Is hilltopper having angry outbursts? If so, he might need anger management classes. My H was referred to anger management classes for angry outbursts. If it's just hostility and strife, of course they don't need outside intervention because Marriage Builders takes care of that. That is what the program resolves. I have not seen anything that told me that anger management was warranted, did I miss something?

If AM classes are needed, I would check with Markos, since he went to one while under the tutelage of Dr Harley.

When you try to tell us what her reasons are and tell us what she is thinking, that's a disrespectful judgment.

Everytime things go wrong, your are reaching for disrespectful judgments.

If I asked you to go through your last ten posts and identify the DJs for us, I'll bet you could find ten, but I'll bet I could find a hundred!!!

The biggest problem evident in your marriage is these DJs. Do you believe it's okay to tolerate some DJs, or do you believe they should not be tolerated at all?

I agree sometimes it is not.


Good grief, Hilltopper, when the doctor gives you a shot, do you hit him because it hurts?

Some of what you will hear here will be extremely unpleasant, but it will be the most important things in the world to hear if you want a good marriage. You had best learn how to listen to things you don't want to hear and throw out the responses that come so quickly to your mind and take more time mulling over what is being said to you.


Hill, you have a SERIOUS Disrespectful Judgment problem, and I doubt you are going to get much traction until you address it. It sounds like you've got a lot of energy to meet her emotional needs, but it sounds like you need some help developing some insight into what DJs you are committing and empathy into how that is making your wife feel.

I predict you'll be starting over, over and over again, until you get these DJs gone.

I can promise you, my friend, from my own personal experience, that you are massively UNDERESTIMATING the importance of this problem, and OVERESTIMATING the importance of your wife's apparent motivational problem. She is here. I promise you that if she is having motivational problems, we can help her with that, but I can also promise you that we cannot help her if you are not SERIOUSLY, DESPERATELY, INTENSELY motivated to fix this DJ problem. Can we trust that we will see you put all of the effort into that that you are expecting her to put into meeting your need for affection?

Hill, I understand that you are making your wife a detailed list of the affectionate acts you would like to see. I think this can be a great idea.

But I just wanted to offer a suggestion: if you want your wife to be patient with you when you commit a DJ, I'd suggest that you be very patient with her when she misses something on your list.

By the way, I think the reason you do better when you are not here is that when you are gone you are focusing on filling her Love Bank instead of rehearsing your most recent conflicts over and over again by posting about them and rereading them here.

Maybe because when you're here, you are venting and DJing your wife instead of working the program?

Take responsibility for your DJs, Hill. It's not the board's fault that you can't talk good about your wife. It's not your wife's fault, either.

Markos, you're wasting your time for right now. He thinks coming here is making things worse. He posts the drama going on and when we call him out on his baggage, he gets upset at us.

Can't talk now at dinner with my wife, no kids! .

Wife and I had an amazing stressful day. We watched our friends 4 year old for the weekend which we committed to two months ago which was probably not a good decision considering the current circumstances. We are gonna be a bit more selective in the future. My wife and I have discussed how I react emotionally to the advice I get here. It is not just here, it is how I deal with everything everywhere and is a problem. I can't even answer why I do so, but I am working on it. I feel like I'm at a crossroads in my life, almost like an out of body experience of sorts right now. It's like, "dude, who the hell are you?"

This is very on point but for different reasons. I don't think the situation Tgrace and I go through is completely understood to be honest. Not in a blaming whiny way, just how things really are. I don't get angry verbally when we talk. But I'm sneaky angry I guess. My face and emotions say it all. Its like a man of many faces or something. I can say something that is perfectly acceptable, but know that the intention in my face and emotions is a stinger. I am doing some self reflection and it should go away and I'm working on it.

I'm not opposed to any of this. What do you think about the fact that I only get angry or upset or whiny about our relationship? I don't care about heads of lettuce or small [censored], the only thing I care about is that I feel my wife loves me. I go about it wrong, there is no doubt, but this is all I want.

I have a problem of not just accepting what people do. I always want to know why and what for. Its like, "you kissed me, but why?" type of stuff. I always want to know why. I do the same thing with my partner at work. If he has an issue why I did something I want to know why he has an issue.

My DJ's are OOC. An addiction of sorts I suppose.

I hear you loud and clear. I can't explain the "why" I do this, I just know that I do it. I'm compelled to do it, it is wrong, but I continue to do so. I love my wife so much guys. I never stopped loving her at any point of this, but my actions and inability to control my emotions are hurting the healing process. I'm gonna do this. I know I might make mistakes, but my wife doesn't deserve this.

You are justified in feeling this. I never blamed you for anything on these posts of mine. I said for me personally it wasn't good at times to continue.

Well, thats the point. If you can't control your anger, then you need anger management. Your anger is entirely your fault, regardless of the reason. And if you can't control it, Dr Harley would tell you look into anger management classes.

Hill, I believe you, and it sounds like you are willing to step up and do what needs to be done. You sound like you are listening. Then main thing you need here is to be truly motivated to change this.

When things start to go awry in your relationship with tgrace, I suggest that you make this your FIRST step: remind yourself that the number one problem in your relationship has been your disrespectful judgments. Remind yourself that you have created an environment that is making it very difficult for your wife to act positively toward you. And then remind yourself that she is trying very hard to act positively, anyway, and she's not going to be able to be consistent in that until you are consistent in eliminating the disrespectful judgments.

Did you hear that, Hill? She cannot be consistent in meeting your ENs until you are consistent in eliminating DJs. She just cannot do that, no matter how much she wants to.

Your brain and your reason can latch onto this fact and make the plan to get your ENs met by eliminating DJs. But your emotion cannot. So you are going to have to overpower your emotions, repeatedly, with this piece of logical reasoning.

Your emotions are going to point you to certain "tools" to try to get what you need. Almost every one of those "tools" is a DJ and is really a weapon used against your wife. If your passion is in the driver's seat and not your logic, you are going to crash this relationship.

It is going to take awhile. In the meantime, your wife is here, and she is asking questions and listening and following the advice given. You are incredibly lucky, Hill. It is going to take awhile.

You have got to get both ends of this program going. Meet emotional needs and eliminate love busters. Dr. Harley says there should be no tolerance in marriage for selfish demands, disrespectful judgments, and angry outbursts. Not that they should be minimized, they should be eliminated! You can do this, and it starts with adopting a personal attitude of zero tolerance toward these behaviors from yourself.

My suggestion is that you take the word "but" out of your thinking on this.

Admit that you go about it all wrong, and discover that you don't have to go about it this way any more and that there is no longer any excuse for going about it all wrong.

Do you really want a better relationship? Is that really all you want?

Do you really want a better relationship enough to make eliminating these disrespectful judgments a high priority?

Because there is literally no other path to get what you want. There are other paths you can try, but they will not work. You can try really hard to motivate your wife to meet your emotional needs in the face of your love busters, but you will simply burn her out. There is no way she can keep at that forever.

While you have her attention and while she is working so hard to follow the advice given here and to work this program with you, you have a limited window of opportunity. If you do not show her that you can change, that you have changed, and that the change is permanent, do not expect her to continue keeping up this pace.

I just reread Dr Harley's description of DJs. Its not that I never read it, I just want to be very clear on what I'm doing and when I'm doing it.

Think about it this way, Hill; any time I try to "explain myself" to my wife, I am levying a disrespectful judgement.

Its funny how things progress over time and the things that my wife and I once thought were the most crucial for recovery in our marriage were really not nearly as important as we thought! Truth is a disrespectfully judge everyone all damn day. I do it to my business partner and all of our staff, friends and I must be quite frustrating to be around! I'm coming around.....

Right?

It may not be as important to avoid Disrespectful Judgements with people other than your spouse, but it's much easier to do so with your spouse if you just don't do it at all.