You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See #804

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 David Schnarch’s unpublished manuscript Living at the Bottom of the Ocean.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 SMR.

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 SMR.

“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 SMR.

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 SMR.

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 SMR.

A listener wrote in after last week's episode. He appreciated it but wanted the other side of the equation. His situation: he wants to do something with his wife that he considers well within the moral framework of their marriage. She says no. Complete sentence. So what's he supposed to do? Stop wanting it? White-knuckle his way through? Watch it fester into resentment? Those feel like the only two options when you're stuck in gridlock. They're not. Every marriage has gridlock issues — places where what one person wants is blocked by what the other person wants. Change the marriage, you just swap the topics. The gridlock doesn't go away. What changes is whether you learn to face it or just keep trying to get your spouse to move off their position. This week Corey and Pam sit with the husband's side of that equation. What the wanting is actually about. What her no actually means — and what he's been attaching to it that isn't really about her. Why the legal brief approach never works. And what it looks like when movement shows up in a form you didn't expect. The wanting can stay. What has to change is what you do with it. The post What Do You Do With The Want #799 first appeared on SMR.

She's been married sixteen years. Four kids. A husband who works hard, fathers well, and helps around the house more than most. She also has sex with him three to four times a week. Does oral sex. Anal play. Vibrators. Mutual masturbation. Sexting. She tried anal sex three times before deciding the pain wasn't worth it. She tried swallowing despite a genuine gag reflex. She stopped sending explicit pictures when she realized she was no longer comfortable with where those images end up. And he told her she has making up to do. That she's not obedient enough. That if she won't do four specific things he'll have to think about whether to stay. She wrote in asking if she's the problem. No. She is not the problem. But that answer is incomplete if we stop there. Because the moment she actually lives by it — the moment she stops contorting herself trying to solve something in him — a harder question arrives. If I'm not the problem and I stop acting like I am, what happens to my marriage? He's already told her. Explicitly. Corey and Pam sit with both sides of this one. What she's actually facing. What the threat actually reveals. And why the only person truly held hostage by "I might leave" is the one making the threat. No is a complete sentence. The post When He Says He’ll Leave #798 first appeared on SMR.

A husband wrote in after our episode with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife. He appreciated it but wanted more on the man's side. His wife feels connected to him through sex. But 95% of the time she's not aroused. She has a good attitude about it. She participates. And then when he gets in the shower, she goes and uses a vibrator by herself — because she feels pressured by him to enjoy it when he's there. He named his dilemma clearly: accept the one-sided sex and eventually resent it, or say no to sex entirely and feel disconnected. He's tried both. Neither works. He called himself stuck. He's not wrong that both paths are painful. But there's something worth looking at underneath the dilemma he named — something the vibrator detail revealed that he almost buried in the middle of his own letter. His presence is the pressure. Not his intention. Not something he's doing wrong on purpose. But his needing her to enjoy it, his hoping this time will be different, his watching to see how she responds — that's what's in the room with her every time. And she can only get there when he leaves. Corey and Pam unpack both sides of this one — what he's actually after that he hasn't been willing to name, and what she's discovered about herself that she hasn't brought into the marriage yet. "How often do we think the issue is one thing when in fact it's also another thing entirely." The post One Sided Sex #797 first appeared on SMR.

If you've ever wondered why desire felt so natural before marriage and so complicated after — this conversation is worth your time. Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife is a psychologist, coach, and fellow traveler in the Schnarch world. In this conversation with Corey, she names something most couples can't quite articulate: the shift from falling in love to being married isn't a sign something went wrong. It's a sign of what was always there underneath. A few things worth listening for: The moment she says "you can either prop up your husband's ego or his penis, but not both." It's not hers originally — it's Schnarch's — but the way it lands in context is worth the whole conversation. Her reframe of the lower desire spouse. Not broken. Not defective. Operating with good judgment inside a system that doesn't work. The Gospel of Thomas quote about bringing forth what is within you. Whether or not that's your tradition, the idea lands. And the woman who came to one of Jennifer's workshops not knowing what she wanted — whose entire life had been organized around everyone else — and what happened when she made one small commitment to herself. This one originally aired a while back. It holds up. The post Best Of SMR: The Lower Desire Wife| Dr Jennifer Finlayson-Fife #796 first appeared on SMR.

She's been married a long time. She's done the work — therapy, 12-step, forgiveness. The guilt and shame are gone. And she's been giving her husband sex twice a week for years. He knows that's all it's ever been. Her question: how do I get past the guarded sex, the pressure, the fear of never being enough? How do I finally be free? It's a good question. But it's not the first question worth asking. Because somewhere along the way sex became something she gives on a schedule she can't trace back to a decision she ever made. Not something they share. Not something that belongs to her. A transfer. A tithe. And he's been accepting it the whole time — while telling her he wants her to be free. Corey and Pam sit with both sides of this one. What it would actually take for her to find out what sex means to her. And what it means that he's spent years gobbling up what he says he doesn't want. "We spend all our energy fighting about what's missing. The real problem is what's actually present." The post I’ve Given Him Sex #795 first appeared on SMR.