DO YOU KNOW WHY YOUR SPOUSE BEHAVES THE WAY THEY DO?

The Ten Commandments can all be summed up into loving God and loving your neighbor because if you do so you won’t break any of those commandments. “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus was asked. In responding to this question He tells the story of a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who is mugged by robbers who strip him of all he has, beat him up and leave him half dead. A priest comes along the way, sees him and does nothing about it. And so does a Levite who passes by a few moments later, but a Samaritan on his journey when he sees this wounded man stops and does something. He bandages this man’s wounds, pouring in the oil and the wine, takes him to an inn and pays the inn keeper to take care of him.

Grace loves this parable, “The Parable of the Good Samaritan”(Luke 10:25-37) because it depicts clearly what happens in marriage. We all like the sojourner, in our journey in life have been beaten up, stripped and left wounded by what we have experienced. According to Linda Graham, Marriage and Family Therapist, if the earliest experiences we had of reaching out for connection were met with non-responsive, indifference, disregard, dismissal, or with anger or critical blaming and shaming, that experience of reaching out gets paired with a feeling of hurt or rejection or confusion. We withdraw back in to ourselves for protection and this is how we come into. Yesterday during our men’s forum, a guy stood up and confessed how he had dismissed some things that happened to his wife when she was young (she was molested by a relative when she was 7), thinking and telling her that she was very young at that time and should have outgrown those things by now. What he didn’t realize until this point was that we don’t outgrow such painful things. Instead they become etched in our brains and that affects us in our adult life. Negative things that happened even thirty years ago have the potential to cause havoc in our relationships many years later.

We ought to be our spouse’s neighbor, the Good Samaritan for each other. How? By not being judgmental, or wishing away certain things that happened to your spouse those many years ago. Instead we have to be keen enough to seek to understand how that has impacted their lives and their relationship. Look for any signs of rejection and shame from your spouse and reach out to them. Bandage their wounds and pour in the oil and the wine by offering them unconditional love and acceptance. Give them in abundance the opposite of that thing they missed or hurt them growing up. Affirm and appreciate them constantly if they grew up starved of affirmation. That is the reason you are there in their life. Like the Good Samaritan reach out to them with compassion and do something to reverse the hurt and bring healing to them.