Sexy Marriage Radio

You’re outside on a nice afternoon. Nothing’s wrong. Your phone buzzes, you look down, and you see the name. You haven’t answered. Nobody’s said a word. And everything in you already dropped. That’s where this episode starts, and it’s part one of two. A listener wrote in after the silent treatment episode with a fair question. He understood the pursuer and distancer pattern. He understood the idea of handling yourself instead of managing your spouse. What he wanted to know was how. How do you actually calm yourself down when years of wiring hijack you in half a second? The answer takes two weeks, because you can’t fix what you can’t see. This week is seeing it. Next week is what you do with it. Corey and Pam work the whole thing out loud on themselves. What does your sinking look like, feel like, sound like, taste like, smell like? Corey goes from six foot one to five foot six and clams up, or he overexplains the same point slower. Pam speaks before she thinks, and if she’s alone she screams in the car hard enough to lose her voice for two days. One of them heads for a spicy chicken sandwich. The other one goes back to the fridge for more dark chocolate. Those sound like throwaway details until you realize they’re early warning signals you can actually catch. Also in this episode. Why the deeper you go the uglier you get, and why there are no friends down there. The 9 PM rule for tense conversations. Why most people only see their own descent days later, and why that still counts. And the two options that don’t come with a third one where nothing changes. Your homework this week. Get a piece of paper. Think of a scene where you sunk. Then write down what it looked like, felt like, sounded like, tasted like and smelled like. Not the story of the fight. Your own tells. Then send us one of them. Some of what you send is going to shape part two. [email protected] or 214-702-9565. Credit where it belongs. The trench, the depths and the ugly fish come from Dr. David Schnarch’s unpublished manuscript Living at the Bottom of the Ocean. He calls it regression. Corey calls it sinking into the trench in his book Go First, coming in January. Same model, different words. The post You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See #804 first appeared on Sexy Marriage Radio.

He loves his wife. He’s attracted to her. They have sex about once a week and he’s grateful for it. She says she enjoys their time together. And something is still missing. She prefers to be made love to — to receive, to respond, to be the object of his attention and desire. He’s the one who initiates, who directs, who carries the encounter. She’s present and warm and willing. And he finds himself wanting something he can’t quite name and doesn’t know how to ask for without creating the very pressure that would make it impossible. What he’s noticing is the difference between being made love to and being made love with. Being made love to is real and valuable. Receiving well — being present, responsive, letting someone give to you fully — that’s not nothing. But it’s a different experience than two people creating something together. One person is the object of desire. The other is a subject in their own right. He knows what she responds to. He probably doesn’t know what she wants. There’s a difference. And she may never have asked herself what she’d bring to the encounter if she took the wheel. Not because he’s asked her to. Just because it might actually be more interesting. Corey and Pam sit with both sides of this one — what it costs him to always be the driver, what she might be missing by staying in the passenger seat, and what it would look like for both of them to show up as full participants. The post Being Made Love To vs With #803 first appeared on Sexy Marriage Radio.

“How does that make you feel?” Four words. The most famous question in all of therapy. Not wrong exactly. Just incomplete. Because nobody ever asks the follow-up: what are you going to do with that? We live in the golden age of emotional intelligence. More language for our feelings than any generation in history. And marriages are not noticeably better. At some point it’s worth asking whether the feelings conversation is part of the problem, not just the solution. Here’s the thing about feelings: they’re valid as an experience. But the map they’re drawing might be pointing at the wrong address. The wife who feels dismissed every time her husband goes quiet — that feeling is real. But if her father disappeared emotionally when things got hard, that feeling has a longer history than this marriage. The husband who floods with shame when his wife suggests something different in bed — real feeling, probably not really about the suggestion. If what just happened is a three and you’re feeling a nine, something older got activated. That gap is the tell. Feelings are a compass, not a conclusion. They point toward something worth examining — about you, not about what your spouse owes you. The question worth asking isn’t “why did you make me feel this way?” It’s “what is this feeling telling me about me?” Corey and Pam work through both sides of that — what to do with a feeling before you bring it into the marriage, and how to bring it in a way that opens a conversation rather than builds a case. We’re not trying to become robots. We’re trying to become students of ourselves. The post Feelings Are A Compass Not A Conclusion #802 first appeared on Sexy Marriage Radio.

She's been married eleven years. Three kids. A life she genuinely loves. And a husband who goes quiet every time they disagree. Not angry quiet. Just... gone. Still in the house, still doing the normal things, but there's a wall — and she never knows when it's coming down or what she did to put it up. She's tried everything. She asks what's wrong. She gives him space. She apologizes — sometimes without even knowing what she's apologizing for — just to get things back to normal. She sends a text. She tries again when things feel calmer. Sometimes it takes days. She's exhausted. And she wants to know how to get him to stop doing this. That's not quite the right question. Because the pattern she's describing — the wall, the silence, the not knowing, the apologizing for things she didn't do, the monitoring everything to avoid setting it off — that's not just something he's doing to her. That's a system both of them are running. He disappears. She chases. He waits. She adjusts. Things go back to normal. Until the next time. Both of them have a role in that. And this week Corey and Pam name both sides — what she's getting from the pattern she says she hates, what's actually happening inside him when he goes quiet, and what it looks like when each of them changes their side of the system. Every marriage system is designed to get the results it gets. The post Silent Treatment #801 first appeared on Sexy Marriage Radio.

Episode 800. Over fifteen years and eight hundred episodes, one of the consistent choices on this show has been to stay away from clinical diagnostic language — words like coercion, narcissism, gaslighting, abuse — even when those words might technically fit a situation being described. That choice has generated some pushback lately. And it deserves a direct answer. Not a defensive one. A real one. Clinical language exists for a reason. In the right setting, with the right context, a diagnostic label does something important — it orients. It gives a professional and a client shared language for what they're working on and where they need to go. It tells someone their experience is real and worth taking seriously. But something happens when that language leaves the room it was designed for. The label stops being a map and starts being the destination. The conversation stops being about what do I do with myself inside this situation and starts being about what do we call what my spouse is doing. Nobody grows in that conversation. Corey and Pam unpack why — what clinical language is actually for, what happens when it travels into everyday marriage conversations and comment sections, and why the differentiation framework points in a different direction entirely. The most important words in your marriage aren't the ones you use to describe your spouse. They're the ones you use to describe yourself inside the situation. That's where the work actually lives. The post Stuck Behind A Label #800 first appeared on Sexy Marriage Radio.