The Crazy Cycle

Series: Love and Respect: An Interview with Dr. Emerson Eggerichs

Leslie Basham: Today on Revive Our Hearts Dr. Emerson Eggerichs explains what he calls the Crazy Cycle.

Dr. Emerson Eggerichs: You cannot motivate a man to be loving by coming across in a way that’s disrespectful, any more than you can motivate a woman to be respectful by doing a whole series of unloving things.

The man says, “I’m not going to love that woman until she starts respecting me.” It isn’t going to work. We know that. As a woman you know that.

So, too, you need to understand something. “There’s no way I’m going to start respecting him until he starts loving me.” It won’t work. It simply won’t work.

Leslie Basham: On Independence Day, 2006, you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts with your host, Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Our guest today believes that women have more power to change their marriage than many ever imagine. I imagine that there are some of our listeners thinking, “Yes, I’d like to change my marriage. My marriage needs to be changed.”

We have with us on the broadcast this week a man to help us as women understand better how men think and how they respond to some of the ways that we deal with them. So if you’re a married woman, I want to encourage you to be listening all this week.

And let me say, as a single woman, that I found this guest and his book to be very helpful in my own life as it relates to the workplace and the men that I’m working with. As I was reading Dr. Emerson Eggerichs’ book, Love and Respect, I found myself thinking, “This explains why some of the situations happen in our office, in our ministry.”

I could start to see things through somewhat different eyes, realizing, “Wow, when I communicate this way, that could make the men around me feel disrespected.” It was very helpful to me.

So, Dr. Eggerichs, thank you for being with us on Revive Our Hearts this week. We need to hear a man’s perspective, and we appreciate that so much.

Dr. Eggerichs: Thank you, Nancy. It’s a joy being with you.

Nancy: You have a ministry called Love and Respect. Your wife’s name is Sarah, and we’ve talked about her a little, and we will more this week.

I wish she could be here with us this week; but you and Sarah have both opened your lives and shared really transparently, in your book and in your conferences, some of the things in your marriage that illustrate what we’re talking about. Thank you and Sarah for being an open book.

You’ve been a pastor for many years, so you’ve heard the heart cries of women and men whose marriages really aren’t working. They’re on what we called yesterday a Crazy Cycle. Why don’t you, for those of our listeners who weren’t here yesterday, just give us an overview of what that Crazy Cycle looks like.

Dr. Eggerichs: Yes; and trailing on what you were saying, through those years of being in the pastorate and the ministry there, the women were coming in, and I was trying to motivate their husbands to be more loving. So I was giving her tools on how to motivate him to be more loving, and it wasn’t working.

There’s a natural tendency to think, “If I just love him more, then this is going to motivate him to be more loving.”

Nancy: So we have all these seminars for wives on how to love your husband. But what we discovered is that loving on him isn’t what will motivate him to be more loving. That’s what this program is all about today and this week.

Dr. Eggerichs: I discovered something in Ephesians 5:33. There God says as His last word, “Husbands must love their wives, and wives must respect their husbands” (paraphrase).

She has one need: to feel loved for who she is. He has a need to feel respected for who he is, apart from his performance. What we discovered is that no husband feels fond feelings of love and affection in his heart toward a wife he thinks despises who he is as a human being.

Nancy: Could I get you to say that sentence one more time a little more slowly because I want that to sink in. I think that’s such an important point.

Dr. Eggerichs: Okay. No husband feels fond feelings of love and affection in his heart toward a woman he thinks despises who he is as a human being. You can say all day long that you don’t despise him, but if he feels that you despise him, then there is a tendency for him to shut down.

Just as a man may not intend to be harsh and angry, but no woman responds sexually to a husband who’s harsh and angry until he somehow reconciles with her; so too, a woman may not be intending to be disrespectful, but something happens in the spirit of the male. He’s too vulnerable at the level of intimacy about that.

So we discovered that “love and respect connection,” that when a wife feels unloved, she reacts in ways that feel disrespectful to him, and she doesn’t see that. When he feels disrespected, he reacts in ways that feel unloving to her, and he doesn’t see that. That’s what we call the Crazy Cycle.

Without love she reacts without respect; without respect he reacts without love. And this goes on and on and on among good-willed people who are divorcing at epidemic rates. We believe it’s because they’re on the Crazy Cycle and don’t know it and/or don’t know how to get off of it.

Nancy: Now, there will be some of our listeners, as often happens on this program, who will respond by saying, “You’re always talking to the women about their issues. I wish somebody would say something to the men.”

And let me just say, that’s not my calling, and it’s not the calling of this ministry to speak to the men. God has called me, and thus Revive Our Hearts, to speak to women.

So the program this week may seem a little one-sided. It is one-sided, but I want to be quick to say . . . and thank you, Dr. Eggerichs, that in your book you address both men and women.

In fact, there’s a whole section of the book I didn’t even read, and I would counsel the women who buy this book to skip the section that’s directed toward husbands; because you know, that can just create all kinds of expectations that we don’t need to have.

So you do speak to men, and you challenge men about how to communicate love to their wives. But what we’re talking about this week and what we need to hear as women is, what does it mean for a wife to respect her husband and to show respect?

Help us as women understand some of the things that we may not intend to communicate disrespect, but they do. We don’t mean for this to come across disrespectfully, but to a man it communicates disrespect.

Dr. Eggerichs: Right. And let me back up even further and comment that sometimes women think, “Well, why are we challenging the women when the men need to be challenged?” Because historically, over the last 40 years, the men are the ones who have been told to be loving.

Dr. Dobson had our program on 3 different times in 13 months, and he said, “I missed it. I missed it.” He said, “Truthfully, we who are experts in the family area have been challenging men to be more loving, and the idea of really challenging women has been far less.” That was his testimony.

So from a historical standpoint, the number one complaint men have is: “I’m tired of being beat up.” So I suppose we need to be a little fair to men on that side.

But here’s the other reason I bring that up. The key to getting a man to pay attention isn’t by coming at him in ways that he perceives as disrespectful: “You’re not living up to it. You need to change. You need to . . .” All of that sends the wrong message. It sabotages the very thing that we’re trying to do.

You cannot motivate a man to be loving by coming across in a way that’s disrespectful, any more than you can motivate a woman to be respectful by doing a whole series of unloving things. We know that. As a woman you know that.

So, too, you need to understand something. “There’s no way I’m going to start respecting him until he starts loving me.” It won’t work. It simply won’t work. You cannot continue to send the message, “You need to change.”

Furthermore, the reason women do that is that they know, if he just made some slight adjustments, she’d out-love him. “He has no idea what I would do for him if he would just make this little change here. I mean, this guy would think he’s died and gone to heaven! But he’s going to get there sooner than he wants to if he doesn’t cut this out.”

But the point is, she has a longing for him to know and to feel what she’s feeling here, the hurts; and if he would just slightly do some different things . . . But what happens in that process in the Crazy Cycle, when she feels unloved—going back to that idea, she tends to react in ways that are very disrespectful, and she doesn’t see it.

She may think it’s just a noodle in the face to him. “Oh, I’m using disrespect; I know that. But he should know that’s just a noodle.” And it’s used to get him to awaken.

But in the man’s world, that disrespect feels like a brick in the face. So what he does is he just locks up. One of the things I encourage a wife to do, after she’s had a fight with her husband, for instance, is to go into the bathroom, shut the door, look at herself in the mirror, and re-enact as best she can the conflict that she just had with her husband.

Research points out the dark look in the eyes, the sour look, the scolding finger that comes up . . . Re-enact it. Come back across at yourself in the mirror in the way it came across. Then ask yourself, “Is there any man, or any person in this world who talks to him that way?”

This is one of the things that we say to women about how they can begin to introduce some things. You need to understand that he’s not usually shutting down on what you say because men banter and debate with each other all day long.

But we do so with a twinkle. We do not do it with a scowling look, a dark look, that kind of look that could be interpreted as, “I despise who you are because of what’s happened here.”

Men pull back from that. One of the things that we encourage the women to do is to say, “Okay, how can I come across in a way that feels more respectful to him even though he doesn’t deserve it?”

Let me repeat this, Nancy, to all who are listening: He doesn’t deserve it. He hasn’t earned it.

It’s not a matter of him being superior to you. It’s not a matter of you being inferior to him. He won’t treat you like a doormat. Trust me on this. Even though it may feel like the result is going to be deferring to him and just giving in to anything . . . no, no, no.

We’re talking about how you confront, in this instance, maybe his unloving behavior. You must confront as respectfully as you can the behaviors that he has demonstrated that are unloving.

Now, I know you feel like you’re forsaking the feminist team when you do that. I know you feel like you’re losing power when you do that. But when you do that in faith toward Christ in particular . . .

Try it several times. We even talk about a respect test here. But enact that; watch what happens. If your husband has any degree of good will, you’ll see him soften and actually look at you, and he will engage you. Because when you come across respectfully—let me just say it this funny way—you’re a better man than he is at that moment.

You see, you’ve entered the honor code, and now he knows you’re more loving than he is, and he knows he’s less loving than you. He knows you’re confronting him on something that’s been distressing. He knows you’re a good woman.

What he sees here is another opportunity for you to send him the message that he’s not acceptable, that you don’t approve of him, that you don’t respect him, and you’re using this in some ways as another chance to change him. He doesn’t hear the deeper cry for love.

He just thinks that, for whatever reason, “You just don’t like me.” And he loses energy.

But when you do it respectfully, it’s unbelievable. It would be the same as him coming across to you lovingly. Most women will hear anything a man has to say if he says it lovingly.

She won’t like what she hears, but if he comes across as, “I don’t know how to say this. You don’t deserve for me to come across as unloving. You know the ‘family of origin’ stuff and my anger. You’re the best woman. I was frustrated when this happened. How do I say this in a loving way? I want to say it lovingly to you because I’ve hurt you so many times in the past, but we’ve got to talk about this.”

Every woman I know would say, “What time do you want to talk?” She doesn’t want to hear what’s being said, but she’ll engage it because he’s speaking a deeper language. And every person who speaks the mother tongue of another person listens. When you speak the mother tongue of respect, he will engage you, which is what you want.

But the feminist movement is giving women the license to be disrespectful when they feel unloved, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

So they’re at a crossroads. I know that the women listening who have never heard this before are in shock. It’s so foreign. It rings true, yet they’re frightened. They’re replaying it in their minds. “Oh, I’ve blown it. I’ve blown it.”

You can recover really quickly, but you’re going to have to make a decision. Am I going to continue what I have been doing—being disrespectful in motivating him to be loving—or could I actually do something respectful in response to his failure to be loving? That doesn’t seem wise.

Well, have you ever really tried it on a consistent basis? You’re really at a crossroads—it’s a crisis, maybe.

Nancy: It’s a crisis of faith.

Dr. Eggerichs: It is. But it could be kind of exciting.

Leslie Basham: Wow, that’s helpful stuff! Maybe I’ll try it on my husband, Drew, later today.

That’s Dr. Emerson Eggerichs in conversation with Nancy Leigh DeMoss about the subjects of love and respect. In fact, that’s the title of the book Dr. Eggerichs wrote: Love and Respect. You can pick up a copy wherever Christian books are sold.

If you’d like to listen to Nancy’s full interview with Dr. Eggerichs, it’s available to you exclusively from us here at Revive Our Hearts . You can listen via an MP3 file or CD. We’re offering it as a thank you for your gift of any amount.

Simply contact us at www.ReviveOurHearts.com to make a donation. If you’d rather call, our number is 800-569-5959.

Let me ask a probing question, one that I want to give you a few weeks to think about. When it comes to love and respect in your home, how much does your television help or hinder? Have you ever thought about that?

We’ll be saying more about that in the weeks to come, but coming up in August is what we’re calling the 30-Day TV-Free Challenge. So consider how your TV affects the atmosphere of your home, okay?

Tomorrow we’ll hear from Dr. Eggerichs on how you can give your husband what he calls “the respect test.” Interested? Then we’ll see you back tomorrow here on Revive Our Hearts. Thanks for listening.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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