Speakers (Nick Stumbo, Dan, and others) discuss marital conflict as more than surface disagreement: conflict often functions like trauma, activating stress biochemistry and resurfacing patterns learned in one’s family of origin. Dan and Nick give personal examples—Dan grew up with an unpredictable, emotionally volatile mother; his wife Becky learned to hide from an angry mother—which produced complementary but ultimately clashing conflict styles (belligerent/verbal vs avoidant). They argue you cannot change what you don’t name: couples must trace present disputes back to early learning ("leave your mother and father"), dig into roots (the book title Deep Rooted Marriage is referenced), and name patterns to free present relationships and build deeper intimacy.
Start with a very, very hard but simple fact. You cannot change what you don't name. And so the question is, how do you. How does your spouse engage conflict? Conflict, let's just say, is tension. And tension, even if it's over a dish rag, has a certain dimension of trauma, meaning it's going to raise your biochemicals, your stress biochemicals. And so you are going to have cortisol and adrenaline, noradrenal catecholamines, beginning to flow through your body, even over something as small as X, Y or Z. So to begin with, the reality of when you're in conflict, there is a degree of trauma. So what has to be asked is, what's your history? What's your story? How have you handled significant and minor traumas in the past? So we always have to go to our earliest learning classroom, which is why Scripture begins with this, Leave your mother and father. Now, that wasn't physical, because in the ancient near east, people didn't go off to college. And then, you know, they often stayed.
Under the same roof.
Yeah, yeah. They lived in a rural agricultural world. And it isn't because they would be independent financially. So this is a deeply psychological process. Leave the loyalty, leave the structure, Leave the processes that have formed to be who you are, but you can't change what you don't name. So I came from a family that had not a lot of conflict. But my mom, I'm an only child, my mom, if you know the term, she was borderline personality disordered, which means she could be weeping one minute, raging the next. She could throw a pot and then be as apologetic and then make a joke about it. And I'm talking about that all in about a two or three minute period of time. So I learned to live with unpredictability. A lot of. Lot of tears, a lot of rage. Becky, my wife, ended up in a family where she had a very playful father, but a very angry and cruel mom who was demeaning, critical. So Becky learned to hide. She literally learned to play in closets because it was a safer domain, and she learned to avoid conflict. So already what I can say is, you've got two profound different styles of dealing with heartache and conflict. I'm belligerent and I'm verbal and I get into the middle of it and she hides in a closet and avoids. Well, that worked pretty well for a while until, and I mean it very significantly, until she began to grow more in Jesus and then began to get a voice and began to name things about my own failure and then all of a sudden, for the first number of years, we were absolutely compatible in our sin. And then, in part because of her maturing, things got a lot more, shall we say, spicy. And it wasn't pleasant, but it's been. We've been married now 48 years. A long, sweet, horrible, glorious disruption of the structures of how each of us came to manage something, of the heartache of life. And that's what I mean by. A marriage is meant to be revelatory. It's meant to expose you, but not in a way that leads to judgment and shame. It's meant to expose you so you're invited into a far deeper relationship, not just with one another, which is fabulous, but far more into a far deeper relationship with Jesus.
Beautiful. Yeah. I love what you're saying, Dan, that we want to connect what's happening in the moment to our story and to our past. And I think that's been a huge growth area in our marriage. And for me, when there's conflict, it's to ask the question, like, what's the conflict behind the conflict? Or to ask, like, what's really at stake here? Because when my wife and I are having an issue, often around money or in laws or kids and our different styles, when I begin to notice in me that my level of reaction is getting really, really strong, that there is always. I have found I don't recognize it in the moment. It's often in the retrospect. It's in the looking back. It's in analyzing, like, man, what was going on. There is. I will realize there was something more at stake for me in my story or the message I was hearing then that maybe has things to do with bigger questions, like, am I being respected? Do I matter? Does my opinion count? And whatever has happened with my wife is tipping me into that much bigger question. And now I'm fighting to protect what I think is at stake without even realizing that's what I'm doing. And so I love how you're equipping couples to think through that. And I assume the book's going to do a whole lot more. And if. If someone's not already interested in getting it, that, to me, that answer alone should be enough to go, okay, how can I figure out what's really going on in our conflict? Because if you don't really know what's at stake, what else is coming into the picture, you can't resolve it. And then I think back to what you were saying earlier. It tends to move us towards. Well, we never seem to be able to fix this. So now we just figure out how to avoid it or to kind of live in this neutral zone where we're no longer engaging. And that's certainly not healthy. So I think you're giving some really, really good principles there.
Yeah.
And I just would add, Nick, Dan, thank you for talking about the psychological leaving and cleaving where I never in all my years ever heard someone say they never left physically. Although I knew it, I never made the connection. So that sense of psychologically. I remember when I was young, I would call my dad to ask. Before I would ask my wife on a decision that we were going to make in our marriage, I would check with my dad before I did my wife.
Right.
And it just showed of, well, wait a minute, I got to turn that page and get on to us and take what was good from my mom and dad, but leave what was unhealthy. And that's what we say to our kids and what we give you. Take the health, but leave our. Leave our dysfunction with us.
Oh, brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. And again, if we go back to what's said in scripture in terms of the core relationship of male and female, you know, when you look at Genesis chapter 2 and 24, there's a sequence to it. Leave your mother and father and then become united, which implies communion and hard to get the word communication there. And then become one flesh. So if there are struggles which are inevitable that there will be sexual struggle. What so often seems to happen is people want to somehow figure out how to resolve the sexual issue rather than working back to the beginning of the problem. The beginning of the problem isn't sexual. The beginning of the problem is you haven't left your mother and father. And that's so easy when I have clients who go, I haven't lived near my parents in 40 years. And it's like, you could be on Pluto. It doesn't matter. We're talking about. You are still bound to the way you handled the heartache of what happened in your own family. And you've not named that you have become passive, or you have become belligerent, or you have become defensive. And it's got a history. So those are the roots. When we name the book the Deep Rooted Marriage, the reason we name that is because you've got to get to the roots. You've got to dig through the soil to begin the process of tending to the deepest part of what has formed you in order to open the door to the possibility that some of what you're stuck in isn't because you don't have the skill or the motivation. You just are bound to a past. And you keep carrying that luggage and all the particularity in it into every particular fight you have. Can we mess with the past to free the present and literally to create a different future?
