The Growth in Marriage
Transcript:
Pastor Priji: Welcome to Marriage Talk! In today’s conversation, we have Barry & Paula from Australia joining us.
Thank you Barry and Paula for joining us all the way from Australia. Would you take a moment to greet our listeners and tell us a little bit about yourselves, how long you have been married, how you have grown over the last few decades you have been married?
Barry: We have been married for 47 years now. Paula has been a lecturer in counselling in various institutions, For most of my life, I have been an accountant. During that time, we’ve also done many marriage workshops and been facilitators of workshops in various countries. We’ve done so in India, Kenya, Uganda etc. but due to Covid, we’ve been doing them over here in Australia and over zoom in Sri Lanka.
Paula: As for growth in our marriage, doing this marriage ministry has been the best thing for us, we have to be intentional in our marriage relationship. God gives us something always to work on. We have worked with post-trauma in Sri Lanka and Northern Uganda, which’s really stretched us enormously in our relationship.
Barry: I have grown more in the last decade than the previous ones. For a long time, it was a difficult struggle for me to submit to leading and where to go, but more in recent time, I have really enjoyed my relationship with Him and with Paula. I have been softer of heart and mind, be able to receive things a lot quicker than I have in the past, I would say that growth in our relationship, as well as personal growth, has been more exponential in the latter decades than in previous ones.
Pastor Priji: Was it easy to always remain ‘ one ‘ in 47 years of marriage? Did it come naturally to be kind and patient with each other? Also, what did you have to work on to achieve that oneness in marriage?
Paula: The answer to these questions is not that we have always been one but we got into this marriage ministry was that we were desperate. We had planted a church in our area and after a while, it had failed.
Barry: The failure of that church was massive for me for a couple of decades, I was in a low-grade depression where I felt like a failure. I tended to blame others for my failures and I ended up blaming Paula for things. I just carried this resentment inside and was really struggling with my purpose. I was in a difficult place at that time, so where we ‘ one ‘ then? I don’t think so. From those moments and the desperation of going into marriage, we conduct and learning a little bit more about exploring what is going in our relationship and slowly understanding each other’s differences and how they add value.
Paula: I remember my personal depression, I remember telling Barry that I was done and that we’ll stay together just for the children but our marriage was over.
Barry: I never thought that would be how things would end up and personally being out of sorts with Paula. When Paula confronted me with the realities that our relationship was coming to an end, I all of a sudden recognized that I was going to lose something. I then turned to God and said ‘ I don’t think I love Paula, I am not sure I know how to love, please show me how to ‘.
Paula: I remember Barry telling me that he wants to love me and that he’s not sure how but will do it with God’s help. But I was sceptical and rude in reaction. But I saw his willingness and he began to change, so I was drawn to that change and I started to soften.
Barry: That didn’t happen overnight, it took many years. The wonderful thing is, because of our experience in going to a marriage workshop, we began to work in the area of marriage and relationship. I believe that was God’s gift to us.
When I look back on my dreams and visions of what my life would be like, with a pulpit ministry and being a pastor etc. but now from this current perspective, I recognize that God had other plans and His plans were better. I sat down in my 50’s and I was thinking ‘ what’s my life been worth, where has it had an impact and made a difference ‘, I recognized that it was in the life of couples. I saw that this was the dream I had and that God was doing His work on it. I saw what God was doing through us but more importantly, I saw what God was doing in us.
Pastor Priji: You have been married for 47 years now, do you ever reach a point where your conversation with each other became so familiar that you started to take each other for granted when it comes to ‘ okay he understands why I am upset. ‘ or ‘ she knows why I reacted how I did ‘ and just be harsh to each other. If you did reach that point, how did you overcome or help each other process that?
Paula: Many listeners will know that 69% of issues in relationships cannot be resolved because we all come from different family cultures. So it’s the way we deal with it that is the crucial thing. We have struggled through the years with our differences.
Barry: We came in avoiding conflict, she avoided it because she came from a harsh background and I avoided it because that was the model for me. So for us, conflict was not so explosive but it was more withdrawn and withheld. Even if we felt slightly irritated and put our hand up and say ‘ that was irritating ‘, what Priji said about assumption is very important, I am the best assumer. I think that I used assumption to protect myself because if I could assume you were just doing what you normally do, then I didn’t have to confront it. By putting out my hand and saying I feel irritated about that so can we talk about that, this got me into a mode towards Paula rather than away.
Paula: To me, the biggest change in our relationship came when we offered each other forgiveness. It started when we were in Northern Uganda where we saw possibly those who were so damaged, physically and in other ways. So I threw out an offhanded comment ‘how do you get up in the morning? How do you forgive?’, one lady stood up and answered ‘ how can you not?’.
One day I just told Barry that I realized I hadn’t forgiven him for some of the deep hurt in our relationship when it was the most difficult time in my life but he wasn’t there for me, and I don’t want it to be shallow so I’m going to take it to God and wrestle with it, but I am going to forgive.
Barry: It surprised me, I immediately knew that I hadn’t forgiven her either and that I don’t know how to do that. So I turned to God as well to gain help with forgiveness.
That forgiving of her was of great impetus to my growth and change in the last couple of decades.
It’s been delightful for me to just explore those differences and see that they actually add to me or expand and see things from a different point of view.
Pastor Priji: Some issues in a marriage can look like it’s never going to be resolved, in fact, our differences are good and compliment each other. But is it a bad thing to have to keep talking about the same issue over and over again? You have one conversation, gain some perspective, but as you go through life you feel the need to bring up that same issue again to have another conversation about it.
Sometimes my wife and I wonder if we’re going about in a circle because of discussing the same issue. So how can one grow about having a conversation about the same issue?
Paula: Often, we don’t feel heard if we come back to talk about the same thing. So we have to find creative ways to feel heard and get to know each other better. The way we found that works for us is a bit of a parenting technique.
We’ll conversate this out for the listeners to understand.
Barry: I would come to Paula and say ‘Is this a good time to talk?’
Paula: Yes, what’s on your mind?
Barry: I prefer if we could have a prayer because I need God’s presence in this.
In the incident you were referring to the other night, when we were taking our granddaughter in the car to her home, I was unloading the car and had the luggage to be taken into the house in my hand. You and our son in law were standing at the door of the house but you did not know I was there and that I needed the door open, but you did not notice me. So I expressed anger there in a bad way.
Paula: We didn’t move and hence you unpleasantly expressed frustration, is that right? Is there any more to that?
Barry: You didn’t move but you didn’t notice me. You were just enjoying the conversation and not noticing me.
Paula: I was just enjoying the conversation and not noticing you, Is that right? Is there any more to that?
Barry: And I just said “Door!” in an unpleasant way and you moved very quickly.
Paula: So you just said “Door!’ very unpleasantly, I knew you were annoyed. Is that right? Is there any more to that?
Barry: I just went down to the road, parked the car and went back, I knew something was going on inside of me because I wasn’t letting you know.
Paula: As you went down and parked the car, you just expressed the surface of that. Is that right? Is there any more to that?
Barry: Well there’s more to that but this was a brief example of how we conduct these conversations and at the end of that, Paula would probably say to me some things about my feels and validate them.
Paula: I would validate him, after having listened to him in that same technique, I would say my side of things in the same way.
Barry: If we don’t formulate a response but rather just listening to what is being said and what the other is going through, then they would feel safe and not defensive.
In a lot of times in our relationship when we kept going back on the same subject matter and have done that on several things, we began to recognize that what was going on in our conversations was needing to exploring beneath all the surfaces.
Pastor Priji: How does it come so easy for the both of you to be expressive of your feelings? Sometimes when we talk, it can be just about the facts like ‘okay you didn’t open the door for me when I needed you to’ and we’re not ready to go beyond the facts where we talk about what we feel. It’s about what we felt at that point what is more important than the door not being opened. How does it come naturally for the both of you to express how you felt in your communication?
Barry: Particularly for me, it was so logical, I needed a reasoning way to my feelings, think my feelings to a sense. Like in a volcano you see lava coming out the top, that’s where to door conversation, financial conversation and other conversations come out the top. What I recognized is those were the things you can see, but underneath, the power of the volcano is the unseen things and that’s what drives the top.
When my son was in his teenage years, we had a proper relationship, there was a lot of anger and I would deal with this anger by saying ‘Go to your room, get out of here, and it wasn’t helping neither was it resolving anything. One day after I had learned about the volcano, I recognized when he came into my presence angry, that underneath the anger was something else, a deeper feeling. So I said to him, ‘someone has hurt you, haven’t they? ‘, and he looked at me and said ‘yes dad, they have, then we had a conversation like we hadn’t had for many years. We began to talk about the feelings, powerful ones that were underneath the actions.
We’ve actually got a picture of a volcano on our fridge to remind us where when things happen above like lava, underneath there are powerful things that need to be talked about and resolved and shared.
Pastor Priji: Could you give us a couple of examples of things we see on the surface and what could be the underlying emotions behind them? Just to give a bit of perspective.
Paula: I handle stressful situations by wanting to talk it through, so I’m like a banger knocking on the door. Barry handles by wanting to withdraw by closing the door because I’m banging on it. I’m pursuing his distancing to protect the relationship in a lot of ways, because if he really said at that point what he wanted to say then it would just escalate. Mine is that I can get quite critical and contemptuous off the top of the volcano.
Mine would be resentment and anger. I know Barry’s anger is internal, I know it’s there but I would just see withdrawal on the surface.
If we take the example of the door, the door we’re just talking about and how Barry wanted to get through the door, then the next morning I would want to talk about it but Barry is still in his withdrawn mode. So because of my response, Barry would be quite resentful because it would feel like it was a switch from being about Barry to being about me.
When the emotions had calmed down, I said to Barry that I was hurt by the response. It took me back to the past and the blaming I used to experience. What did you feel?
Barry: When I heard that I was extremely disappointed and sad. Things that I accused you of was totally out of the base and I just assumed the wrong assumption. It became like ‘what have I done!’.
Paula: You had your response but also went into your shame didn’t you?
Barry: My mother is elderly and I have watched her struggle with being aged and losing things she took for granted, things she could do all by herself before and I see her frustration. Part of our family, what we do is, if we feel pain, we hideout. So I recognized that I felt tired and wasted that night, I was in a bad place and paid out my pain on Paula.
I was just disappointed. I heard in church service that ‘it is out of the heart that comes to the product of life’, it’s what is on the inside that comes out.
I recognized that there was something wrong with my heart and I was disappointed with that.
Pastor Priji: How important is it for us to grow in our relationship with God so that we can grow in our relationship with each other? Also to ask God to reveal any blind spots in our relationship that needs growth or change.
Paula: That’s interesting, the last decade our ministry has moved more towards healings of those past wounds. Only God can put His finger on those and heal those things. He has used us as instruments in each other’s lives to facilitate those healings, but it’s through Him alone.
Barry: For me, the term ‘toward you’ is one of the most difficult terms when there is a conflict between us, I have always struggled with that term. But it’s interesting because the definition of repentance is to ‘turn to God’. So for me any movement in a relationship that requires courage, I can’t do it without Him, it’s something beyond my ability. The lovely thing I have discovered is as I have intimacy with Paula, it opens up intimacy with God. It’s not a linear thing anymore, it’s all 3 of us together exploring and knowing each other.
If you’d like to connect with Barry & Paula, reach out to them via their website or email.