Hello and welcome to Episode 56!

This will be the last interview in a 3-part series with Drs. John Van Epp and Morgan Cutlip.

They are counseling psychologists and relationship experts, and I’ve been talking with them about having healthy relationships at every stage, from the very beginning when you’re just getting to know a new person, to the stage where you’re ensuring that you are and your partner are ready for marriage, to today’s interview which is geared for couples who are already married.

If you’d like to check out the previous episodes in this series, they were Episode 54: Guidelines for Choosing the Right Romantic Partner and Episode 55: Ready For Marriage? Here’s How To Know.

So let’s see what my guests have to say about how to maintain a healthy marriage relationship using their Relationship Attachment Model…

Interview with Drs. John Van Epp & Morgan Cutlip on Marriage Communication Breakdowns

Brian: Welcome back to the show, Dr. John and Dr. Morgan. We’re so glad to have you back a third time.

Dr. Morgan: Glad to be here.

Dr. John: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thank you so much for giving us this platform to talk to your listeners in this kind of conversation. This is really wonderful. We’re both hoping that it’s going to be a real benefit to all of them.

Brian: Thank you. It’s an honor to have you on the show. By the way, for those who might have missed the first episode or two in this series, I contacted Dr. John and Dr. Morgan because I read one of Dr. John’s books years ago and it had a major impact on my life (and my future marriage with my wife). So it’s an honor to have you on the show to share some of that wisdom, and I have a feeling that it’s going to be well received. I get a lot of compliments for the guests I bring on the show and I don’t think this is going to be any exception, so we’re glad to have you back for number three.

Question: I want to start this interview by asking you this question:

We’re talking about marriage (assuming the people are already to the point of a marriage commitment). What should we do if we find ourselves in a marriage where we didn’t follow the RAM (Relationship Attachment Model)?

(And by the way, for those of you who aren’t familiar, listen to episode 16. Also, two episodes ago we described the RAM just briefly – but episode 16 goes into great detail about what that is.)

Assuming we did not follow the RAM, if it’s not going well in marriage, what do we do at this point?

Dr. John: I wrote a book called How To Avoid Falling In Love With A Jerk, and the most common response to that was, ‘So it’s too late for my wife? What is she supposed to do about it now?’ or ‘When are you going to write the sequel? I’ve already married a jerk,’ or something like that. I know that’s not exactly what you are asking but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of, ‘If we had a rushed relationship or if we didn’t really get to know the person extensively but we formed a commitment or got sexually involved because that felt right at the moment, but now here we’re married and we have all these issues…’ I think that’s basically what you’re asking – what is a couple to do?

I would say first of all, that’s no different than any other couple that did it any other way and they did it allright. Still, when you face issues in your marriage relationship, you’re going to have to adjust, buckle down, identify them, and make a plan to try to work through them in a way that resolves the issues, puts them in perspective, and puts you both back in a good place.

I worked with a couple once that did get married pretty quickly. They did not date very long so they kind of broke what I would call a minimum amount of time to really get to know each other. The other thing that I would say they had working against them is that through their dating relationship, it was speckled with lots of arguments and emotional tension and yet they still got married. They’ve been married ten years and that emotional tension had continued for ten years in their marriage relationship.

I helped them to sit down and look at their relationship through that model of the RAM, ‘How are you guys staying in a know of each other? Where is your trust or belief in each other? How are you meeting each other’s needs and forming a good mutual reliance where you can look to each other and say, ‘I can depend on you to do right by me and to take care of me.’ How are you doing that? What is your level of belief and commitment to each other? How are things going in your physical affection as well as sexual relationship?’ Those are ‘know, trust, rely, commit, touch’. That’s the model right there that we talked about, the RAM (Relationship Attachment Model). And they had all kinds of problems inall five areas. But what I try to help people do is identify where they are, and then talk about what it would look like if they really got to where they would like to be, and then identify a step or two in that direction.

I would say that’s true for any and every couple. We’ve got to run our relationship, and identify where we are. It’s just that the RAM helps you to have specific areas to consider. They’re major areas that are the bonds of our relationship, and so you can look at, ‘Where am I here? Where are we in this area? And then what do we need to do to move toward where we’d really like to be?’

Question: So if somebody realizes that they need help in this area or that area, do you find that couples are usually able to work that out among themselves if they have the right tools and knowledge, or do they frequently need help if they’re really in a bad spot?

Dr. John: I think the majority of timecouples are trying to work it out on their own. Let’s just give them a rule-of-thumb, if you’re trying to fix something and it’s been three, and at the most, six months and it is not really changing, then you need to bring somebody else in. And just to be a little self-promoting here, I mean we have Rock Solid Marriage which is an online video course that is way cheaper than going to a therapist and it’s a good starting point.

Let’s get some input and then have conversations about that input. We have worksheets and things like that in the material. But I think that too often, couples kind of get that logger jam; they get stuck. They argue about it and then they reach a point of just quitting. They stay in the relationship and continue to go forward, but now they’re not even addressing it and it is just a lit fuse.

Dr. Morgan: I think a lot of times when couples get to that point, it feels like this is how it is and therefore this is how it will always be, and at that point their hope for the relationship improving really starts to erode and it becomes a very dangerous place to be.

Dr. John: Hope is crucial. We have colleagues that do marriage intensives. It’s like taking marriage counseling (one hour of therapy)and putting it into three or four days where they just go nonstop with a group of couples. One of the biggest reasons that intensive is successful and helpful to couples is it moves them out of the hopeless state that Morgan just mentioned, into feeling hopeful like, ‘Hey, there’s something here.’ I do think that whether it’s grabbing our online course, which is a very simple thing to do, whether it’s going to a therapist, or whether it’s signing up for an intensive, it is worth it to do something to try to re-germinate that hope and to see that there is a way to get beyond this state that we are stuck in.

Question: In your program you mention the attitude that we have towards our partners. The question is how do you just simply maintain a positive attitude towards your partner in marriage?

Dr. Morgan: In the last episode, John, you talked about ‘the between and the within.’ I think that it’s really common in marriage to feel like you have a bad attitude toward your partner because of something he or she did. It’s a reaction to what you are seeing in the relationship. I think one of the first steps is to really understand that a big part of the work in marriage is done within. If you have a bad attitude toward your partner, you have to own that and you are going to have to do something about it. It’s not necessarily just your partner’s fault.

Dr. John: I was doing a presentation at a university andhad an afternoon with several professors. One of them had just finished a dissertation on the subject of trust, and their whole premise was that trust does not just come automatically from the other person. There’s the one that’s being trusted and the one that is trusting. But the one that is trusting has to make some choices. What are they going to focus on with the other person? What are they going to zero in on? What are they going to bring to the forefront?

We say trust is earned but I think trust is also chosen, so there’s this blend. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. So my attitude toward my partner is an attitude of trust, what do I believe about them and what do I think about