Many wives live with great frustration because they keep telling their husbands that something he is doing (or not doing) is causing them great pain, but the husband never changes. The hurt and confused woman thinks, “If I knew I was doing something that was really hurting him, I’d stop it as soon as I found out. Why won’t he?”
- Functional Fixedness
The answer, according to Dr. Melody Rhode (a gifted marriage and family therapist), is “functional fixedness.” This phrase describes a man who will never be motivated by his wife’s pain; he’s only motivated by his pain. For change to occur, he has to feel his own discomfort. He doesn’t like hearing you tell him you’re not happy; in fact, it probably irritates him. But if the pain necessary for him to change is greater than the pain of putting up with your occasional expressed frustration, he simply endures the verbal outbursts as “the cost of being married” and will put the entire episode out of his mind as soon as it’s over.
Why?
Because it’s painful for him to remember the conversation and he wants to avoid pain at all costs! According to Dr. Rhode, men don’t normally change if what they’ve been doing appears to work for them. For example, when a woman allows her husband to treat her with disrespect, he has no motivation to change, and so it’s unlikely he ever will.
- Seek help
Rhodes continues, “There’s a simple question I ask wounded women who seek help to endure belittling or degrading treatment from their man: ‘Why does your husband treat you badly? Answer: because he can.” This is not, in any way, to blame a woman for the abuse, but to develop a new understanding in order to map out a different future.
Rhode asks, “If what he’s doing is working for him, why change? He needs a compelling reason to change and it needs to be more compelling than your unhappiness or private misery with the situation.”
- Change the status quo
If you happen to be married to a man who doesn’t care if his actions hurt you, so long as he gets what he wants. In such cases, allowing the behavior while complaining about it won’t change anything so long as the husband keeps getting his way. Remember, with such men it’s not your pain that motivates him, it’s his pain. A God-fearing man would be motivated to change simply by understanding that his actions or inactions hurt you. For the narcissist, you have to be willing to create an environment in which the status quo becomes more painful than positive change.
In essence Melody is saying to wives, you might be thinking “How can I get my husband to be more sensitive?” while your husband is thinking, “How can I end this conversation that is causing me pain?” He doesn’t want your pain to stop; he wants his pain to stop. This is because his heart hasn’t been renewed. He is a stranger to agape love. Putting someone else’s needs above his own doesn’t even occur to him because he does not have a sacrificial heart or mindset. Your call for him to sacrifice simply because something he is doing hurts you is like asking a soldier to fire a weapon he doesn’t possess.
If your husband is mired in functional fixedness, any appeal to empathy is futile. He is spiritually incapable of empathy. Again, he will be motivated by his pain, not yours.
- Seek validation/ worth elsewhere
What can a woman do? Melody (who has specialized in working with women who are married to narcissists) suggests the following: “Women need to quit being bent to their husbands for their worth and validation. She continues, “They need to be helped to know God as their husband, provider and protector, and not to be expecting this from their husbands”.
Simply put, sisters if you happen to find yourself married to a man who is unmoved by your pain, don’t look to him for your validation and worth. He is not your God.
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