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Unhappy Marriage and Uncontrolled Behavior

One of the most common reasons someone has addictive behaviors or uncontrollable behaviors is because of an unhealthy relationship.

An important point about uncontrollable behavior is it is covering up emotional pain. That’s why it’s uncontrollable because you don’t want to face the pain. Unconsciously, there is something going on that you’re trying to avoid, and this behavior is helping you to avoid it.

Since it is unconscious or not well understood, it’s tricky to get a good understanding and be able to deal with the pain and the behavior.

A common behavior we see with this is a lot of little explanations or little lies we tell ourselves for the reason for the uncontrollable behavior.

 

Example

 

A man says he has an unhappy marriage. He explodes a lot with verbal outbursts but he claims it is his wife’s fault. He blamed his wife because he claimed she cried too much. She had a tendency to cry when she got overwhelmed or hurt and to him, this behavior was unacceptable and caused him great rage.

The first step was to help him see that switching wives was not an effective strategy for dealing with his uncontrollable behavior. This happens a lot and this is why while 50% of first marriages fail, 75% of second marriages fail because people think it’s their spouse’s fault, and they fall for it.

Let’s talk about marriage, an unhappy marriage does not mean you have to leave. Everyone has unhappiness in their marriage. In order to face that effectively, you cannot blame or run.

 

Finding a Solution

The next step was to sit down and find out what was going on with him. It turns out he had a sister who was a crier and he felt she did it on purpose and was manipulative. In fact, when this man was young he thought his mother was giving him attention, then his sister would cry and take the attention away. So he had a great deal of rage at them, but that was mixed with embarrassment over wanting his mother’s attention. Which caused a great conflict.

He would bury it and when his wife unwittingly was a crier, all the feelings got brought back up for him. After discussing this further, we were able to give him a bridge statement to use with his wife. The bridge statement’s purpose was to tell her before the rage came up.

 

Bridge statement example

 

“I’m getting upset about this, I need to step away, I’ll be in the garage working for an hour, I’ll come back and check on you and see if we can talk about this calmly.”

By adding in the bridge statement, this changed their whole dynamic and both of their uncontrollable behaviors became a lot calmer and a lot more in their control.

Unhappy marriages do not have to lead to uncontrollable behaviors.

 

If you have a problem with uncontrolled behaviors and want to talk about it, please give us a call at 757-340-8800.

 

For more on this topic go to,

Addictions and Uncontrollable Behaviors: Why Am I So Unhappy?

 

For more helpful info go to www.drldabney.com. Or for online programs to help you, go to relationship-rx.com

 

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2 Comments

  1. Jessica

    This is deep

    Reply
  2. Jessica

    Definitely going to think about reaching out after reading this

    Reply

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