9 Steps To Save Your Marriage For The Husband | Page 2

to cope well? It’s all about self-talk — the thoughts we
have — and how we evaluate the thoughts that we have. You probably have noticed that
your self-talk — those thoughts running around in your mind — has been in some
turmoil lately; many thoughts flowing through your mind.
The Sage Model
Here’s a diagram that we use in your husband’s course. We don’t teach it thoroughly in
the short course your husband is taking, but it’s all taught in the books that came with the
course.

Wife’s Module
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The Sage Model demonstrates that feelings are created by the thoughts we have. Here are
some of the highlights of the model to show you how our self-talk determines our
feelings, actions, and responses. Glance through it and then continue to read something
about each of its sections.
Any given thought comes from either
memory of past events (Recollector), from
our senses (Senses), or from imagination
about something that has happened or might
happen in the future (Constructor).
One of your nine sub-parts grabs it.
You add some importance, time perspective,
scope and level to the input.
And you have a thought (called TWIPI: The
Way I Perceive It).
Your comparator is like a search engine. It
takes the thought and evaluates it based on
your storehouse of all of your past
experiences.
Then you get a match or a mismatch, which
creates a good feeling or a bad feeling. That
feeling leads to a strategy.
Then you choose a persona, and you
respond to the world.
This happens so fast that you can’t follow it in your conscious mind (your awareness).

Wife’s Module
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You’ll see in a moment how this relates to coping, but first I want to ask you to notice
that men are different from women. You and I understand that men are somewhat simpler
to understand than women.
Men generally think they use logic, where a woman might use emotion. That doesn’t
make them wrong; it just makes them different. Here’s a graphic that makes the point
visually.
I apologize for using something funny when we’re discussing something so serious, but I
think it might help you be clearer about my next point.
Strategies
How can one person cope well, while someone else copes poorly in the same situation?
Here’s the Sage Model again. Let’s say a man and his wife have a fight. Nothing big, just
a little spat. They yell at each other and then it’s over. Let’s see how a man might cope
differently than a woman. We’ll take the man’s case first.
She says, “I’ve told you ten times to put the toilet seat down. You’re very inconsiderate.”
The man says, “Get off my back! You’re always nagging me.” I’ll trace the man’s path
first, using the Sage Model.

Wife’s Module
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1) He hears a complaint, and a judgment
— toilet seat left up —he’s inconsiderate.
2) He processes that and
3) gets a bad feeling and he becomes
angry.
4) He adopts a fighting attitude and facial
expression and says
5) “Get off my back. You’re always
nagging me.”
Now, unless she wants to continue the
fight, the exchange is over. He promptly
forgets about it and goes back to what he
was doing.
Actually, in this example, his response
wasn’t very good but his coping was
excellent. Tiny bad feeling — very short
— not strong at all.
Now let’s see how a woman might handle
the same transaction and cope poorly.
1) She hears the attack; “You’re always
nagging me,” and 2) switches to her Us-
part, the relationship part. 3) She gives it
lots of importance because her husband,
who is important to her, is shouting at her.
4) She hears “always” and gives it a huge
scope and gets the thought “He thinks I’m
a terrible wife because I’m always
nagging him.”
5) Partly because she’s a woman, and
feels things stronger then men tend to do,
and partly because she puts a lot of
importance in whatever angers her
husband (and because she believes he
means “always” is nagging him),
6) she has a very strong “hurt” feeling.
Then, because she is using her Us-part
(which doesn’t like to fight because it’s
bad for the relationship), she 7) stays
inside her head and
8) reprocesses her hurt feeling. We call it
looping. Over and over she replays the exchange
— every time, feeling worse each time. Some
women cope so poorly, they could take an
exchange like that and pout or sulk for a day or
two, creating extremely bad feelings, nursing
them and keeping them around for a long time.
Making bad feelings strong and long lasting is
exactly the wrong recipe for good coping.

Wife’s Module
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We don’t know exactly how your husband manages his coping, but we want you to
understand that he now knows that poor coping can damage a relationship, and it’s
exactly the opposite of what he really wants. His poor coping made him vulnerable, and
he now realizes he was seeking something outside of your marriage because he was
creating negative experiences of his marriage for himself.
His pain at the thought of losing you, and his search for help, led him to us. We will teach
him how to cope superbly well, so well, that he