and out on and off and I am preoccupied because I'm always thinking about what's Jim thinking of me right now. Does he appreciate me to value me doesn't want to be with me does not want to be with me. He gave John a big hug.

These are my thoughts all the time you jot out your heart, and he gave me so maybe like John better and so this preoccupation of relation and their hypervigilant, always watching.

Okay so that's the vasodilator JEE right in the book your own personal story of being the avoid arrest.

So as an expert in that kind of never ending avoiding what is avoid or well eyelid for 15 years that with this lifestyle.

Not really realizing that my family didn't really bond on any emotional level. When I was growing up my parents let me we had nice dinners at my house, but we never had any personal conversations. And if I had a feeling if I was sad my dad said you better stop crying. I'm going to give you some to cry about famous famous how I go to your room and tell you have your happy face and my mom just got highly anxious, so there was this under lying message of feelings are something we don't do feelings are something that we dismiss feelings or something. We don't move into. We are always trying to fix them and move away from them and so I got very good at. First of all just not showing my feelings and over time, not even really knowing what they were. So if you asking of weight or how they are, they really only have one answer fine yeah and I can't say that wasn't true.

I sort of existed in this like very midline kind of level where I was never very happy and I was never very sad to steady, steady, and a lot of people marry of waiters because were very predictable and were very steady and what people don't realize until you see they Mary asked is that we don't really have any range of motion. We really can't connect on an emotional level. I don't have memories of comfort from my childhood where parent really noticed I was, not doing well and sought out to kind of understand what's deep in my heart and so I couldn't describe what was deep in my heart. I had no words for internal experiences and it was just a place that I never developed and I didn't realize until the 15 year mark that when you want to close the smile and I really didn't know what you are talking about. This is just a foreign concept to me and a lot of people think they're of waiters spouses are holding out on them.

You know what I want you just won't give it to me and honestly of waiters don't even know what they feel they don't know how to comfort you. They don't know how to have empathy when what was it like being married to me like you as the Raven asked that well.

It was hard to feel like I could capture you or that I could pull you into a place that I could feel as though there was something substantive and meaningful.

I appreciate the point Cape May because a lot of times we person is married to an avoid or would believe that they are just holding out the truly K did not have the words to be able to describe how she felt.

She is no longer and avoided. By the way, and I am happy to announce that part-time night. She is she's a recovered tortoise which is now that secure attachment that was nice and ethical will for everybody's thoughts stay in these wounded states it's to move out of that and I would have to say that it is your distance from me was something that talked a little bit later, but it was a very thing that trigger my childhood. Her distancing so that's was a part of the change that is your wound is I was my visit and see if you let me ask you about that because it's intriguing to me, and in part I'm always asking. Are these mechanisms that God provides us for a period of time to cope with our environment, and I don't know because we talk about them in positive and negative context, but for me I I would probably lean like UK toward the avoid or because my childhood I was taught. Okay, I had your bucket. That would be a class yeah so I mean one of Jean's things would be that you know I struggle being emotionally attached to her in certain ways and I'm mindful of that but the difficulty and that is always thing the Lord the circumstances that I was in did was at a protection mechanism.

Yes, I all these are protective mechanisms and they work and my family. It was way more comfortable not to show my feelings and was way more comfortable.

The few times I did cry I went to my room. I went on a walk. I always moved away from people. When I was sat, or when a feeling would be too much to handle, and keep down in a course I did that in my marriage for the first 15 years. He never saw me cry.

So yes, as a child are very protective that they become so automatic we don't even know what's animating us as an adult, and so I had to learn to develop a vocabulary for feelings I had to learn to go back and repair places where I just didn't develop an one of the huge things for me as an avoid it was to learn to take a feeling word list and to refer to it often so that I could start to have a more of a knowledge about what do I feel because feelings linked to needs. You gotta fill it in from the cave you go to our website and you go to freebies. There's a list document. They are called stalwarts, and it's also in our block.

It's just a list of words that are feelings that describe what's inside of samples of my goodness.

Sad, jealous, betrayed, humiliated, abandoned and ashamed of these things that we literally have a list and you'll say to my when I'm feeling this and point to it are fine now. I can identify because, but for two years I had that list in my journal I had it in my Bible.

I had it in my car I had in my purse and I purposed to look at it and say okay and I was feeling a feeling right now. What might it be, and at first I was sort of guessing but then I begin to learn to read my body because of waiters turn off their body, which is part of how we know or feeling our bodies. Usually the first signal that were feeling something we get angry we get a tight, tense shoulders were siding we we start to feel anxious stomach so I begin to pay attention to my body and at about the two-year mark. I actually started to realize she know what I feel right now and I could put words to it.

So this is a very important growth goal. We ask your audiences all the time. Does God have emotions from Genesis to Revelation. Teresa Goddard with his emotions never go to go a lots of them.

What are the jealous. A member you have anger. I have heard I have sadness and grief I have joy. God has all these feelings I have love and he he knows how to name he knows why he hasn't and he knows what he wants to do with and were made in the image and likeness of God are so for us to have access to our emotional selves.

This is called emotional intelligence are God's highly emotionally intelligent. This isn't psychobabble were just copping cotton okay. We talked about that secure connector type and that's the goal that's where you want to get to talk more about how you do that we've mentioned the vasodilator the avoid or let's talk about the pleaser and what were doing here for you is identifying perhaps through the description of these what you might be there is that online survey you could take a disco to our website you'll be able to do that will link to the your convictions. A survey that you can do so. Talk about the pleaser will you write a moment ago. I like how you put it.

These are stress management, coping mechanisms for us as children.

What serves us best to survive. What were going through at the time for me. I had an angry parent, an explosive parent and so I found that to be quiet, to be a good boy to try to do nice things around the house to stay in and maybe clean or straighten things up to really emotionally care take the parent. What happened to me was is I would stay in for the purpose of trying to figure out are things improving are they getting better. Are they getting worse. What can I do. So why do good kids come upon the scene there trying to be good to manage what's happening around them to make somebody happier. So that's your point exactly. Jim, when you talk about how we cope and it serves us well so that's what I did as a child. As a result of that pleasers walk into adulthood and they don't have a strong sense of self.

The very tuned into other, but if you asked them where you want to go for lunch also will wherever you want to go for lunch.

You know they don't have a strong sense of opinion. Secondly, that they have very weak boundaries.

If you need somebody do something at the last minute. Ask a pleaser and they'll get it done for you. And even if it's midnight they don't have a strong sense of the abilities say no that's boundaries and then they won't get angry. Why, because anger is a separating emotion. If I get angry at you.

That means working to have some distance and separation so pleasers. Unlike K who could tolerate separateness pleasers new closeness in order to feel okay and I'm okay if you think I'm okay some very other dependent on you to make me feel okay. If you're smiling then I can smile inside so that's what I grew up with, so took a lot of work for me to get to a place where I could learn to be strong and autonomous by myself without your approval or yours or even kids can ask me and I count less veneered to try. That was a lie to be married to an unrecovered pleaser who had no idea what were so nice and I kept feeling like me so much. It was nauseatingly nice wasn't. Now I as I look back now used asked me all the time. How are you how are you in a course only one answer line that I could see now that I understand it never felt like it was really about me. It felt like it was more for you. Like if there was one right answer. I'm clean I'm fine. Your amazing and most wonderful husband I could ever have disingenuous question. It was really not about you is really about me right right is interesting you pick that I didn't want yes and so I think the other thing that was frustrating is you know, the lack of boundaries you know you you could be very overbooked, trying to help everyone and you don't be nice to everybody and sometimes that took away some time that we might have had at the home, but in a completely grown out of that linking kind of interesting things about these lifestyles is there are kind of. We can also think of them as a stress response style of waiters fully. You have your fight, fight, freeze pleasers get great may freeze if you're mad at her mother's conflict. They get, you know, rattled and fast. I just might. So we have the stress responses that sort of go with certain reactions that are very predictable right in the last one. I think it's less was chaotic described chaotic that seems to be the worst possible state. I am not sure that there measured here knowing that I would look more destructive than the others, but talk about the chaotic controller victim and how little Jim just little while ago you said my childhood was so chaotic and what was when we stop and say what was that like and having read your book. It's a home where there is unpredictability were person doesn't know they're safe where the parent is supposed brief be providing security and safety. The parent is simultaneously dangerous abusive and neglectful harmful or so, addicted or edited such a mentally unhealthy place that there perhaps at a level or lower than the trial. So as a child do the child doesn't know what is predictable Thursday. If you will, another synonym for chaotic is disorganized so there's this disorganized attachment not just a disorganized world but disorganized attachment experience is one researcher coined it is called fright without solutions. The child is in a frightened state without any solution to that in the child is left in the sun settled state and so they often then find themselves moving into one of two modes of highly controlling mode where they can predict their world which has high levels of rigidity to it because if I have a rigid controlled world and I'm not left unsettled anymore because I know it's going to happen around me everyday.

It just means you better do what I say so that you're not doing something different that rattles me or the might end up more of a victim type victim is just somebody learn to tolerate the intolerable.

This is the more compliant child in this home that just learned that they stay under the radar they hide under the bad that that's their way of coping the trouble as they have very little sense of self or boundaries and it's very hard for them to stand up and and say no to someone who's controlling her abusive themselves because they arty learn to tolerate the intolerable normal such great insights from Mylan and K your conviction today on Focus on the Family and I were to pause right there and bring the balance of the conversation to you tomorrow. Mylan and K have so much more good stuff to share on this topic of love styles. Each of those. The avoid or the pleaser the vasodilator the controller and the victim all resonate with us in one way or another, and by discovering your love style and how it shapes your behavior, beliefs and expectations. Your gonna be able to strengthen your marriage and make it thrive and let me remind you that Focus on the Family is here for you. We know there are ups and downs in marriage. That's just the way life is.

And when those harder times come, we can help you we have a team of caring Christian counselors who can listen to your situation of the pray with you the law for some resources and help you get on the right path to healing. We also have our hope restored program for relationships that are in real trouble. This is a four day marriage intensive that offers hope and healing for you and your spouse and people who have attended say it is life-changing. How about that for a testimony in our survey work done two years after those who attend 80% of those couples are still together and doing better. If you're in a place of brokenness in your marriage. Get in touch with us. The Lord does amazing things in those intensive's and we also have Mylan casebook on the lifestyles we talked about today. It's titled how we love and you can get that directly from Focus on the Family.

In fact, when you make a monthly pledge to the Ministry of focus of any amount will send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for partnering in ministry together and if can't commit a monthly amount that we understand will send that to you one time as well donate. As you can learn more about hope restored schedule time to talk with her counselors and request your copy of the book how we love our number is 800 K and the word family 800-232-6459 four stop by the episode notes for all the details on behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team joining us today for Focus on the Family will be back tomorrow with more familiar coverages as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ five households cares for a child with special needs.

If so, we know you want your child to be taken care of, no matter what happens. If you want to secure your child's future by preparing a well that need extra guidance for your unique situation. Focus on the Family can help download a resource 15 questions to ask if you have a child with special needs is our gift to you. Focus on the Family.com/special needs e-book