Is Your Marriage on the BRINK? Listen Now and Find HOPE!
Dr. Joe Beam cracks the CODE to LOVE on Relationship Radio!
Is your spouse controlling your every move? Has a mismatched libido left your love life a desert? Did your spouse walk out and file for divorce?
Don't throw in the towel! Dr. Joe Beam dives deep into THREE REAL listener emergencies, offering battle-tested strategies to restore a beautiful union:
Do You Have a Controlling Wife? Reclaim your FREEDOM and reignite romance (Spoiler Alert: It's NOT about control!)
Sexless Marriage? Discover the SECRET to a THRIVING sex life, even if your desires are miles apart.
Divorce Looming? Stop the BLEEDING! Learn how to WIN BACK your spouse (without begging!)
Dr. Joe Beam cuts through the FLUFF and exposes the CORE ISSUES that sabotage marriages. You'll learn:
The REAL communication killer (it's NOT what you think!)
Why "fixing intimacy" is a RECIPE for DISASTER
The SECRET WEAPON that can save even the most BROKEN marriages (hint: it involves YOU!)
Struggling is NORMAL. Giving Up Shouldn’t Be! Dr. Beam equips you with the tools and the HOPE to overcome ANY obstacle. You'll discover:
Self-care strategies to navigate the emotional storm of separation.
The power of a SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITY (you're not alone!)
How to TALK to your spouse about getting help for the marriage (without starting a fight!)
Marriage Helper is YOUR one-stop shop for marital BLISS! We offer:
Life-changing workshops to reignite the spark.
Expert coaching to guide you every step of the way.
Is Your Marriage on the BRINK? Listen Now and Find HOPE!
Dr. Joe Beam cracks the CODE to LOVE on Relationship Radio!
Is your spouse controlling your every move? Has a mismatched libido left your love life a desert? Did your spouse walk out and file for divorce?
Don't throw in the towel! Dr. Joe Beam dives deep into THREE REAL listener emergencies, offering battle-tested strategies to restore a beautiful union:
Do You Have a Controlling Wife? Reclaim your FREEDOM and reignite romance (Spoiler Alert: It's NOT about control!)
Sexless Marriage? Discover the SECRET to a THRIVING sex life, even if your desires are miles apart.
Divorce Looming? Stop the BLEEDING! Learn how to WIN BACK your spouse (without begging!)
Dr. Joe Beam cuts through the FLUFF and exposes the CORE ISSUES that sabotage marriages. You'll learn:
The REAL communication killer (it's NOT what you think!)
Why "fixing intimacy" is a RECIPE for DISASTER
The SECRET WEAPON that can save even the most BROKEN marriages (hint: it involves YOU!)
Struggling is NORMAL. Giving Up Shouldn’t Be! Dr. Beam equips you with the tools and the HOPE to overcome ANY obstacle. You'll discover:
Self-care strategies to navigate the emotional storm of separation.
The power of a SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITY (you're not alone!)
How to TALK to your spouse about getting help for the marriage (without starting a fight!)
Marriage Helper is YOUR one-stop shop for marital BLISS! We offer:
Life-changing workshops to reignite the spark.
Expert coaching to guide you every step of the way.
Sometimes you have questions about relationships and you think who in the world can I ask? Well, we try on Relationship Radio every so often to just look at questions that have been sent in and try to answer those questions. Now we choose the questions that we think might have the most number of people who want to know answers to it. But we always want to get your questions and try to answer them when we get the opportunity to do so, and so we have four questions that we're going to answer on this episode of Relationship Radio. Hi, I'm Dr Joe Beam.
Speaker 1:
Typically, I do this program with Kimberly Holmes, who is our CEO, but she's unavailable today. I wish you were here, because we wind up arguing over these questions and that's lots of fun for everybody, including her and including me. We always come to a conclusion together, though we just sometimes take different ways to get there. Well, without Kimberly, I guess I'll have to argue with myself. Let me go through these four questions and see if we can be of value.
Speaker 1:
Question number one why does my husband want to leave to be alone? No cheating, no fighting or being ugly. My controlling nature has chipped away at the marriage to the point. My spouse doesn't feel happy, they're dead set on leaving and I feel like there's nothing that can be done to save us. Is there still hope? Well, let me give the first part of the answer by referring to the last statement in the question. Is there still hope? There's always still hope. We have worked with so many marriages over the last 30 years and we just don't give up. You say ever Well, we give up on trying to help save a marriage. If one of them marries somebody else, okay, that's a different marriage. Now we can't help you anymore. Marriage if one of them marries somebody else, okay, that's a different marriage, now we can't help you anymore. Or if one of them dies, we usually, after three days or so, we'll give up on that one. You say three days, well, there was this one time in history, but anyway, we give up after death and we give up after somebody marries somebody else. And so, yes, there's always hope.
Speaker 1:
We have seen situations that nobody believed could possibly be put back together and, to be honest about it, I didn't believe it either. There have been times when I have told the people that I work with that couple. There is no hope, none. And lo and behold, here they are married together 10 years later doing happy, happy things and having a great marriage. Because sometimes even I, the optimist about marriage, will say I don't think this one's going to work. We see those marriage miracles happen again and again and again.
Speaker 1:
Now, in this particular situation, notice what she says. She's asking for a motive. Why does my husband want to leave to be alone? And then she goes on to say there's no cheating. Now that tells us he's not leaving for an affair partner. No fighting, just not even being ugly. It's just, she says, my controlling nature has chipped away. Now, that's all the answer we need.
Speaker 1:
We can look at what she said and we know why he wants to leave. You see, there's a general principle of life I have never seen fail Never. Now, if it has ever failed, I've just not witnessed it or experienced it and that principle is this People don't leave what they have unless they believe what they're going to is better. I'm going to say that one more time. It's that important People do not leave what they have unless they believe what they're going to is better. Now, it does not necessarily mean that it is better, but they definitely believe it's better. You say okay, so I can see how that applies, maybe, to an affair.
Speaker 1:
Let's say, this husband was, you know, having an affair with Sally Sue out here and he wants to leave his wife for Sally Sue. His why would be that he sees Sally Sue as being better than being with his wife. Yes, is Sally Sue better than being with his wife? We're not saying that. We're saying that he would believe that where he's going is better than what he has. Not that it necessarily is better, but that he would believe, oh, or if he wanted to go live a lifestyle where he's just drinking, carousing, gambling all the time, and he can't do that if he's married, then he might leave her for that lifestyle, and so he believes that's better than being with her. You've got it now. He believes that, even if it's not true. He said but wait a minute, dr Bain. She just said there's not something out there, at least, that she knows about? She said he just wants to be alone.
Speaker 1:
Think about it this way Sometimes the thing we see is better is being alone. See, as better is being alone if what we're in now is miserable. You see, people can put up with a lot, and if somebody's trying to control or dominate me, I may put up with it for a while, but after a while it is so devastating to my self-image where I begin to believe I don't have any value, that I'm not worth anything, and it builds up such animosity toward the person controlling me. Imagine that you have been kidnapped, for example, and the person who is your guard treats you disrespectfully in all kinds of ways. They'll tell you what you can eat, when you can eat, what you will wear, when you wear. In other words, you become like a small child, a toddler, in the sense that this person controls everything that you do. Would you, as an adult, find that reprehensible? Sure you would. Well, you're thinking I would find it reprehensible even to be kidnapped. I understand, so maybe the illustration is not the best illustration out there. All I'm trying to tell you is nobody wants to be treated as if they don't have good sense. Nobody wants to be treated as if they are a child. And even people who don't have normal intelligence do not like being treated in a controlling manner.
Speaker 1:
You say how do you know my oldest daughter, angela Michelle? Mentally handicapped At birth, she couldn't breathe for the first seven minutes of her life, lost millions of brain cells, her IQ is 59. Back 55 years ago when she was born, they would call that trainably mentally retarded. Now realize we don't use that word anymore, but that's what they would call it back then. And so she operates at the level of a slow six-year-old. So she's a little girl living in a woman's body. You say, do you tell her what to do On some things? Yeah, because she's a six-year-old. But even at that, if you control her, like to the point where she doesn't feel she can make her own decisions in life, now obviously her decisions are more limited because of her lack of wisdom. But the more she feels controlled, the less she feels loved. And so it's like we control her only as much as we have to, so that she can feel like she has value as a human being, that she has worth, that she can make her own decisions as much as possible.
Speaker 1:
The same thing is true with a spouse, but with adults. After a while they just won't take it anymore. I'm out of here. Now she's saying is there any hope? Sure, there is, but two things have to happen. The first is the lady has to get it. You say, what do you mean? She has to understand what she's doing. That's controlling. And if she doesn't understand what she's doing, that's controlling, she'll just still control. If he were to come back and he wouldn't be back long, boom, he'd be gone again. So she has to get it. She has to understand. And then the second thing that has to happen is that he has to risk it, because if he were to say I've learned about control, I've learned about how to not be controlling anymore, he's going to say I've learned about control, I've learned about I do not be controlling anymore. He's going to think yeah, right, I'm going to come back in this community just as it was before. So how does she get it? Let me make a suggestion that unfortunately may sound like a commercial, and I hate that. I don't want to be doing a commercial here.
Speaker 1:
If this couple were to come to us, or if he wouldn't come with her because of their current state, she would have come by herself to one of our solo spouse workshops In three days. We can help people start getting vision and all kinds of things like oh, now I see how that works. Oh, I actually thought I was helping there, but now I see how it was destructive, oh, oh, oh. And we have lights going off for three full days People going. I see it now. I see it now.
Speaker 1:
And the reason to come to a workshop to do that is because sometimes you learn it not from the teacher, but from one of the other people in the workshop, one of the other husbands of a school workshop who says when my wife does this, I feel control. And all of a sudden this wife goes oh my goodness, I do that to my husband. I wonder how he feels, and then they can have a conversation. Does that lead you to feel control? So, having other people, even if it's a solo workshop, where it would be all women, for example, or a mixture of men and women all solo, you can learn from each other, and so is it possible. Yes, ma'am, why did he leave you? Because he's hurt, because he feels like being alone is less painful than living with you. But you have already told us why, which means that if this is going to change, the change has to start with you. Are you willing to do that Now? If you're not, it's your choice. You can do whatever you wish, but any hope of fixing this marriage means that you have to learn how to be non-controlling to the point that you change enough that he sees it so that he's willing to take another risk, and I'll tell you at the end of this program how you can contact us. But that's something we can really help with and have many, many times.
Speaker 1:
Now here's another question. My wife seems not interested in being intimate and having sex with me as often, as I have a high sex drive. How do you navigate a marriage when our sex drives are so drastically different? Well, first of all, don't think yourselves unusual. The number one reason that a couple would visit a sex therapist is mismatched frequency, like you're talking about here, or in other words, mismatched levels of desire. He or she wants to have sex a lot more than the other. You might be thinking, didn't you just mess up there?
Speaker 1:
Dr Beam, you're saying that in some marriages, women actually are the ones with the higher sex drive. Believe it or not, yes, it's not unusual in a marriage for the wife to have a stronger sex drive than the husband. Now, more typically, though, it's the husband who has the strongest sex drive than the wife. Are there ways to fix that? There are not ways to make the drive equal each other, but there are ways to get to a point of sexuality where that both of you are happy with it, so that it's not so often that the spouse who is a little reluctant feels put upon, but is often enough where the spouse with a high sex drive can be sexually satisfied. Now can I answer all of that in a short program here? The answer is no, not unless I do a whole program on that, which is not what I'm doing right here.
Speaker 1:
But let me tell you one of the things that's available through being one of our members, if you've been through one of our programs. For example, if you and your spouse, sir, were to go through a three-day workshop, which would be really important, because if you're going to fix the sex drive, you really first need to find any flaws in the relationship itself, not to be nitpicky, not to try to cause problems when there are none I don't mean that but if there are any relationship flaws, you have to find and fix those first. Relationship flaws, you have to find and fix those first. As a matter of fact, sometimes the frequency gets closer just by creating a better relationship between the two people. You see, in our world intimate doesn't mean sex. In our world, intimacy means closeness. Into me see, vulnerability, trust, those kinds of things and if you can rectify or those kinds of things. And if you can rectify or fix those kinds of things, then often the frequency gets better together just because the relationship gets stronger together in the sense of true intimacy, openness, transparency, et cetera.
Speaker 1:
Plus, anybody, any couple who has been through our couples workshop will also have free access to a kit that I put together a few years ago. As a matter of fact, I spent a lot of money putting this kit together. We were going to sell it. I believe it was $700 for the kit and some people looked at it and liked it and thought it was worth more than that. Now we don't sell it separately. We actually have it as an availability to any couple that goes to our workshop. It is seven and a half hours of teaching about sex.
Speaker 1:
But that's not just it. You stop and actually fill out PDFs as you go through and they measure things like your sexual compatibility, things like sexual inhibition, things like well, what if one of us wants to do something sexually that the other person is not sure he or she wants to do? How do we figure out whether we should try it or not? We actually have profiles in there to figure out those things that I've actually shared with marriage counselors to use with their clients. What I'm saying is this is subtle, but step number one make sure you get the relationship where it needs to be, because my guess is, if your drive is that much higher than hers, you're to some degree frustrated. My guess is that means sometimes you're actually causing problems by the way you communicate that frustration to her. My guess is that if you communicate in that way, that her response is not necessarily positive and she becomes frustrated too. My guess is that you already have a lot of frustrations because of this and the way that you deal with it so far. Do you see why we'd say first let's show you how to have the really best relationship. Then you can have that, catch seven and a half hours of videos and that will teach you how to have amazing sex.
Speaker 1:
Our next question comes from a wife. She says I'm trying alone to draw my husband back. He's moved out, checked out and has limited capacity to listen to anything I say, unless it relates to the children or to the divorce that he would like to have. I find it challenging to approach him with what's in it for him. Aren't I enough?
Speaker 1:
Now you realize because I don't know you or your personal situation that last question I can answer for you, like when you say aren't I enough? I don't know what that means. Does that mean that? Do I think that you have the capability of being a great wife? My guess is that you do, but I don't know you. Do I think that you're beautiful enough? My guess is that you are, but I don't know you. In other words, I can't really answer that question because I don't know you. But what I would ask you to do is stop questioning yourself. Don't question whether you're lovely or lovable. Don't question whether you're enough. You need to believe that you are and that, if you're not right now being what you need to be, that you can be that person. Look what you say here. I'm trying alone. That's a tough place to be when it's just you.
Speaker 1:
Now, having a support group can be of great value. Here. You say what do you mean? Some people who know what they're talking about, who have been through similar situations, who can understand what you feel, can understand what's going on and still be very positive about it, rather than saying things like well, just kick him to the curb, it's not the best advice you understand it's not the best advice you understand. In other words, not amateurs, not relatives that love you too much and therefore they're mad at your spouse, not your friends who want you to do what they think you should do, but people who have enough wisdom to help you understand that some of these things are hard and some of these things are difficult to deal with. But here's how you can do that. So he's moved down. Got it Checked out In the previous two episodes of Relationship Radio.
Speaker 1:
If you have not had a chance to listen to those, I suggest that you go back, because you hear a lot of good information there about what to do when the spouse has moved out, about how you take care of yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. But I notice here that you say I find it challenging to approach him with what's in it for him, which tells me that you know some of our material and that when we talk about how to invite somebody to the workshop, how to invite your spouse to the workshop, that what you do is you have to figure out what's in it for him and you help him in that process of seeing why it's of value for him to come to the workshop. So apparently you're already familiar with a lot of our information. Now, if you're a member already of our group, reach out and let those people minister to you in there, not just the members, because they will, they love to, but also our people, our ones that work with us at Marriage Helper, who will be in there to look for their advice and counsel. If you have a coach with us, then I would suggest you ask that coach right there.
Speaker 1:
I'm trying to get my spouse to come to the workshop with me, but I don't know how to ask it in such a way of what's in it for him. And if your coach can't help you with that, then you might want to call back and talk to one of our workshop advisors. You can always talk to one of them by going to marriagehelpercom that's marriagehelpercom slash book now. And if you already have an advisor that you work with, people that have helped you enroll in various things that we do already, then go ahead and talk to him or her again. If you can't get to that person, get to a new one and just say help me know more about how to help my spouse get this, because he or she's not listening to me at this point. Now do we have some magic formula? Not really. Now do we have some magic formula? Not really. I'm assuming you have the workshop. I'm assuming that you have the toolkit about how to invite your spouse to come to the workshop and that's where you say, okay, I say what they already in there, what's in it for him.
Speaker 1:
But I'm finding it challenging knowing how to do that. We can't help every individual because we have thousands of people contacting us every month. We can't have every individual where we can sit down one-on-one and help them figure that out. But if you have a coach already, he or she might be able to do that with you. If you have already a workshop advisor you've worked with, he or she may be able to help you do that. Now, they can't take hours, they'll only have a few minutes because they're all so busy. But my point is we want to help you do this Very much, want to help you to do this, and if you feel that the advice you're giving from us is not enough, write it and tell me that so that maybe I can figure out something else, because we never want to leave anybody anybody to the point where they're saying you guys are so busy you don't have time to help me.
Speaker 1:
And so if you go the route I just suggested and that doesn't work, you write in and say can you please get this message to Dr Beam? And they will. They'll get it to me and I'll see if there's something else we can do, because we really, really want to help. Don't give up the fact that he's not ready now doesn't mean he won't be ready tomorrow. Now, if you're a praying person, if you're a praying person, I would recommend that you also pray Lord. Whatever obstacles are out there, please remove them. Lord, give me great wisdom. Lord, give me great insight. Lord, open my husband's heart. We've seen a lot of people come who said they would never come. We're now happily married and doing quite well.
Speaker 1:
And the last question I'm just going to hit very quickly my fiance and I have been together for 10 years. That's kind of interesting. That's kind of a long time to be together and still just be fiancés. My fiancée and I have been together for 10 years and I've lied to her about stupid stuff all the time and she's fed up. How do I right those wrongs, become more honest and gain her trust back? Let me give you one suggested method. I have seen it work. It's not my method. It was actually worked out by a couple down in Alabama that are dear friends of mine and it worked for them and I've been recommending it to people ever since and worked for them like 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:
Here's what I'd recommend Go to your fiance and tell her can we do this system? If I tell you a lie, I will come back within 24 hours and tell you the truth. Now she might be saying don't tell me a lie to begin with, which you'll probably be fine. I don't want to. I'm going to try my best to always tell you the truth, but because I've been in the habit of lying, it might be really difficult for me to just stop cold turkey, and so, even though I want to stop, I may wind up lying to you anyway because it's been a habit of mine.
Speaker 1:
Now, if I do, I have 24 hours. If you'll agree to the plan, I have 24 hours to make it right To come in and tell you the truth. If I can do that within 24 hours, you give me amnesty, you forgive me, you make it all right. Honesty, you forgive me, you make it all right If it takes longer than 24 hours, or if during that 24 hours, you find out it's a lie before I confess it's a lie, then let's have some consequences, some very negative consequences, to teach me their consequences to my behavior.
Speaker 1:
Now, through that process I just described this couple who are friends of mine some 20 years ago when they developed that got to the point where he never lied at all. But it took a process like that to get him there because he was so used to telling lies, even about stupid stuff. As this question says, some people have to relearn how to talk. Well, I hope the answers to these questions have helped you. Forgive me if it sounded too much like a commercial, and I want you to know this we care, we really want to help. For 30 years we've been helping marriages thousands of them but right now we really want to help yours. Thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next episode of Relationship Radio.
