Helping couples discover the why behind the what in their marriage with Chris and Beth Bruno and Tracy Johnson of ReStory Counseling.
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Welcome to the Thrive Marriage Lab with Restory Counseling, where we help you explore the why behind the what. Because guess what? We believe that your marriage is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be explored and enjoyed. We believe that the more you explore and know your story, the deeper your marriage connection will be. This podcast is now the audio version of our new YouTube channel, Thrive Marriage Lab.
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where each week you can expect us to help you cultivate connection and belonging without the fixing and tips and common things you often hear in the marriage space. So find us on YouTube or listen in.
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I got this phone call once from one of my clients and it was from the wife of this couple that I'd been working with and she was like crying on the other end of the phone. And she was telling me that the husband had they had a fight they've had you know all the way down into that fight category they had a fight and she was telling me how devastated that she was that he got in the car and he took off and he said.
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I will be back in like 30 minutes, but I need to get some space. I'm just going to drive around." And she was devastated. She thought, Oh my gosh, my marriage is over. It is, you know, we're never going to recover from this. He's, he's leaving me. And I had to like coach her through the reality of a, what was happening for the two of them in this moment. He took off and she felt left and it was devastating to her. And he was so enraged that he had to leave. What?
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was the solution. What were we going to do? Welcome to the Thrive Marriage Lab. My name is Chris Bruno and I'm a licensed professional counselor and the founder of ReStory Counseling. And together with my wife, Beth, and our colleague, Tracy Johnson, we post videos to help couples know the why behind the what. Because we believe that the more you explore and know your story, the deeper your marriage connection will be. So this couple is is
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She's on the phone with me and I know that he's somewhere. She's still, you know, on a, on the other line, she's trying to reach him and like patch him in and have a three way emergency call. And I just basically said to her this, I said, listen, here's what he's doing. He is actually letting himself cool down so that he can come back to you so that he can engage with you because apparently wherever the conversation went, it got so escalated.
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that he could not think anymore. He didn't have his executive functioning online. He lost his mind basically, and he needed to get some space. And you probably also need to get some space. This is a good thing. This is a good thing. So here's what I always recommend to couples that when you get into that escalated level and you've crossed the hurt line and, and you actually,
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like feel like we're no longer able to even communicate because the only thing that we're going to be doing is going to be hurting each other and saying things that we don't mean. And we even forgot why we're fighting and, and, but we are fighting because of how you made me feel by, by what you said and we've lost the issue at all. Those are the times you guys, where I suggest taking what we call the 2024 rule. This is the 2024 rule for communication. This allows you
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20 minutes to calm down, 20 minutes to calm down from that like escalated level. And the fact is that our bodies are fascinating. God made our bodies so fascinating in the sense that like we do have defensive mechanisms, we do have defensive structures that come online when we feel threatened. And the fact is that, you know, this woman that I was talking to, she's like four and a half feet tall. She's not actually a threat.
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but there was something about the way that she was engaging that triggered something in his story that made him feel threatened, that made him feel so threatened that he actually needed to leave. And so when he left, he was actually doing what I had recommended. It was the 20 minutes, it was taking just 20 to 30 minutes of a break. Maybe go to the bathroom, walk around the block, go put the kids down to bed, take the dog out.
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Uh, do something else, go into another room for a few minutes, lay down on the floor, do some yoga, do something else. When you get to that higher level of escalation, you're not going to actually be able to have any constructive conversation any longer because all of your defensive mechanisms are active. And the only thing that you're going to be doing is surviving. So 20 minutes and here's the thing, take 20 minutes and then come back.
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And in that coming back, this is really important is to come back and say, Hey, can we try again? Where did I lose you? What happened? What were we talking about? What even were we fighting about? Uh, that kind of thing. It helps you like come down from that escalation, get your mind back in, you know, screw your head screwed on straight and allow you to come back to your spouse. Those 20 minutes are crucial. Maybe, you know, 20, 25, 30 minutes, something like that. Come back.
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If you're still not able to continue the conversation, if you're still not able to re-engage, if both of you haven't been able to kind of come down, take another 20 minutes, go for another walk, do some more yoga, go make dinner, do the dishes, do something else, and then come back to the other person. See if you can re-engage. And if you still can't do it at that point,
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then my recommendation is to allow for a little bit longer time to pass. Maybe it needs to be an hour, two hours, six hours, 12 hours. And we say 2024 rule because we want it to be to, you know, 20 minute segments, but really don't let it go any longer than 24 hours. So if you're in, you know, this conflict and it's 5pm on a Tuesday and you've tried a couple times after 20 minutes and you can't, you know, really kind of re-engage with your spouse.
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it's okay to let that go to the next day. And maybe you're going to say, Hey, let's revisit this tomorrow morning at eight o'clock over a cup of coffee. Let's see if we can connect then. Okay. You know, and if you still can't do it then maybe at lunch, but at least by five o'clock on Wednesday, you've got that 24 hours to kind of think through things, to calm down, to really reflect on what happened for you. Where did you go internally? What postures did you start to take in your communication?
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and even wonder like, what was it that was so threatening to me? What was it that he said, or she said that that caused my defenses structures to kind of get activated. It allows for you to be curious about your story. It allows for you to wonder like, Hey, what was the word, the phrase, or the tone that he or she took that made me so need to enter into survival techniques. That allows you that space.
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20 minutes, but at least within 24 hours. We always want couples to come back and at least have within those 24 hours, song level of conversation again, that they can reconnect. Because you know, if you go more than 24 hours, if it's 36 hours or 48 hours or 72 hours, then actually there is this like departure. There is this leaving that has happened. Uh, and the one who's been left is like, like I said earlier, like,
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devastated in the sense of like, are they ever going to come back? Is this the end? Are we ever going to recover? And the other part of it is that if you let it go for 36, 72 hours, whatever it may be, the likelihood of you actually doing the work, having the repair conversation is diminished because time's just going to happen. The kids need to go to school. Things that you got to go to work. You're going on the work trip, like those kinds of things. And it just gets lost.
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has so much of marriage communication, marriage health is not just in like the rupture. The best work happens in the repair of the rupture. And so if you're not repairing, you only have rupture, it'll come back. You're not actually engaging in a healing and talking through what I wanted it up happening. And it just like goes by the wayside. Then you're going to have like this, this library of experiences that have built up over time.
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that kind of get in between you and now you just have this pile of things that are unresolved. And the issue doesn't mean that you fix the problem, the issue is you talk about what happened between you. Because again, the issue on the table is not the issue on the table, the biggest issue, the biggest issue you guys, is the conversation, the relationship between the two of you. Even if you don't resolve whatever started the fight or the disagreement in the first place,
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If you don't resolve that, that's okay. You can always come back to that, but we always want couples to come back to like, hi. Like I see you again. I love you. I don't know what happened. I don't know why I lost myself and got so escalated. I'm sorry, can we try again? Can we go again at that conversation? That is so, so, so super important. So the 2024 rule is again, really important. 20 minutes, come back, 20 minutes, come back. And if you can't do,
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Re-engage after that. Make sure that you come back within the next 24 hours. Don't let it go longer than 24 hours. And if it does, if something does go longer than 24 hours, that's where I would say, hey, contact somebody, a friend, a professional, a counselor to kind of help you navigate that conversation so that you can come back to one another. Hopefully that's a helpful thought as you dive further into deeper and more intimate marriage communication. We'll see you in the next video.
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where we look forward to hearing about how your marriage continues to grow. See you same time, same place next week.