ERP 187: The Four Habits of Joy-filled Marriages, an Interview with Dr. Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey
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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 187, “The Four Habits of Joy-filled Marriages”, an interview with Dr. Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey.
Before we get started, I wanna take a moment with you and pause, to deepen in the intention. As I do this, I invite you to consider your personal intention as you’re listening to today’s episode, as I set the intention for the Empowered Relationship Podcast. And that is that we become more self-aware, more skillful in cultivating intimacy with our significant other. And to do that, we have discussions on this show, whether or not I’m providing tips, tools or suggestions about a particular topic that I see couples getting stuck in in my line of work, or perhaps comes from my research or my experience in education.
I also interview other experts in the field. As I mentioned, I have this influx of interviews, because these are people that have reached out to me, except for the interview with Dr. Lonnie Barbach, episode 184, “How to deal with sexual incompatibilities.” I wanted her on this show to speak to a couple listeners’ questions around struggling with really different experiences and desires, and seemingly incompatibilities in the bedroom. So if you’re interested in that episode, I encourage you to check it out.
You can check out that episode, as well as the show notes for today and any other episode, on my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com. Click on Podcast and you can find all the episodes listed there.
I’m excited to share today’s interview with you, as it’s full of research-based, practical tools that you can work with to increase the positivity and the joy in your relationship. And I love to be able to have evidence-based practical tools that you can implement right away… And they make it very easy and accessible. Let’s get started in today’s episode.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Dr. Marcus Warner is a conference speaker and author who has spent over thirty years helping people and organizations navigate some of life’s toughest challenges. As the president of Deeper Walk International he has helped develop dozens of resources that deal with recovery, leadership, and family life.
The second guest today is Chris M. Coursey, who is the president of THRIVEtoday, a non-profit focusing on training leaders and communities in the nineteen skills that make relationships work. Chris is an ordained minister, pastoral counselor, published author, curriculum designer and international speaker.
Marcus and Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Marcus Warner: Hey, it’s a pleasure, Jessica. Glad to be on the show.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, thank you for having us. We’re excited for our time together.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Likewise. You both wrote a book together, “The Four Habits of Joy-filled Marriages.”
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah, it was quite the enterprise. Essentially, I wrote the chapters, Chris wrote the exercises, and we collaborated on everything to try to make sure that we were in sync with each other. It was a lot of fun, because it gave us a chance to be a little more relationally-connected, because we don’t live in the same state… So it was a fun enterprise.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yes… And Marcus and I are excited about talking about joy, so this was a fun project to work on together.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Was there an inspiration that helped birth this project?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Well, you know, both of us have been working in people-helping areas for a long time. Both of us have done a lot of trauma recovery work in different settings, and one of the things you realize is that we live in a low joy culture, and a lot of people come in low-joy families. That affects so many things in life, so we thought we could write a book at the marriage level to get things started off there… Because there are so many basic principles that if people just knew them going in, it could make such a world of difference in the way that they interact with each other. So we thought if you can affect the home, and affect what’s going on in the marriage, then you’re gonna be able to have a greater impact overall.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yes… And we wanted people to know that joy is accessible. Sometimes joy feels like it’s as far out there as the moon; it feel so far out of reach… But we really wanted couples to know that there are some very practical things that you can do to start some joy in your marriage and in your life… So we were really excited to offer a resource that could help people do that.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And I’ve had a chance to read most of the book, and I love how accessible it is. It’s not this super-thick, super-heady, complex book, but it does bring in some real significant brain science, and I think that’s a great combination to make it so accessible and simple, but also have it be so research-based.
Dr. Marcus Warner: The brain science has been fascinating, hasn’t it? Both Chris and I learned our brain science from Dr. Jim Wilder, who was on the cutting edge of research coming out of UCLA Med Center. Back in the early 1990 he was listening to lectures from Dr. Allan Schore before he ever put anything into writing… And got a jump-start on the whole “How do we integrate all of this brain science on attachment and joy into the recovery process and into other areas of life?” So we were both blessed to be able to become friends with Jim and learn from him.
I’ve gotta be clear upfront – I’m not actually a brain science expert, but I have learned from one… So what we tried to do was say “Hey, this stuff is just too important to leave it in the academic world. We’ve gotta get it out there to people.”
Dr. Chris Coursey: And Marcus and I have been practicing this in our own lives, with our own wives… And you know, when you start doing this and you start to see a difference and feel a difference, you really wanna share it with other people. So both of us serve a lot of families, couples, people from all over… And as we’ve also been able to share this stuff about joy, it’s just been a really life-giving experience. So the book provides an opportunity for us to really share something with the world that we’re pretty passionate about.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And I can’t help — I don’t know if anybody’s mentioned to you or you’ve seen that Netflix series about sparking joy, and the art of tidying up. Has anybody mentioned that to you?
Dr. Marcus Warner: I think so, yeah. My daughter, who’s in her 20’s, was telling me about this show. I haven’t seen it personally. I believe there’s a Japanese lady who comes and helps people get [unintelligible 00:07:57.01] organized, and appreciate the joy that something has brought them before doing to get rid of it… Keep the clutter down – I think that’s a great concept.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: [laughs] Well, I bring it up because I did my undergrad in psych, I’ve been in the field of psychology for a really long time, and as you know, there’s been a growing trend in the last 10-20 years looking at positive psychology – studying love, studying happiness – and a lot of the times traditionally it’s studying more depression, anxiety, and some of the difficult problems… And sometimes when we can access the power of some of these positive elements, it has a profound impact, but it’s approaching it from a different angle. So when we’re looking at clutter in the home, or a problem, it’s easy to address it from this very serious, very “I need to do better”, and even sometimes shame and blame, and that doesn’t always give the life and breed that positivity that allows for this fertile ground to continue to create goodness and a positive cycle…
Just to bring this back to your guys’ topic around a joy-filled marriage – a lot of the listeners on this show, or who listen to this show, are familiar with the attachment research. Can you help us with joy and the research around joy and how you’re defining joy?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah… Why don’t I jump in, Chris, and pick up on it? The brain science — depending on how technical your listeners are used to, but behind your right eye is what we call the joy center, or the joy bucket… And it’s this place in your brain which is the right orbital prefrontal cortex. It can grow for as long as we live, as long as we continue to experience joy. So this part of our brain literally grows as we experience joy, and the bigger that it gets, the more emotional capacity that we develop. So the ability to bounce back from hard things is directly proportionate to how large this part of your brain grows, and how many pathways back to this brain center we develop from the various upsetting emotions. You mentioned shame and anxiety and depression earlier, and part of the brain science behind this is that we need a neural pathway back to our joy center from each of those negative emotions.
Some people are pretty good at returning to joy from sadness, but they have no capacity to return to joy from anxiety. So we’re looking at how does a person grow a big joy center, and how does a person grow pathways back to joy, and how do we learn skills that can help us to grow this? From this perspective, we’re defining joy as relational happiness that occurs specifically on the right side of the brain, and specifically just behind your right eye.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yes, and one of the amazing results of Dr. Allan Schore’s work is really the power of joy. He describes it as “Joy is when you’re the sparkle in someone else’s eyes.” So in other words, you walk into that room and somebody’s face lights up to see you. So joy fundamentally on that right side of the brain is a nonverbal experience; so it’s the face that lights up, it’s the voice tone, it’s the body movements and the gestures and the timing. So when you see that face light up, it’s a spontaneous reaction… So the next thing you know – your face lights up in response. So joy is contagious, and that’s really what we’re after here, to help couples be able to amplify the good stuff. Because basically, your brain is an amplifier. So your brain is gonna amplify whatever is in the environment.
If you have a lot of angry people around you, guess what’s gonna happen? You might notice that you’re getting frustrated and you’re getting angry. But if your brain is trained on joy, what it will do is it will look for the good stuff and make it bigger. So if it’s been a hard day and I’m interacting with my family at the dinner table that evening, I might say “It was a really hard day today, but here’s three things that went well today, and I wanna share this with you.” So we don’t dismiss the hard stuff, but we do amplify the good stuff. And that’s really what we’re after here with joy – just helping people be able to kind of grow and amplify some of the good stuff in their lives.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And if I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like depending on our previous experiences in relationship or in our life, we may have pathways that are built to that joy center and capacity, and sometimes we may not have so much strength in that area… But it sounds like you can help people learn how to grow that.
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah, precisely. I often tell people that no one is born happy. In fact, that part of your brain that experiences happiness and joy in relationship isn’t even developed at birth. It has to be formed through experiences. So people who grow up in infancy, in the toddler years, and they don’t get the attachment, those joyful attachments that they’re craving, a lot of times what will happen is they won’t develop a big joy center, and they won’t develop these joy pathways, so they enter into life somewhat crippled, you might say. They don’t have the brain fully-developed the way that it was intended to be developed, because they have missed out on so many of these formative experiences.
So we distinguish between A trauma and B trauma, and B trauma is the bad stuff that happens to us, and we’re all familiar with that. But A trauma is the good stuff we missed out on, like the good attachments we missed out on; people comforting us in our shame and helping us return to joy, people being happy to be with us in our sadness, and staying relationally-engaged with us as we return to joy from that… And when we have those kinds of experiences, that’s what actually begins to form and create these pathways in the brain. So if we missed out on that when we were young, the good news is that the brain’s plasticity means that we can still develop those later in life.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yes, and that is really good news, because the absolute best window for joy is when you’re nine months old. So the ninth month of life is actually where the brain is in the ideal state to really grow a lot of joy. But for many of us, maybe our families didn’t have a lot of joy, or communities were struggling, so the good news is no matter what happened during those really formative years where your brain is really wanting to grow joy, we can grow joy throughout our lifespan; that part of the brain that Marcus was talking about retains fetal biochemistry, which means it can grow like a garden, it can grow throughout your lifespan… And the good news is it really likes faces that light up. So as we’re purposeful about building some joy, you’re literally changing people’s brains when they’re working on building some joy, and that’s good news for all of us.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, it is. And you’re giving some real concrete examples around how to do this. One of the things you talk about in your book is recognizing when there is a joy gap… And a lot of the times you’re referring in the context of a marriage between two people, the gap of joy… But I’m wondering even if somebody is listening as you’re talking about the brain science and the neural pathways – is there sometimes even a gap internally or individually, where they’re not able to access that joy or they’re not able to return to joy?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Oh, absolutely. And we all hate those joy gaps, right? Because that’s when we are stuck. It’s like “I can’t get out of this anxiety.” My body keeps sending me signals that say “You should be in distress. The world’s falling apart.” And so it stinks when we get stuck there. Or we get depressed, like “Oh, this is all hopeless. I don’t see the point”, or we get stuck in shame. So we actually identify six basic negative emotions that people can get stuck in if they don’t learn how to develop a pathway back to joy. We call them the “SAD-SAD emotions”, just to help make them easier to remember. It’s Sadness, Anxiety, Despair, Shame, Anger and Disgust.
We find that they form sort of like a color wheel of negative emotions that by combining them together you can actually make all of the negative emotions that are out there… And what we find is that I can internally have a gap, in that let’s say I have no ability to get back to joy from shame, because I never developed a pathway back to that… I can get stuck in shame for days and for weeks, and there can be this extended gap in my life… So you’re absolutely right, there can be an internal joy gap, as well as a gap between couples in their relationship.
Dr. Chris Coursey: And the good news is whether we’re married or not, we can start joy and spread joy in our friendships, our relationships, in our communities. Again, the brain really likes those faces and those voice tones, but through stories – if you share joyful stories… There’s a lot of practical ways that Marcus and I go into in our book, where you can build some joy. Whether you’re married or not, your brain is wired for joy. And we all know how it feels when we walk into a room and somebody’s glad to be with us, they’re glad to see us… But we also know how it feels to walk into a room and somebody’s not glad to see us. It’s a night and day experience.
Our brain prefers joy, our brain wants joy, and the good news is we can just practice some very basic habits to start and spread some joy… And that is a message we’re really excited about.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And just before we go there, it sounds as though if you are in a partnership/marriage/relationship, that if you start practicing these practices to amplify joy, that it’s gonna help your relationship and it’s gonna also help you increase your connection to joy individually. Is that right?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. It’s hard to have one without the other, that’s the nice thing about joy. And the other thing about this that’s nice is that it’s cross-cultural, because all humans brains are basically wired the same way. You don’t get a fundamentally different brain in Asia or in Africa than you do in America; this is universal, because this is simply the way that the brain operates… And that’s really nice, because it means these principles work all over the place.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that. Well, shall we talk about some of these practices?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Absolutely.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Where would you guys like to start? What are the ways in which you help people increase the joy?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah, absolutely. In the book, what we’ve done is we talk about this joy gap in a marriage, and the idea is that in really joy-filled marriages the joy gap you count in hours and days at the most. And that is “How long has it been since we shared joy together?” So in joy-filled marriages you’re starting your morning and there is some kind of connection that’s joyful. It could just be an eye contact, it could be a touch, it could be a hug, it could be anything, but we’ve had a joyful connection there. And then we come back at the end of our day and we know there’s gonna be more joyful connections, and there’s a couple throughout the day. So in joy-filled marriages, these are habits that people develop that keep the joy gap really small, because they’re actually measuring the time between joyful interactions in hours, or possibly days.
In the marriages that are struggling, the joy gap can get to be weeks long, and months long, and I’ve talked to a few people where it’s been years since they’ve felt any joy with the other person. So if your marriage is actually in crisis, this isn’t gonna fix everything, but it is a good tool to add to the other things that you’re doing to try to help.
To shrink this joy gap – that’s kind of the focus of the book – we’ve come up with four habits… And we use the word “PLAN” to help people remember what those four habits are. So you need to plan for shrinking your joy gap. The first one is Play together. It’s amazing how after you get married, life can become a business, and your bed can become a boardroom. That’s where you discuss problems that you’ve got to fix. Playing together on a regular basis, and weekly/daily there’s things that you do that are a little playful with each other.
And then Listening for emotion versus problems. Happy to unpack that a little bit, but the brain science behind that is fascinating. The A is Appreciating daily, and that is finding ways in words and in deeds to let the person you’re married to know that you are happy to be with them and that you notice something they did that you appreciate.
Then the last one is Nurturing a rhythm. A lot of times when we get stressed out is because there’s no relational rhythm in our life, and we don’t know when the next time is we’re gonna experience joy with anybody. We don’t know when we’re gonna be able to get any rest, we don’t know when we’re gonna have a break… So nurturing a rhythm around relationships is the fourth habit that we discuss in the book.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Nice. I would love to give some examples to each of these, just so people can have a sense… Because as you mentioned, in a long-term relationship that maybe has gotten more routine, or task-focused, can feel really business-like… And for people that may have lost that sense of play, what do you recommend to get back in touch with that?
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, so Marcus and I try to keep this very practical. Basically, play is kind of a reflection of some of the joy that we have. A fellow by the name of Dr. Stuart Brown says this: “Play is the single most significant factor in determining our success and happiness.” So this is good news – if we can just make a little bit of time to play together, to spend time together with our spouse… You know, my wife and I like to do date nights where we’ll go walk along the beach and basically have some protected time, where we can smile and interact. It’s a really — not only a fun bonding exercise, but it’s actually really good for your brain. So Marcus and I would recommend having special events that you can count on, or even some social routines. What can you add to your calendar, where can you add some protected time, so that you guys can go do something fun, go build some joy? We even talk about relational sex as a way to play together. Marcus, you have a really good example of a couple who took play seriously…
Dr. Marcus Warner: Oh, yeah… We have a lot of fun people we got to talk to for this. We had one couple – they travel a lot for business, and so they started leaving little notes in code around the house, because they had kids… But they would leave a little note that says “ETN 3:5” So this little code – they knew what that meant. ETN was Estimated Time to Nakedness…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: That’s so adorable…
Dr. Marcus Warner: And then it was like 3 days and 5 hours. I talked to a couple that had literally kept track of how many states and countries they had sex together in. They would track it. They actually made special day trips just to add a state or a country to their list. And what happens is, like I said, too often — bedtime is when we first quiet. It’s the first time we’ve been alone and quiet together all day… So what tends to happen when that’s the first time you’ve been together relationally all day, without other things to occupy your time, what do you tend to talk about? Well, you tend to talk about your problems. You tend to talk about “Oh man, I’m struggling with this. I’m really upset about that. Can you believe what this person did…? What are we gonna do about this situation? How are we gonna invest our money? What do you wanna do with that? And by the way, do you wanna have sex?” It just doesn’t really work.
So what we tried to do, for example, is call the bedroom a problem-free zone. And that is we’re gonna talk about our problems in the kitchen; we’ll talk about our problems on the couch; we’ll talk about our problems somewhere else… But when we get in the bedroom, that’s to say “This is the time for play and for rest.” So we might play cards, we might watch a show we like, we might do other things, but we are doing things to share appreciation and to quiet together, and it leads to more relational sex.
And we would describe relational sex versus performance sex. That’s where you are under pressure to perform because you’re trying to live up to something, or you’re doing it out of fear, and there’s no playfulness involved, because it’s all fear-based at this point. So properly understood, I think that sex was always intended to be part of the playfulness of marriage.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, and Marcus and I encourage couples — like with the date night, try something new. Your brain has a novelty detector, so it pays attention to something new. My wife wants to go swing dancing for a date night, so we’re looking to try new things that we can build some joy together when we go out or when we spend time together. Play is really trying to encourage couples to “Hey, you know what? Protect some time to build some joy.” A lot of people are resistant to play, because they think it’s being childish… And we would say “Hey, it’s more like being child-like.” There’s something really good and life-giving when we can play and smile and have fun together.
Dr. Marcus Warner: I think the other story Chris may have been thinking of is a couple that he liked NASCAR and she liked HGTV… So she agreed to go to a NASCAR race, and she went and she got the book “Complete Idiot’s Guide to NASCAR” and she read it. And he agreed to watch one show on HGTV with her. And in that way, they were both expanding the areas in which they could share joy. So she got a big kick on race day, of going there and realizing that she knew more about the history of NASCAR than most of these die-hard fans she was with, because she’d been doing her research… And she learned to find some joy in that.
And he got a kick out of the show that they watched together, and it gave them something else to connect over and to talk about. So adding hobbies, adding new experiences is a great way to build play.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes. There’s so many opportunities here… Because you know, someone who might be feeling stuck in their marriage might be at a loss around play. Like you’re saying, they don’t think of play, or that seems childish, or immature… And there’s so many opportunities, whether or not it’s something you enjoy and wanna plan for, or if it’s something new that you have curiosity around and wanna try out and would be fun, or even spontaneous play. I was thinking about guy guys last night; my husband and I were in the bedroom, and — this isn’t sexual… [laughter] But he had one of those wool dryer balls from doing the laundry, and he was tossing it… And he tossed it to me and we started playing this game that we just made up.
It was super-fun, and we were laughing and giggling, and it was just so spontaneous… But I don’t know that that would be as accessible had we not been bonding and enjoying each other. But there was an openness to that, so I wonder if just having more time and space for play then also supports that spontaneity… And then even that individual creativity between two people, like the couple that let notes around; they made up their own language. So there’s so many opportunities, it seems…
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, and I love the spontaneity of it, as you say… Just being open for those moments. The fun thing about play is before we realize it, we’re actually enjoying ourselves and having fun, and building some joy… And those are great examples.
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah. Let’s face it, nobody got married because they thought they’d be more miserable with those persons than without them. We all got married because we thought we’d have more joy with this person than without them. So we need to do some things to make that a priority.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Absolutely. So do you have other examples for listening for emotion…?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah. The basic brain science idea – your right brain, left brain – there’s some things about that that are just metaphorical, but there are other things about that that are pretty concrete… And what we’ve found is that your right brain in general is the relational part of your brain, and it thinks relationally, and most of the relational circuitry on the brain is on the right side. The left side of your brain tends to be for tasks and problem-solving. So what I find is that when you listen to people, there’s like this on/off switch in your brain. And if the switch is in the on position, all of those relational circuits fire up and they engage, and you’re present and you’re engaged and you’re relational. But when your switch goes off, all of those relational circuits kind of power down, and you’re not engaged. And when that happens, I can still listen to you with my left brain, but I’m not listening for emotions now, I’m just listening for problems.
So when that happens, that means I don’t have any curiosity about how you feel, I don’t have any curiosity about what you think… Usually because I’m pretty sure I have you all figured out already. So because of that, as soon as I hear a problem, I may interrupt the conversation or just listening altogether, because now I know what the problem is I need to solve. That is not a very relational, joyful way to have a conversation.
So in order to stay relationally engaged when we’re conversing, focusing on listening for the emotion that the other person is feeling, and then naming that emotion accurately, validating that emotion by naming it accurately helps to keep us relationally engaged in the conversation, helps keep us curious… Because if we lose our curiosity, then we lose our ability to stay relationally connected to people, and the joy goes out the window in our conversations.
There’s a lot of nuances to this and a lot of implications of it, but that’s the core idea – this on/off switch in the brain; when it’s off, I tend to listen for problems, and when it’s on, I’ll listen for emotions and validate them.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, at this point it’s so significant… Because what happens is the moment I shift into problem-solving mode in an interaction, I’m trying to fix something, and I’m forgetting that this is someone across from me that I care about, that I love, and I’m trying to solve a problem… Which means the odds are very high that I’m going to minimize my wife, I’m going to probably shut her down in some way. The result is she’s gonna feel alone, she’s not gonna feel connected with me.
The moment I feel alone in an interaction, that creates some of the toughest conditions for me to navigate that interaction. So it’s the last thing that we want to create in our interactions, but unfortunately it’s something that we tend to create when we shift into this non-relational problem-solving mode; we don’t like feeling minimized, we don’t like feeling like a problem to be fixed. So what Marcus is saying is really important for how we interact – we listen for those emotions, and we say “Wow, you’re really mad. I can see why you would be mad when that driver cut you off. I would be angry as well. What do you need when you feel this way? Would it help if we go for a walk? You tell me what would be helpful right now.” So we’re really focusing on what our spouse is feeling, instead of just trying to make the problem go away.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Especially in really poignant moments, I imagine there’s times where it may not be as necessary to listen for the emotion, but other times it’s incredibly powerful. I was meeting with a couple yesterday, and they’re both attorneys… And they look at their history together and how intellectual they are together often, and this particular circumstance – they have two little children and there’s just a lot on the plate with two professional careers, and living in an expensive area, and the whole list… And it was a weekend, and it was like his personal time, where he had freedom, and he chose to do something that was for the family; it was like hanging up this piece of art that they had had, and had been on their list for a while, and… And the story and the details aren’t super-relevant, but what we got to was how he wanted to feel from his wife that it was good enough, or that he was good enough, and that it was good. He tends to be perfectionistic, and he doesn’t always lead on to her that that’s what he wants.
I think that was part of the challenge – she didn’t even know that he had an emotional need, and he wasn’t necessarily helping her see that, and she maybe wasn’t listening for it either. So they were missing it, and he was feeling really hurt that she had made a comment of like “Oh, I thought you were gonna use command strips and you used a nail…” So it was speaking to the content, rather than his emotion of feeling like “I just moved the needle.” I was making the analogy of he just moved them five extra yards; he had done an effort for the family and wanted to feel acknowledgment, but he had some feelings of like “Is it okay to want that?”
Anyway, it was really powerful what they were able to achieve when they were pivoting towards that emotional need, but it wasn’t easy to get to. So even if one person’s not in their relational space — excuse me, even if they’re both in their relational space, if one is feeling shame about having that need, it still might get missed.
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah, that’s a good point, because one of the things that keeps us from being there is – again, we talked about those pathways in the brain… It sounds like he struggles to get back to joy from shame. That’s an under-developed pathway; it’s not that he has no capacity, but it’s an under-developed one. So as a result, it can be helpful for a wife to recognize “Oh, this is something where I need a little extra sensitivity when it comes to shame issues, because there is more help needed here.”
We lay out a really simple tool for trying to help people with that, and it’s VCR – Validate, Comfort and Recover. The idea is start by validating the emotion, and then offering comfort. Too often we reverse those. We immediately try to comfort somebody, and say “Oh, it was fine. You did great. Everything’s good”, but that can also sound dismissive, like you just want them to leave. So the order is important. You validate first, and then you comfort, and you help them to recover… And recovery is defined is they start feeling like themselves again. They feel like they’re seen and heard, and able to move forward. And the more often that that process happens, that VCR pathway takes place, that’s how you strengthen those pathways back to joy. We need to do that from all of the SAD-SAD emotions.
Husbands and wives can help each other as they’re going through these things, as they learn that “Okay, my husband struggles with this” or “My wife struggles with that”, “My partner struggles with this…” You’re going through these things and you’re looking at them and going “Hey, I can either get upset with them and try to help them fix that all the time, or I can think of this Validate, Comfort, Recover cycle and realizing the more frequently they go through that, the more capacity they’re gonna build.”
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yes, and we do a couple of different exercises in the book to really walk people through “Okay, what would this look like, both with maybe a good thing from my day, but also with a hard thing from my day?” Because we can learn to do this just talking about some good things, but then we learn how to do this when I hit that shame pothole, or I get stuck in some hopelessness. So it really is a very practical, but a really game-changing tool to use.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, so powerful. I love this! And even just the simple — I loved in the book you were saying how the husband is at the dinner or breakfast table, and the wife is talking about something that matters to her, and he is listening, but he’s reading the paper simultaneously, and she’s like “You’re not listening!” And he basically replays everything she said, but it’s the content and not the emotions. So there could be just on every day level like “Hey, I really want you to hear this” or “This means a lot to me”, that there’s a different type of listening that can occur, that can help that.
Dr. Marcus Warner: Exactly. Everybody wants to be seen and heard, and learning to listen for emotions is a good way to do that.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: How about appreciation?
Dr. Marcus Warner: That’s something we’re hearing more and more about these days, isn’t it? I think as the brain science and the power of joy are getting out there, more people are realizing how powerful this is. I know at Indiana University they did a study where they took 42 people who were in therapy for anxiety or depression and they put them into two control groups, like 21 and 21, and they added one exercise to one of the groups, and that was to take half an hour a day to write a letter of appreciation to somebody. They didn’t have to send it, they just said to take half an hour of their data to be in a place of appreciation.
You can imagine what they’ve found was after a month to two months there were noticeable improvements in the group that was practicing appreciation. This is because there’s no faster way to grow that joy center in the front of your brain than through the practice of appreciation. And not only is it good for growing my joy center, but it’s really good for growing an attachment and a bond with somebody else… Because when someone expresses appreciation to me and I receive that appreciation, we get bonded together in joy. So it’s a good thing.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, and this is really exciting, because what we now know about appreciation is when our brain uses this habit regularly, what we do is we scan the environment for good things. So I had a friend who was kind of skeptical about this, because she said “You don’t know my life. You don’t know the craziness of my days”, but she decided to practice appreciation regularly… Basically, three times a day, five minutes of appreciation for each of those five-minute blocks. So just feeling appreciation, thinking about the good things three times a day for five minutes at each time.
And as she did this for — I think she was about a week-and-a-half in, her car broke down on a trip, and the husband forgot to put a credit card back into her purse… And all of these things just went wrong on this trip. But she noticed in the midst of all of these things going wrong she was thankful that her car broke down where it did, and she was glad it didn’t break down over there in the dangerous part of the highway… And in the midst of all of this, she was just finding reasons to be grateful, even though a lot of things were going wrong. And she said “In that moment I knew something has changed in my brain… Because normally, I would have been blasting my husband, I would have been blasting the tow truck driver, I would have been just losing it with these different people.” She said “When I was feeling gratitude in the midst of all of these problems, I knew “Wow, something has changed in me.” And it was very simple, just practicing appreciation so that her brain starts to look for the good stuff instead of amplifying the bad stuff.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: So, so great…! Can you give us any examples around how to nurture the rhythm, or a rhythm?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah, so nurturing rhythm… In my marriage, my wife used to complain that she didn’t feel like she got my time, which was baffling to me, because we did stuff together a lot. And what I realized though was that rarely was the point of what we were doing to be together. We would do tasks together and be in the same room while we were getting things done, and we would maybe run errands together or something like that, and we could spend 3-4 hours during the day, and at the end of the day she would say “I feel like we don’t have that much time together anymore”, and I looked at her like she was crazy.
I began to realize that what she was talking about was time where the point of being together is being together… So we tried to initiate something we call couch time. That is early in the evening we would sit on the couch, look in each other’s eyes and connect over the day. And just knowing that she had that to look forward to kind of helped her calm down a little bit… Like, “Okay, I know I’m gonna get connection time.” And that’s part of a rhythm, when you know you can count on something. So before we go to bed, we have a routine that we know that we do, and we know that we can count on this routine. And there can be spontaneity within the routine, but just knowing that that’s there creates a rhythm.
And you go back to this biblical idea of Sabbath. The idea is to have a rhythm that you know you can count on downtimes of rest, as well as uptime of relational connection.
Study after study that has asked “Where is the happiest place on Earth to live?” has almost always pointed to cultures that are very good at rhythm. They’re very good at creating this rhythm of knowing that “I’m gonna get extended time for rest” and “I’m gonna get extended time with people, and in between I can get everything else done.” When we can create that kind of rhythm, it makes life more sustainable, and the joy that we do develop becomes more sustainable as well.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yeah, that’s right… Because it’s really hard to build joy when you’re tired. It’s really hard to build joy when you’re exhausted. So as people take some time and protect time for rest, not only do you still bond in rest and still enjoy each other, but it really sets the stage then for building some high-energy joy. And rest is really one of the greatest predictors of lifelong mental health. It’s “Can I quiet? Do I rest?” It might sound strange, but we actually have to protect time to rest in our marriages. As Marcus said, that could be a really life-giving time, when we can rest, build some joy and rest. That rhythm is really crucial.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: It’s such an important message… I think so many people are so overworked and don’t incorporate that into their flow. I remember reading that in the book, and I was like “I’m so glad they’re saying that. It’s so important. It’s such an important message to just really invite that”, because I think so many people are so stressed and it’s really hard to cultivate more joy from this depleted place and play when you’re so exhausted… So I love that.
Well, before we wrap up, is there anything that you guys wanna emphasize, underscore or add? I know we can’t do everything justice, but…
Dr. Marcus Warner: Well, I’ve gotta say in my marriage the thing that has been the biggest game-changer for me has just been the whole paradigm of thinking that when I get upset with my wife, instead of going into a place in my mind where I’m just rehearsing all the reasons why I’m justified in being upset, I am learning that “Wait, half of my brain has shut down. I’m not acting like myself. I’ve turned into a different person.” And instead of focusing so much energy on justifying my emotions toward her, I am learning to spend more time trying to get my brain back on, engaged in online, so that I act like myself in the midst of our problems.
So we’ve actually formed kind of a saying that we’ll use with each other, and that is simply “Let’s keep the relationship bigger than the problem.” What we mean by that is “We may not be able to solve this problem today, but I still love you, I still wanna be in relationship with you, so let’s enjoy our relationship and we’ll just agree to keep working on this problem.”
Dr. Chris Coursey: Yes. And you know what, a little joy goes a long way, so I wanna encourage the listeners today that even during a meal, talk about highlights from your day. One of the exercises in the book is what we call “Happy and sad”, where we just practice what are three things from your day that made you happy? What is one thing that made you sad? And you might have five things that made you sad, and you could share five things… But for every sad thing, we want you to highlight three happy things. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re getting that relational part of your brain online, and it’s really priming you to build some nice joy with your spouse, with your partner, with your family. So a little bit of joy goes a long way, and it can be a really life-giving practice.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Great! Well, how do people get in touch with you? I’ll put the link for the book “Four Habits of a Joy-Filled Marriage” on today’s show notes. Are there other ways that people can get in touch with what you have to offer?
Dr. Marcus Warner: Yeah, we do have a website related to this called HappyHappyMarriage.org. It’s kind of a funny name, but it works, and we’ve got some extra resources there related to the book. My ministry – I actually am in a Christian ministry called Deeper Walk International, so most of the work I do is actually in the church setting… And Chris runs an organization called Thrive Today. You can reach mine at DeeperWalkInternational.org, and Chris at ThriveToday.org.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. Well, I really appreciate what you guys have done in this book, and making it so practical but so research-based and effective, and helping people build this joy capacity in their brain, and the neural pathways, and also build the joy in relationship, as well as individual… It’s such an important message, so thank you for what you’re doing.
Dr. Chris Coursey: Thank you, Jessica. It’s great to be here, and thank you for what you’re doing and for having us here today.
Dr. Marcus Warner: It’s been an honor, thank you.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s episode. Again, the evidence, research-based tips and tools for you to practically implement into your life and your relationship. Again, if you wanna access today’s show notes, I encourage you to visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast and you can find today’s episode listed there. It’s 187, “The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages”, an interview with Dr. Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey.
I encourage you to check out their book. It’s actually a really short read, and again, it’s really practical, evidence-based, and you can find the link for that on today’s show notes, as well as a transcript and other notes about today’s episode.
Until next time, I hope you take great care.
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