Hi, I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from Baremarriage.com, where we like to talk about healthy, evidence based biblical advice for your marriage. And today we’re going to be focusing on a book that does exactly the opposite.

We’re going to look at The Empowered Wife by Laura Doyle. That book has sold like wildfire. It was positively talked about in the New York Times just a few weeks ago, about how this book has helped so many women transform their marriages using Laura’s six intimacy skills. It was originally titled The Surrendered Wife, and it’s now the Empowered Wife.

For those of you who listen to the podcast, you’ll know that we often do deep dives into these problematic books, usually Christian ones. In fact, this is the first book that we’ve ever done a deep dive into that isn’t an evangelical book, but it is so recommended in Christian circles, and it is one of the most often asked for books that I get and so we thought it was time to do a real deep dive, especially since the New York Times decided to do one just a few weeks ago. So today, two of my good friends are going to sit down with me for a very long conversation. Sorry it was so long, but we had to do this book justice on the Empowered Wife.

And if you want a short form of that conversation, we do have a downloadable one sheet, on the problems with the Empowered Wife that you can get for free. I will put the link in the podcast notes, and you can get that right now handed out to people that, you know, to anyone who is recommending the book and let’s spread the word that this is not a healthy book. Now, before we jump into that conversation, I just want to say a special thank you to the people who took the first look at the one sheet and gave me some feedback before I published it. And those are the people at our Patreon group. You can join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month.

We have several hundred people in our group. Quite a few actually, now. And we just have a great time on Facebook. They bring up great stuff. They show me stuff that I haven’t seen. So usually a lot of the things that I comment on are actually brought to my attention first by our Patreons. And before I do something, we often run things by them. Plus Joanna runs some awesome book clubs, and more. She’s going to be starting a course on how to develop a sexual ethic this year that some of the higher, Patreon tiers can go through. So really fun. And of course, if you would like to support what we’re doing, including our translation work, our Spanish stuff is coming out soon.

You can also give through the Good Fruit Faith initiative of the Bosko Foundation and get a tax receipt for that. So we will put a link to those things in the podcast notes. And then one final shout out, October 2nd and third is our simulcast. So if your church wants to bring us to you, we are doing a marriage conference all day on the third and a sex talk at night on the Friday, and you can simulcast that into your church with allowances for time change. I don’t know how they do that, but technology is amazing. And if October 2nd or third don’t work for you, you can use the recordings anytime within the next 30 days. So do check that out on the podcast. It’s a great way to bring us to your church for really not very much cost. So see that.

And now, without further ado, let’s get on with our conversation.

All right, buckle up, everybody. This is going to be a wild ride.

I am joined today by Bethany Jantzi, who’s done post-graduate work in coercive control at the University of Stanford. That’s right, isn’t it, Bethany Salford. Salford. I always say that wrong. Salford. In the UK and is now helping churches identify coercive control. And she’s been on the podcast before. Love her and Doctor Merry Lin who’s a psychologist who has been on many times and is my coauthor for our upcoming book, which is out in March.

Fawn. Now, I never get subtitles, right? So I’m going to try really hard. Okay, fine. How a trauma response became biblical womanhood and how women can reclaim their agency.

Dr. Merry Lin
You got it right. It is pretty long.

Sheila
I never remember the subtitles. So that is coming in March. You know, I’m writing about trauma responses and one of my big goals and values is to stay in my lane. So I said, I don’t want to do this to the psychologist. So we got Merry on board. And remember that about staying in your lane in our discussion. That is coming in okay. Yes. We’re going to see that come up a lot. So ladies I may read the Empowered Wife if you took one for the team, I sent you all an email and I said, hey, are you willing to work through this with me?

Dr. Merry Lin
Yes.

Sheila
And I don’t know. I have so many notes. And, Bethany, I know you said you had so many notes. We’ll see how much we get through. This might be split into two.

Dr Merry Lin
Yeah. I was highlighting everything left, right and center. And I was like, I wanted to make notes. Facial expressions were happening.

Sheila
So if either of you can sum up, how would you sum up this book if you had to do it in like two sentences to put you on the spot?

Dr Merry Lin
Well, I consider it like an infomercial for her program. It’s kind of like, do these six steps and your life will be perfect? Which is the last thing that I would ever say to someone who’s dealing with difficult circumstances or just the ups and downs of life. So that’s what I would say. It felt like more to me, but I’ll keep it short.

Bethany
Yeah, I would say too, it kind of feels like a formula. And if you apply the formula in the exact correct, precise way, then you will be guaranteed, sometimes within two weeks, the marriage of your dreams, like it was what the claims that she makes. A lot of times I was like, how do you even know how to quantify that? Because I’m not so much interested in what your life is like after two weeks, check in after two years, like, is there any kind of longitudinal kind of monitoring of how this works? But yeah, oversimplifying complex problems down to like a formula with like a guarantee is what it felt like

Sheila
Like, yeah, very, very, very strange. And remember again, everything that we’re going to be saying, like we have, a downloadable one sheet on the problems with this book, I had a terrible, terrible time trying to get all of this into a one sheet, so I summarized it as best I could. You can find that in the podcast notes.

But we’re going to talk about it in broader terms. So let’s start. So her book used to be called The Surrendered Wife is now called The Empowered Wife, and it has sold a lot of copies. I couldn’t get exact sales figures, but this woman is everywhere. There even was this glowing article about her in the New York Times like, like three weeks ago at the point where we’re filming this. So, it wasn’t like a review, per se. It was like this author sat down and talked to her and the author herself was really skeptical, but kept saying how much this book worked for so many people. So there must be something to it. And I just found that in the New York Times to be so scary.

Yeah, that they would do this, but this book is everywhere. So she starts out saying that she talks about the six intimacy skills and we’re going to get into those six skills in a minute. But I want to talk about how she opens the book. So she talks about her own story, how she was really miserable in her marriage, how nothing was going well, how she thought it was her husband’s fault and so what did she do? She went to other women who had been married for over 15 years, who had happy marriages, and she asked them what to do.

Bethany
It’s a very formal research project.

Sheila
Anyone have any thoughts on that?

Dr. Merry Lin
Can I just say that, my understanding is her original book was called First Kill All the Marriage Counselors Modern Day Secrets to Being Desired. Cherish and adore for life. And she starts off talking about trying to see a therapist and how terrible the advice was, and how she describes marriage therapy is not even what happens in marriage therapy.
But that’s a whole other conversation right there. So that opening alone, oh I know better than people who have professional training and I get it, lived experience is really key. But I can get lived experience from somebody who’s living, you know, making choices that they’ve made. And I don’t agree with them and it works for them but doesn’t necessarily work for me. So having a formula, like you said, Bethany, that somehow captures the thousands and hundreds of thousands of women’s marriages in this neat little box, it’s just not realistic. And I think it’s selling something that could be harmful.

Bethany
Yeah, yeah. I also think the gravitas to set yourself up against an entire field that is research based, that is constantly evolving and testing hypotheses and reevaluating to set yourself up against that is a bold move, a bold choice, and to paint marriage counseling. She even says that it’s downright dangerous. So she’s already from the off the hop inserting this fear of like, follow me – I have the answers. Like, don’t. Marriage counseling could be dangerous to you. So it’s interesting how she’s using fear to kind of make people more susceptible to her ideas.

Sheila
She asks, are marriage counselor counselors, marriage counselors. And she says that marriage counseling doesn’t work at all. She says that this is a quote. “They take a theoretical academic approach to marriage. They’ve learned things from textbooks and in classrooms and have degrees hanging on their walls, but they don’t necessarily have the most important credential of all: a happy, passionate, thriving marriage of their own.”

And you’ll never know how many couples your counselor has helped or hurt, because that information is confidential. Like, and she just says that you just should never see a marriage counselor because they’ll make everything worse. And instead, you should just trust her. Because what did she do? She went to women who had been happily married for 15 years and got their advice.

And what I think is so ironic about this is that right where she says that she did that? She also says that people looking at her own marriage would have thought she was happy.

Bethany
Right, right. How did she judge which 15 women to go to?

Sheila
Yeah. Like how does she know that they have good marriages? Like she’s just saying it. And she says that they gave her advice that she thought was stupid. Like she thought this was totally counterintuitive. This was like nothing she’d ever heard. But she decided to do it. And here’s and here’s what she found. And again, this is a quote “I felt as though my husband had changed and was finally doing all the things I had wanted him to. But in reality, I had changed and he was responding to me the way he had when we first fell in love, because I was acting the way I did back then. At the same time, I felt more authentic and more of myself.” And this is the key thing, from the very beginning of the book, and I want you all to hear this, because this comes up over and over again. If she places herself as the instigator for all of the change in the marriage, and she places the entire responsibility for change in the marriage on herself, yeah.

Dr. Merry Lin
And then to her readers, she places that responsibility on the women. Yeah, it’s up to you girls. You can do this.

Bethany
Yeah. I think that was the part that I had like so many notes on, because I felt like it was incredibly dangerous to lay all the blame at the feet of women and to convince them that they have all of the power and control to create this marriage of their dreams. Yeah, we can talk more about that as we get into it, but I like lots of quotes from that part.

And from my perspective, as someone who works for victims of coercive control, how I see that lining up with dynamics in these fields of relationships.

Sheila
No, it’s just not everything that she says doesn’t work in abusive relationships, but it doesn’t work in normal marriages either. And we’ll talk about why. Okay. So she has this quiz, this 20-question quiz that she invites you to take at the very beginning of the book. I am not going to read the whole thing, but I want to give you all a taste of some of it.

So she asks. She asks whether you can tell whether these are true or false. Okay, so here’s one. Husbands and wives have to give and take equally for a marriage to succeed.

Is that true or false?

Dr Merry Lin
Apparently it’s false, yes, because really, the more that women receive graciously from their husbands and focus on their own happiness, the more successful they are.

Sheila
Yeah. Here’s another one. Women have more influence than men on whether a relationship will be connected and fun or distant and miserable. And she says that is true.

Over and over again. It’s that women are the ones who are responsible. Let me see. A happy wife is often willing to have sex with her husband, even if she’s not in the mood. We all can guess that that’s going to be true, right? And we’ve talked about that so much on this podcast. This is the one that really got to me. And maybe we can spend a bit of time talking about this one question eight. A husband wants his wife to be happy and will go to great lengths to make sure that she is.

And she says that what she says at that one is true.

Bethany, you’ve studied for coercive control. What do you think of that?

Bethany
Yeah. I mean, we know that a lot of women experience relationships that have abuse in them. So like 1 in 4 some studies 1 in 3. And then we know that a key driver of that abuse is a sense of entitlement and not only entitlement but entitlement to be in control. So then what we’re saying, what we’re seeing is that these abusers have a distorted cognition that elevates their needs above everyone else. So this idea that all men just want the happiness of their wife and will do anything for that, it doesn’t hold up. When we look at the abuse statistics.

Sheila
It’s just simply not true.

Dr. Merry Lin
And also I think talking about if I asked an average man, they would say, yeah, sure, but they don’t think about the costs and the sacrifice and what actually is needed to make his wife happy, or he has his version of happiness. That’s not actually aligned with reality. Because women I mean, we’re a broad range. You can’t put the needs into little boxes and expect that we’re all going to be the same. And even then there’s nuance with that as well. And so to expect that a man would understand that. So even if he says yes, I would probe a little further and say, well, what does it mean for your wife to be happy? And then I’d ask her that, would you agree with that? And they might not actually line up. And I would say that’s been my experience. And couples who come for therapy are not necessarily couples who don’t love each other, and don’t want to make each other happy. They aren’t trying their best, but they just don’t understand each other’s needs and how they communicate with each other. All of that. And to just say women, it’s all on you. You just kind of do these six steps and it’s going to be all fixed. Is just such a disservice to the layers and complexity of marriages, let alone abusive marriages, as you say Bethany.

Sheila
Yeah. Okay, Merry, you’re going to love this one. Okay. This is question 11 diagnosis and medication for conditions like ADD, OCD, Asperger’s, borderline personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder provide insights that can dramatically improve marriage. And she says that that one is false.

Dr. Merry Lin
Oh my goodness.

Sheila
Those diagnoses may give you insights, or they may be a giant distraction from your own feelings and desires, but they don’t get you any closer to feeling desired, cherished and adored. Which is about practicing the right skills.

Dr. Merry Lin
Yeah. That’s okay. First of all she’s not a clinician. Yeah. Thank you very much for dismissing the value of a diagnosis. And yeah it’s true. It does give partners insight about some of how we are struggling mentally or we process things in a divergent way. But there are such significant differences in how a neurodiverse spouse or one with mental health issues are going to be handling life, their window of tolerance, their ability to handle stress, their ability to handle feedback – all of those things are really significant. Even their ability to pick up on, and understand communication. So it is absolutely essential not just to understand it, but to really have deep, honest conversations of how it impacts the marriage in its entirety. And couples typically have to learn new strategies of how to incorporate that reality. It’s like saying.

Yeah, it’s nice to understand, Sheila, that you came from Bellville and that your family culture, I don’t know what your family culture is, actually, I’ll say mine. I’m Taiwanese, it’s nice to know. But, you know, I can just go ahead and say all sorts of wrong things about Taiwan and Taiwanese people, and it’s not going to affect you.

Sheila
Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy. And then this one sets the tone for the whole book too. Question 19 for a marriage to improve, both people have to work on it. And that, of course, she says, is false. She says women have far more power in a relationship and therefore have the ability to revitalize the intimacy of a marriage single handedly. Men rise to the occasion, but women set the tone.

Dr. Merry Lin
Wow. I mean, I don’t even know where to begin with that one.

Sheila
And that’s really what we’re going to be unpacking, I think, throughout this podcast is what she’s saying in this entire book. So, Bethany, you were saying, like from the very beginning, she makes these crazy promises. So let’s look at some of these promises. And I have a bunch of quotes here. I’m just going to read, and this comes up like this, like page 6 or 7, like this is, this is at the very beginning where she’s explaining what this book is for.

She says, my experience is that almost all marriages are completely fixable, no matter how long the couple has been separated and no matter how hopeless it seems, even affairs, mental illness and addictions have proven no match for the power of a committed wife armed with the six intimacy skills and the support and encouragement to implement them.

Bethany
Yeah, yeah, that I just, I think that this feels to me as her being an author, writing to women who are struggling, who are looking for resources, we’re looking for help that by nature is going to draw in women who are caught in this fog within a relationship that does have abuse in it, because those relationships are very confusing and destabilizing.

And when I meet with these women, they often tell me that they’ve read book after book after book and podcasts and even research, just desperate to understand what’s going on in their relationship. So I can’t help but think about these women being drawn to this book and then reading those kinds of claims and thinking this is kind of a dangerous, if not reckless claim to make.

Sheila
Yeah. Let me give you an example of how she says an alcoholic husband was fixed with a six intimacy scale. So again, this is her. I’m going to read this. I’ve had the honor of hearing the stories of courageous women who were married to alcoholics, physical abusers or cheaters who used the six intimacy skills to heal their marriages.

There was the woman who used the spouse fulfilling prophecy with their alcoholic husband, who subsequently and to her amazement, quit drinking as she repeated what felt like a boldfaced lie that he didn’t drink much. Then there was the young wife, devastated by her husband’s affair. People told me that I would never be able to trust him again, but I now know that’s a lie. I trust him because I decided to trust him. So how did the alcoholic stop drinking? Because she simply started telling everyone that he didn’t drink much.

Dr Merry Lin
She went into denial. And this is the thing. I mean, when she’s talking about happy marriages, to me it feels like she’s promoting the appearance of a happy marriage. That it’s just simply having the right attitude and responding in a positive way to a partner and not acknowledging the seriousness of what the issues are. Now, I’ve worked with couples with exactly these issues, and I have not been able to find success coming out of that unless there is genuine ownership on both parties for the part that they play.

Contributing to the issues in the marriage, including addictions, the porn addiction thing. Oh my gosh, that section. We can talk about that later.

You know, drug or alcohol use, whatever it might be. Both parties have to have this sense of ownership over their part of it. There has to be this whole process of forgiveness and working that through. But for trust to rebuild it is absolutely essential that the person who has the addiction shows over and over again that the behavior actually has changed. Not her perception of the behavior, but literally, are you drinking fewer drinks? Have you stopped drinking? Have you stopped looking at porn? Have you stopped using verbally harsh, abusive language? To me, if that person is not consistently showing changed behavior, then it could be just their doing the check box as I call it, behaviors to say look, I’ve changed. Look, I’ve changed. But there isn’t that deep rooted work. And it takes a lot of work. When somebody is caught up in addictions, it’s just not a matter of having somebody believe in you. Often the person has to come to the end of themselves. They have to seek help. They have to get people who will hold them accountable over their addictions.
I mean, it’s a lot of work. And for her to just say, yeah, just do the spouse fulfilling prophecy.

Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to the women who have read this book and felt that that was the case. And when things didn’t go the way that they wanted to, either had to go into denial mode or they had to try harder. And this is the message that women keep getting. If there’s a failure in your marriage it’s up to you. You have to just try harder. And that places them in such a place of over functioning, taking way too much responsibility and ultimately feeling the blame and the shame when things don’t work out.

Sheila
Yeah. This part of the book really reminded me of Stormie Omartian’s Power of a Praying Wife, as she promises how, you know, when you pray all of these problems can be fixed. And we talked about that on that podcast as well. You know, this isn’t a Christian book, but it’s that same idea, like, no matter what the problem is, these six intimacies skills are going to fix it.

Bethany
Yeah. And that, you’re just not doing it enough or the right way if there’s still a problem. Yes. And this reminds me of the rhetoric around submission and respect. Like, you’re not submitting enough. If you submitted more than you would call out in your husband his masculine leadership and he would step up. And so this idea that it’s on the woman to just double down even more with these behaviors and responses that I think can kind of lead to a habit of like self-silencing and like Merry said, like this, like denial and even some of the examples to the stories, I’m just thinking, I don’t think the story is true like this one here. Another wife explains that it wasn’t until she stopped focusing on the other woman that her husband’s mistress disappeared from their lives and he turned his affection and attention back to her. I’m so ignoring a problem. Whether it’s infidelity or addiction, it doesn’t make it go away. But this is her magical thinking solution, which, if you’re desperate, could be very alluring to believe that.

SheilaYeah. It’s just crazy. And so this is how she sets up the opening of the book with these huge promises that no matter how big the problem is, all you need to do is follow these six intimacy scales which are super easy. And remember that marriage counselors don’t teach them to you because presumably marriage counselors don’t care or are evil.

Dr. Merry Lin
Or are we making money off of marriages suffering?

Sheila
That’s right. That’s what she says? Yes. Where she doesn’t make money off of marriages.

And I want to. And so that’s how she sets up the whole book. Women have the ability to fix anything, even their own physical abuse, or addictions, if they just do these simple things and ignore everything that marriage counsellors say. And I know that sounds absurd, but that’s seriously what this book says.
Like that’s seriously what it says. And so with that in mind, let’s tackle the six skills.

So skill number one is self-care. Yeah. And I want to say from the outset I don’t hate this one. Like yes I had some issues with how she framed it. But I don’t hate this one. And so I want to give props where I can give props because you’re not going to hear much of that in the rest.

But she’s saying that there’s that, that when women take responsibility for our own pleasure and happiness in life, and when we focus on what we genuinely want and are able to communicate what we genuinely want, that that can transform dynamics. And I’m like, you know, this may be something to that. Like, I can see that, I don’t know, what did you guys think?

Bethany
Actually this can be like a protective factor in relationships, where there’s abuse, and control. But the issue is that the victim’s perception of reality gets supplanted by the abuser’s reality. And so after a while, you can’t even trust your own instinct because your self-trust has been eroded. So even if you did drill down and think like, what do I really want? What’s important to me, that it’s going to be kind of distorted and not as reliable. But I think just as a principle, that being really in tune with your desires can be very self-protective against the abuse and manipulation of another person. Yeah. So I didn’t take that on its face.

Dr. Merry Lin
Yes. And then to add to what you said, Bethany, is, women who end up in abusive relationships sometimes often come with their own trauma history. So then you’ve already got filters in place, and, and maybe the women themselves don’t really have a clear sense of their voice and what they actually want. In fact, if you ask the average woman what they want, a lot of times they’d be like, oh, I’d have to think about that. So while I think this is a good concept, I don’t think she digs nearly enough into why women don’t know all the time what they want, how they struggle to communicate it because of fear. And certainly in our Christian culture, it’s, oh, I’m being selfish. I’m being lazy. I’m being too demanding. I’m being too needy.

Sheila
The heart is deceitful, Merry.

Dr. Merry Lin
It is. And so then we’re taught from an early age not to trust our own instincts. So, like, even the space to say I don’t you might not know what you need, but you have to tune into yourself and your own body and your own emotions, not let it be reflective of what your partner is telling you, or showing you, or giving you or not giving you.

Yeah. And even her wording, it’s such an indirect way of expressing a need. Also, there’s problems with that too. Remind me Sheila at some point I want to talk about healthy fighting because it sounds like she doesn’t want any conflict whatsoever in these marriages. And that’s the sign of a good marriage. And that’s not true at all.

Sheila
So, yeah, that actually is a huge thing. So in this section on self-care, she says that what you’re supposed to do is instead of ever making requests or demands of your husband, you’re supposed to vocalize what you want. So you’re supposed to say stuff like, I would love to spend time together in the evenings instead of saying, would you please stop playing video games?

Right. Or you’re supposed to or instead of saying like, I’m worried that there’s not enough money in the bank account, you know, can we look at, if there’s are the job opportunities that you could work on getting to get a higher income, you’re supposed to say, I would just love it if I could buy some new clothes. And that’s an actual example that she gives, right? Like you’re never supposed to say anything that involves the word you. This is the key thing. So if you’re ever expressing a desire that involves the word you. So I would love it if you, then you’re doing it wrong because you’re never, ever, ever supposed to make any demands or requests of your husband. You’re only supposed to say what you want.

Dr. Merry Lin
And the funny thing is if you talk to a typical husband or at least mine. if I do this hint thing. Oh I would just love it so much if I could have a lobster for dinner. He’s like if you want to go out for dinner for a lobster, why don’t you just straight out ask? Just tell me you want to go out for lobster. To me it feels manipulative, like indirect speech to get what we want. It feels like we’re manipulating the other person and also trying to massage and protect their ego, so that they don’t feel criticized or controlled.

Sheila
And that is actually the theme of this book. I believe that what this book is trying to do is to teach women how to manipulate their husbands. It’s not trying to teach you how to have intimate relationships, because intimate relationships mean that you both get to show up with everything you are.

Dr. Merry Lin
I agree.

Sheila
Vulnerable and authentic. This is not advocating for intimacy. This is advocating for acting in such a way that you manipulate him to do what you want. So it’s ultimately a selfish thing.

Dr. Merry Lin
And it’s an avoidance of dealing with the hard stuff of marriage, because showing up both authentically you and I appreciate that she’s emphasizing women’s emotions and needs, but I hate that she doesn’t give space for women’s thoughts or intelligence or ideas which could be better than their partners. And I think that showing up fully with all of that, you are absolutely going to disagree.

And intimacy is that there’s safety where you can talk to things that you disagree about and sometimes very passionately, but with the recognition that there can be repair because I trust you, which trust has to be built because I trust that you will take the time to hear me as I will you, and that we all respect each other’s opinions, even if we disagree.

If you don’t have that essential trust, then it’s all up to you as the wife to manage, manipulate, watch the mood, be careful of his ego, all of that stuff. Oh my gosh, how can you trust to be truly you? You have to hide all that. You know.

Bethany
If you have to follow all these rules like you’re saying, Merry, then that tells me that there isn’t a sense of emotional safety already present in the relationship. Exactly. And that’s why her instructions and all the rules. It reminds me of the woman that I work with and how they are constantly placating and monitoring their facial expressions, their tone of voice, how they word things always like on eggshells about how they express anything to try and avoid any kind of pushback or punishment from their husband. And so it kind of feels like Laura Doyle has a low view of men in terms of what they can tolerate. Their egos are very fragile. And so when you’re talking about intimacy, I don’t see this formula really providing that for both people. Men maybe get to talk at length about their feelings, their wants, their needs, their desires to their wife. But I don’t see a space where the wife is free to share those things with her husband.

Sheila
Yeah. She specifically told not to, not ever.

And I want to emphasize how in each of these skills women are given very, very, very specific scripts on how we are to speak. Yeah extremely specific scripts. So in, in this case, yeah, you’re supposed to say you know, I would love it if, I would love this. And he is somehow supposed to magically then because he wants you to be happy and she keeps stressing this, that men really, really, really want to please their wives, then if you just say, I would love something, he’s going to do it. Whereas. But this is the part that doesn’t make any sense. Because if men really, really, really want to please their wives, but if the second we say, I would love it if you’ve played fewer video games and spent more time with me, then he’s no longer willing to spend time with you because that is so emasculating and that is so threatening to him. Then does he really want to please you?

Dr. Merry Lin
Great. Great point, great point. If it’s just because you said directly what you want from me and I’m not willing to do that, is that really true? Yeah. No, that’s a great point.

Bethany
And this is where we see this kind of reflection of the dynamics in these coercive and controlling relationships. Is that anything that is expressed directly, that is a woman trying to expand or reinforce autonomy, if that’s met with backlash and a negative reaction that conditions her to get smaller and to really self-silence and self-censor.

And that’s what I see at play in this book. And so it kind of I feel like it’s striking to me how much the way that she’s training women is, the way that the victims I work with are conditioned to placate and to self-censor and self-silence in a way that really undermines their autonomy.

Dr. Merry Lin
Yeah. And just reinforces that unhealthy, toxic cycle again and again. And it’s ultimately the woman’s fault if that doesn’t work.

Sheila
Yeah. Yeah. So this is a manual on how to manipulate your husband while self-censoring yourself, basically. Wow. And we haven’t even brought this up yet, but let’s just mention this in every single chapter. She tells you that you cannot do this alone, that while these six intimacy skills always work, and she uses the word always so many times in this book how they always work, you probably can’t do this alone, and you really need her coaching program. And so this whole book reads like an infomercial for her coaching program. And we tried to figure out how much it costs. I think Bethany and I did some digging. Bethany, you even took one for the team and signed up for her emails.

Bethany
I have been getting a lot of emails from her. So like, you know, sign up there, don’t hold back.

Sheila
And we think it’s around like 297 a month, like $297 American a month for her coaching programs. And in order to become a coach, I think that’s like $30,000 or something. So any woman, regardless of your education, can sign up to become a coach where you can then coach other women in these six intimacy skills and over and over and over again in this book, you’re told that you can’t do it without it. So okay, here we go.

Anything else on that? Oh, can we go on to skill number two? Are we good?

Dr. Merry Lin
Yeah, lots to say, but I think it’ll fit into the other sections.

Sheila
Okay. Skill number two is to restore respect. And I don’t think any of us were surprised that respect plays such an interest. Yeah. And a big point here. And I want to start by how she opens this whole section, which made me want to bang my head against a wall. I think I probably did, or I like if the book were not on a Kindle, I would have thrown it right in or drowned it.

But she talks about how women don’t show respect to their husbands anymore, and they keep talking about how bad their husbands are. But your husband is a good guy. And Emerson says this all the time, too. Like, I couldn’t believe the parallels between what she says and what Emerson says in Love and Respect. But she over and over says, your husband is a good guy, and how do we know that he’s a good guy?

Because you married him? And here’s a direct quote “we can only marry our match. Since you’re not mean and spiteful. He’s not mean and spiteful. You’re not a bad person, so he’s not a bad person either.”

Dr. Merry Lin
Wow. Where is the data?

Sheila
Like. So basically, she’s saying that abusive men don’t exist.

Bethany
Yeah. And it’s interesting to talk about like, so much she goes back to the beginning of the marriage to show like, this is what it could be like, but no abusive relationship just starts off 100% abusive because that’s part of the manipulation and the deception that is at play. That’s part of that intermittent positive reinforcement. And when you’re in a relationship with someone who is abusive, they have been abusive from the start. But it’s a calculated, sophisticated tactic at play. Yeah. With that intermittent positive reinforcement. So every time that she talks about this, about what the relationship was like at the beginning, it’s proof of what it could be. I just think for the 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 people that are in a relationship with someone who is abusive, that just doesn’t really add up because this person has a desire to control that trumps these other desires.

Sheila
And I wanted to talk about those numbers for a minute. So, yes, 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 marriages are abusive and have coercive control elements. That doesn’t mean that 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 women who are reading this book are in those marriages. It’s probably double that, because who reads these books? People in great marriages where they don’t have problems are not reading marriage books on how to fix marriages. So the incidence of abuse among people who are reading these books is much higher. And even if it’s not full blown abuse like it could be addictions, it could be extreme emotional immaturity, which is really common and really, you know, unresolved trauma.

Yeah. Avoidant attachment, like different attachment issues. We all come out of childhood with issues, right? And if we haven’t dealt with them, they can really impact our relationships even if we’re not outright abusive. And so we can be in these really dysfunctional relationships and we’re reading this crap.

Dr. Merry Lin
Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing is, I mean, there’s this running joke that you tend to marry your father or you marry your mother and what again, research has shown, clinical experience has shown over many, many, many, many couples is that there is something in me if I have any sort of trauma or attachment injuries, I’m going to walk into a room of a thousand people, and I’m going to never, ever really be attracted to the person who somehow zings with my nervous system.

And some way my nervous system is familiar and also says, oh, this is our unconscious, typically, Here is a chance for me to work out what wasn’t resolved in my childhood. In this relationship, but because we’re attracted to the same kind of person that we might have grown up with, it becomes this, this, this cycle that just doesn’t change.

So we can only make our match. I would say we can only marry unfinished business, though I can read it that way. And so if we don’t have that self-awareness, we are being very, very intentional about choosing a mate that’s different from what you might have grown up with. If you had a difficult childhood. You will not marry someone who’s your match.

And unfortunately just because you’re not mean doesn’t mean that he’s not going to be mean to you.

Bethany
Yeah. In fact we often see in abusive relationships that these manipulative people, these controlling people look for women who are very high in empathy and yes. Yeah. Yeah. And nurturing and so like that’s not, that’s not the match. This person sees someone who they think can control this person and they will bend over backwards to care for me and they will prioritize my needs. That’s not a match that’s a predatory way of thinking about exploitation. And so I just don’t see that with the way that she describes it. So matter of fact.

Sheila
And it’s just disgusting.

Dr. Merry Lin
What she said. Like totally, totally. And even in non abusive relationships where there’s just differences, we do tend to still out of our own immaturity, our own lack of awareness, Merry, because, you know, they have a stable future ahead. We’re not there’s a lot of reasons why people pick partners that they do. And we cannot automatically assume that, therefore they’re equal in character and development and personal awareness and that willingness to take responsibility for working on their marriage.

Sheila
One thing, one thing that Rebecca says a lot on this podcast is that we need to take responsibility for our own media consumption and for, and this is what I’m hoping that we that you all see. And one of the reasons why we take apart these books is to help you all when you are reading stuff, to be able to recognize the red flags, because when you read a sentence like that, that we can only marry our match.

Since you’re not mean and spiteful, he is not mean and spiteful. If that doesn’t throw up red flags to you, that is a red flag. Yeah, like that should throw up a red flag to you. And we women, we need to start being a lot more discerning and not put up with this crap because this is ridiculous.

Let’s go on with some of the other things she says. Not surprisingly, she says that if you are hurt in your marriage, why are you feeling hurt? It’s because your husband doesn’t feel respected. So the reason you’re hurt is because you are not respecting your husband. And then she goes on to say, and I think we commented on this before we even started recording.

Your husband doesn’t want your opinion. That’s the actual title of one of the chapters that your husband doesn’t want your opinion on. And so we should never volunteer what we’re thinking. We should instead say to him when he’s expressing a thought or when he’s trying to make a decision, you shouldn’t give him your opinion. You should just simply say whatever you think.

Dr. Merry Lin
And if you say what you think and you get hurt as a result is because you disrespected your husband. Yeah, that’s the cycle right there. Yeah. According to her.

Bethany
Yeah. And she has very little criticism for men’s behavior. And so often she frames this idea that you as a wife didn’t know that you pulled this invisible lever. And so now he’s just reacting. He’s just responding. And she gives men so much leeway and so much grace, saying he’s just a mere mortal. He’s just a human being. But for us women, I guess. Yeah, we need to micromanage everything we say and how we say it so we don’t get that kind of grace extended to us.

Dr. Merry Lin
And to and to tie, women getting hurt by just disrespecting your husband. Not only is it a simplification, but it just minimizes the damage that women experience with abusive husbands or angry husbands or just insensitive husbands. And it doesn’t address the core issue. If I respect my husband more, or according to her terms, speak in ways that she considers respectful. Like, whatever you think is respectful, that somehow things will change. The only thing that changes is that maybe I might not trigger his responses, but the only reason why I would even have to be afraid of treating those responses that history has taught me is that if I say truthful things and he overreacts with anger for my self-protection, I have to stop doing that.

So then I’m taking ownership over his overreaction. I’m somehow his mood stabilizer, emotional regulator, nervous system support animal. And that’s what I have to spend all my time doing. And research shows that for women who do that, it takes a huge toll on their mental health, psychological health, and physical health. I mean, Sheila’s and our book coming out.
We’re going to talk a lot about that. And just the impact of this type of response that she is telling us we should do. It can literally cause us to die earlier.

Sheila
Yes. Self silencing causes women to die earlier.

Bethany
And it’s so interesting how this convenient framing that abusive or controlling people want us to have is this false understanding that there’s like a cause and effect relationship because they want you to believe that it’s your fault, that you deserve this behavior. Look at what you made me do. I wouldn’t have to do this if you didn’t do this. It’s all your fault. And if you mold yourself into the compliant person that I want you to be, we would have no conflict. And that’s the ethos of these abusive relationships, the convenient framing that the victims tend to adopt and that self-blame is so destructive and psychologically damaging.

Sheila
Yeah, but this is also why she claims it works, right? Because if women do this, if they never, ever, ever speak their opinion, if they just simply say whatever you think. And, if they just whenever he’s going off on something, if she just says, I hear you and doesn’t give any other commentary, then yeah, there might be fewer fights. But do they have a good marriage?

Dr. Merry Lin
No. And it’s not intimate at all because there’s no shared honesty at all.

Sheila
Okay, I want to go into the next part of this, which is this. So she starts by saying that you’re never supposed to give your opinion because he hates it. And then she talks about how you’re never supposed to nag. Yes. Right. And nagging is any time you make any request of him, like any time that you mention that something needs to be done, you’re nagging him. Even if you’re just simply conveying information. And I want to read to you one sentence or 1 or 1 paragraph that just had me rolling my eyes. So she says, this experience tells me that if I try to get him to change the oil this weekend, I’ll end up with a husband who is completely committed to not changing the oil because he doesn’t want to be controlled, managed, or mothered. It’s simply not a respectful or dignified way for a wife to behave. So you’re not supposed to tell him that the oil needs to be changed, because if you do that, you are controlling him, managing him, or mothering him. So instead you’re supposed to say nothing, and if you say nothing, he will now change the oil on his own.

In what universe does this exist. And this is what she keeps portraying is that as soon as women stop saying a word about what they need, he’s magically going to start doing it. And she tells so many stories about this, about how she just stopped mentioning a really big problem. And now where has been totally taken care of, right? Like she stopped mentioning all the housework. And now where husband does all the vacuuming and he washes all of the dishes because she just simply stopped talking about it, in what universe does that happen?

Dr Merry Lin
Well, I and I might have shared the story before. I have a fantastic husband. But early on in our marriage, whenever I would do the laundry and I’d leave the laundry basket at the foot of the stairs, all I literally wanted him to do was take it up the stairs so he would walk over the laundry basket while he went upstairs. So one day I asked him, “Do you realize that there’s a laundry basket at the bottom of the stairs? He says, really? So I said, oh, and he says, why don’t you just ask me to take it upstairs? It would be so much easier. I’m like, oh that was good to know. So you’re okay if I give you direct asks? Yeah, of course I want to do whatever you need to help you, but I don’t know what I don’t know and I don’t notice what I don’t notice.

Bethany
But she tells all these stories to make us scared of any kind of direct communication.

Dr. Merry Lin
I know.

Bethany
And then all these stories were, like. Yeah, it’s just like magical thinking. But in her own story, she talks about how, like, she had to take over getting oil put in the car because he would leave it so long, and wouldn’t pay bills on time. But then she’d stopped mentioning it, and then he just took over those things, like it’s just not believable.

Sheila
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Can I read this? In the same section, one of the most disturbing parts of the book to me was just the story of Mike and his son Matthew. And I’m just going to read this. And the context of this is just trying to say that women, you may think you want him to act in a certain way. You may think that you want him to do these things, but you need to understand that you’re not a man, and men see things differently. And that’s okay. And just because you want something doesn’t mean you’re right because men have an entirely different way of seeing things. That’s the context of what she’s about to say. So Mike had his eight year old son, Matthew with him, and in between games he asked, Matthew, do you want to have a race down to the water? Matthew’s face lit up. Yeah, he said excitedly. They both crouched like runners at the starting block and Mike said, on your marks, get set. And just as he said go! He shoved his son into the sand and took off running to the water. My friend Brianna and I were both appalled at Mike’s behavior. I couldn’t believe a grown man could do something so mean to a little boy. But my friend Dave thought it was funny and so did Mike. In fact, so did Matthew. They were all laughing while Brianna and I stood there with our mouths hanging open in shock. All the males thought this was great fun and all the females thought it was mean. What a great example of how different masculine culture is than female culture.

I am so horrified. I have a grandson who is almost seven, and if his father did that to him, that would scare Alex so much because Alex trusts his dad. Like that is downright abusive. And the fact that the men are laughing does not make it any less abusive. And of course the little boy is going to laugh too, because he’s not safe. That’s the only way he can get his dad to pay attention to him, or to be nice to him, is to laugh along with the joke of being abused. That’s awful.

Dr. Merry Lin
Yeah, and I remember later on the husband was commenting. He was teaching the son that life isn’t fair.

Bethany
Well, she is like that. She’s like, what were you trying to teach the son by this? So the assumption is that this behavior was intentional and it’s meant to teach him a lesson. So then he starts talking about how life’s not yeah, life’s not fair. And yeah, this idea of, like, masculine, healthy competition.

Sheila
Yeah, but that’s not competition. That’s cheating.

Dr Merry
That’s cheating, that’s mean and that’s abusive

Bethany
That behavior is like a primary attachment figure. Yeah. And then like what if he was to say like, oh that kind of scared me how you did that. Like what kind of response would he get from his father?

I think she just, like, rationalizes this, that our female brains just don’t understand male culture.

Dr. Merry Lin
And also we don’t have the judgment to say that that behavior is actually unacceptable. Yeah, right. That is not helpful to the well-being of our children. You know that. Well, men will be men, boys will be boys philosophy. And we can’t get them anyway. So all we can do is just try to manipulate them to get our way and to speak to them in a way that makes them feel respected and smart and capable and somehow they will magically do the right things.

Sheila
So it also made me think, okay, I’m trying to think of any men that I know, any men at all who would ever do that to their son. And like, maybe I can think of one, maybe of all the men that I know, the fact that she has that many men in her life who think that’s normal tells something about who she’s hanging out with and what she thinks is normal.

Bethany
And this, like, this example is, like, interesting and really stood out. But what if it’s something like verbal abuse from the husband, the way the husband speaks to the son, it makes it seem like a wife just shouldn’t step in because she can’t really understand the lessons that he’s trying to teach his son.

Sheila
It primes the wife to ignore abuse.

Dr Merry Lin
And even to call that masculine culture. I think that’s derogatory to men. And there’s a lot of men now who are speaking up against that kind of thing. And she describes masculine and feminine in such a binary way, like there’s one right way for men, one right way for women. And women are just better at this.

Men are just better at that. And it’s not true. There is such diversity within genders of people’s gifting. My son, who is very sensitive, would have been crying had his dad pushed him, which his dad would never do, but he would be appalled now as an adult male, to consider that masculine behavior. Because it’s not, men can be and should be kind and caring, respectful. And I think respect should be both ways. And she doesn’t speak to that at all. It just speaks about women to men.

Sheila
Yeah. But if she lives in this culture where that is normal male behavior, a lot of what she’s advising makes sense. Because if she’s living in that abusive culture where the men around her all like this, then yeah, the only way to have a life that is remotely livable is to completely self-censor, shrink yourself, lose yourself, you know, so that perhaps he stops being terrible to you. Like it’s just wild. Okay, I just want to read the book.

The headlines, the headings in the book are often the most offensive part of the whole book. Like she says, the most offensive things in her headings. So let me just read in the respect section. Here’s a couple of the headings that she says, and I’ll just let you guys comment on whichever ones you’d like.

Pretend you love your husband more than your children. Right? So it’s the idea that, you know, you have to, yeah. Love. The more I think she even gives an example of, you know, if you were, if you were trying if you were in a boat and you had to save one, you know, you should be saving your husband, right? Which is crap. And my husband and I have even talked about this when the kids were little. Like, if he ever had a choice between saving me or the kids, he darn well better save the kids or I would kill him afterwards, right? Like. Like any man who would save me over the kids is no. And vice versa. Right.

Number two, you can’t criticize your husband without hurting your kids. I think this is complete garbage. Because what kids need to know is that they have. They have the ability to speak truth, you know, and this applies not just even not even in totally abusive relationships. Like there were times where, especially when our kids were hitting puberty and Keith had a habit of being too hard on one of them, and I had a habit of being too easy on the other one. And we weren’t bad parents. We were a good family. But the ability to let the kids notice this and speak it was so healing for them and helped our family dynamic.

Like mom, you’re doing it again.

Or Dad you’re doing it again

Or like, the other thing is, like, whenever we went camping the day before we went camping, I turned into a crazy person. Like, I just turned into an absolutely crazy person. Like the library books that hadn’t been returned for six weeks. The baseboards needed to be cleaned. Like, I just, I went like a crazy person and gave my kids the right or the know how, the opportunity to say, mom, you’re being a crazy person.

Like, this isn’t normal. This isn’t healthy. It was good because being able to speak the truth about your parents is a huge gift.

Bethany
And that we want to model what it looks like to be in tune and to trust our self-perception. And that we can speak to that. And that’s why this book feels like there’s so much gaslighting in it. Like you think your husband is this, but actually, have you ever thought about this and like, there’s so many ways where it kind of feels like Laura Doyle doesn’t believe women when they say, I’m having these issues, it’s a big problem.

She’s like, but what if he tried to be grateful? It feels very gaslighting. One of the things that protects us is having that self trust and being able to rely on our perception and our judgment of what we’re seeing and what reality is, and speaking to that. But that is not something that is modeled in this book at all.

Dr Merry Lin
I used to work with a lot of couples who didn’t know how to fight, because the parents would never show it in front of them, so they didn’t have the ability to be honest with each other or even with any other relationships or relationships, so stayed really superficial. And so they needed to learn how to speak at a level of deeper truths.

And one of the things that I think is so vital to not just do it for ourselves and in our own relationships, but also to model it for our kids, is how to disagree and speak our opinion with respect. So you can say, I don’t like it when you hit your sister. And that’s speaking a truth that is not acceptable behavior in this home, as opposed to saying, Amanda, stop hitting your sister.

Yeah, two different ways. So I think that kids do better. And that’s definitely been shown to be the case when kids have seen parents wrestle through, argue, work through conflict, model how to resolve conflict, they do it better. And also when we do it with our kids because like you said, Sheila, and especially as they grow up, they have this, what I call a BS monitor inside of them. And they know right away when something’s not right and you’re not practicing what you’re preaching. And if they don’t have the freedom to be able to, in a respectful way, point out that disconnection, then we’re not going to grow like there’s this assumption that men already come ready, made with great self-awareness, great ability to know their strengths and weaknesses. And women don’t have to give any feedback. But we know in any industry, any community, any friendship, any relationship, honest, helpful feedback is essential. Otherwise there isn’t authenticity or vulnerability or all that intimacy that she’s talking about.

Bethany
It’s like such an indicator of a healthy marriage, one that’s marked by reciprocity and mutuality is that both people are receiving influence from the other person, naturally. But we don’t see that really in this book.

Sheila
And again, I just want to say like sometimes we’re talking a lot about abusive behaviors. But abuse is one aspect. Like a lot of these behaviors are on a spectrum. Right. And you could have people that are emotionally immature, that aren’t necessarily abusive, but there’s things that they do that are very dysfunctional. So maybe you have a spouse that has a real anger trigger, like they fly in a rage really quickly, but then they come down and you know, they know they shouldn’t have done that. And they’re trying to work on their wind up tolerance and stuff like that, and giving your kids the ability to say, yeah, my dad has a short fuse. Right. Like that’s just the truth. Your kids are going to know it anyway. And giving them the ability to name that is not bad like it’s just crazy.

Dr Merry Lin
Okay, well otherwise the kid would then go, oh, it’s my fault that my dad yelled at me. And that leads to all sorts of difficulties or that. Yeah, yeah, I deserve that. Exactly.

Sheila
Then she also says dishonesty is the best policy and we’re supposed to fake it. So even if you don’t believe it, you fake it. It’s like the woman, that spouse fulfilling prophecy says, my husband didn’t drink much when he was a full blown alcoholic. So you just fake it. The things are good. And as you fake it, that’s a way of showing respect.

Dr Merry Lin
Yeah. How is dishonesty linked to intimacy? How I can’t understand her rationale for that at all. She has the superficial appearance of connection with her partner because they’re laughing together, they’re having fun, they’re having good superficial conversations, but they’re not having deep, honest, relationship changing kinds of conversations if they’re being dishonest. I mean, you have two people together. There is no way you agree on everything. If you’re always agreeing on something, everything, then somebody is lying right and she is saying to your wife you are a liar. Yeah.

Sheila
Because in doing so he’ll become the man of your dreams. Okay, let’s move on to skill three. Skill three is to relinquish control of your man, by which she basically means don’t ever correct him. Because correcting him is trying to control him. Okay. And I want to read this quote from her. She says this “when I am happy and playful, he is typically attentive and affectionate. When I’m controlling, he’s reliably distant and defensive. When I’m vulnerable, he’s quick to respond with tenderness and protection. When I’m grateful, he looks for even more ways to delight me. When I treat him respectfully, it engenders passion and adoration. When I’m anxious, he tries to comfort me unless I’m anxious about him or something he’s responsible for. Then we’re back to distant and defensive.

In other words, he is. So no matter how he is treating her, it’s because of how she is acting.”

So my question is, if he is a barometer, why isn’t she.

Like why does this not work the other way. Why is it all lit on her? And she would say well the only person you can change is yourself. And so we have to focus on what you can do. But it’s just gaslighting you. It’s when you deny an attack, the reverse victim of an offender. It’s saying like if he is hurting you, it’s because you did something wrong.

Dr Merry Lin
When I’m controlling he’s reliably distant and defensive. So let me talk a little bit about conflict. When we disagree, our tones may increase, our words may become harsher. We might become defensive. That’s not a sign of a bad relationship. That’s just a sign of responses that we’re going to have when there’s difficult conversations.

And I always say that if I’m going to be talking to my husband about something just because he’s defensive, it doesn’t mean I should stop talking. It just means I need to give him understanding that of course, he’s going to be defensive because I’m talking about hard things and I get defensive if you’re confronting me with something hard to hear, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to work on that thing.

So that defensiveness isn’t a sign to say, oh, it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have said those things. The defensiveness is recognizing he’s allowed to get defensive, although hopefully in a respectful way. It doesn’t always work that way, and that this is an important conversation that we need to come back to. Conflict often happens over a series of conversations, and it takes a while before it gets to a place of resolution, especially if you’re talking about really, really important issues.

But it’s just so like black and white. When I’m controlling, he’s decent, defensive. When I’m vulnerable, he’s tender and protective. Is this like this binary, this or that, this or that? And no, I’m sorry relationships are far more nuanced and complex and layered, and there’s so many factors that affect how we do what we do and all of those things.

And to say that we are therefore responsible for all of that.

Sheila
And this is what I mean about how she takes something complex and nuanced and way oversimplifies it, flattens it down and says, here’s the formula. That’s not the way that life works. And it’s certainly not the way to have intimacy and authenticity.

And I want to remind everyone that in this section which talks about relinquishing control, remember that her idea of control is wanting him to do anything at all differently.

That is her idea of control is wanting anything at all to change. If you are wanting anything at all to change, then you are trying to control your spouse.

Bethany
Or if you have an expectation, you can’t have an expectation. And this reminds me of because I was a big thing. When I was doing some work on for my program, we did like a case study based on like a documentary or someone’s memoir, and I chose the Duggars, and I was delving into some of their beliefs, and this was like a big thing that they taught their children is that to have a happy marriage, you can’t have any expectations. And that’s what this reminds me of. But it’s normal and healthy and okay to have expectations. But for Laura Doyle, that’s like the pathway to having a terrible marriage.

Sheila
Okay, I want to read that. There’s one section in this that made me especially upset. And it wasn’t even one of the bigger things, but she’s talking about a woman named Tiffany who was trying to figure out what was on her paper. Laura talks about it as being on your paper.
If you were to write down everyone’s responsibility, put it on their own papers, what would be on your paper versus your husband’s paper? And you’re saying only pay attention to the stuff that’s on your paper that you’re actually responsible for. And a lot of women say, well, they can’t figure out, like, what’s on his paper versus hers. And so she’s telling this story of a woman who got it mixed up with this woman named Tiffany.

Her issue was that she had a teenage daughter who was a slob. And she really wanted to teach this teenage daughter to stop being a slob. So she decided that she was going to stop doing this daughter’s laundry, and she was going to make her daughter do the laundry. And her husband kept undermining her.

Dr Merry Lin
He would pick up the laundry and stick it into the laundry? Yeah. So he would basically pick up all the mess of her clothes. Yeah.

Sheila
Right. And Laura Doyle said that she needed to remember that what she wanted was a clean home. And so she just needed to stop complaining because she was still getting a clean home. It’s like she was trying to teach her daughter not to be a slob. And the husband was undermining that. And that actually does matter. And the fact that she couldn’t even see how this mattered, like if her husband didn’t care about the lesson she was trying to teach the daughter, then the wife wasn’t allowed to care about it either.

Dr Merry Lin
Well, the earlier father was allowed to teach his lesson about how life is unfair by shoving his son into the sand and she can’t teach her daughter a lesson about, a very important life skill is to take care of your stuff. Yeah. It is so unbalanced. That story really bothered me as well, because as a, person who works with parents and tries to help coach them on what would be helpful, especially when they’re dealing with teenagers, to not have clear expectations and then consequences, which are real consequences, not just taking away their cell phone, but like real consequences. She doesn’t have clean clothes, so you have to rewear your dirty clothes. That’s okay, because if she were living on her own and she didn’t do her laundry, that’s exactly what would happen. So it’s giving them the experience of real consequences while still in a relatively safe environment where you can learn from those lessons. To me, that’s such a key part of parenting. Especially teens, and teens are not going to like it. They’re going to ignore you. They can be, you know, angry. They can talk back. And again, those are times for us to be able to say, hey, I understand that you’re upset. And I would be upset too, if you didn’t get to wear clean clothes, but it’s not acceptable for you to yell at me.

And, you know, being able to be that clear and calm but clear, is so key. And so for her to say that that’s not right for her to do it because her husband would rather avoid the conflict of the daughter being upset by cleaning up after her. What are we teaching her?

Sheila
Yeah, and so what the husband wants automatically trumps what she wants.

Dr Merry Lin
Yeah, yeah. Well, his peace, his feeling respected, his feeling that he’s so competent and so great at everything. I mean, I think part of the strategy is, like, a lot of flattery as well. You’re supposed to affirm him when he does something. Well, even very basic things. And it’s just like we’re using flattery. It’s just so manipulative. And again, it diminishes in my opinion, not just men’s responsibilities, but their capabilities. It’s kind of like they’re. You picked up the laundry. That’s so awesome. Thank you.

Sheila
So here’s another headline. And she spends a lot of time on this one. Bethany, I’ll let you respond. Your husband is better with money than you are. And so you need to let him control the finances, even if you’re afraid, and even if he has a past history of not paying bills and overspending.

Bethany
Yeah. Again, this idea that men are this way and women are this way, so follow this. And even in that part she talks, there’s this story of one of her clients about how the client was worried because she saw that what her husband was doing was driving them into debt, but she decided to not raise it and just let it be and see how it would play out. And then over time, he started making better decisions. And now he’s financially prosperous. So this idea that we can’t speak to concerns that we are actively seeing, like played out in front of us is kind of alarming. But then this is just a broad rule that, like, your husband should control the money and, like, make these financial decisions and that you will sacrifice your intimacy if you don’t. From where I stand and the cases that I work on, it’s like not having money or the access to resources is such a common obstacle for women being able to make decisions that they feel like would support their flourishing when they are psychologically like dying and shrinking. So this for me was very concerning.

Sheila
Yeah. I want to pick up what you said, like that story about how she let it go and now suddenly they’re financing the process. Almost all of the stories in the book are like that. So the woman has a completely logical, major concern. She doesn’t speak. And then the husband does this amazing miracle. So in the same section, she tells outlandish stories, like an alcoholic who quit drinking and then lost 80 pounds simply because his wife stopped asking him to get healthy.

And that’s like everything is so over the top. As soon as she stopped making any requests, he became rich and became gorgeous and, you know, and stopped all the addictions and stopped the porn and stopped everything, like it’s crazy making it.

Bethany
Yeah. And it also, again, this message that, like women, we can’t believe our perceptions. We can’t believe our instincts, that there’s an issue that we need to address. We need to just give our husbands the time and space to sort it out. And according to all of her stories, it always works out really well. And it also reminds me of the prosperity gospel, because did you see how many times in the book? That when you give your husband respect, he does better at work and gets a promotion when he handles the money he likes and starts making better financial choices. So there’s also that allure to it as well.

Sheila
Yeah. Okay. Let’s move on to skill four. I didn’t have a lot to say on this one. It was just stupid. But skill four is receive receive, receive. And it’s all about how to get more gifts, compliments and help. And her part about gifts was like, first of all, I just I’m just not like that.
I’m not a person who needs a lot of gifts. And so the whole point is that she’s focusing so much on men giving you jewelry, like, I just don’t know what kind of marriage she’s living in, like, again, it just seems so different from what I’m trying to get. But the whole thing about how the reason your husband doesn’t give you gifts is because you once told him that you didn’t like what he got you, and so now he’ll never buy you another gift again and it’s all your fault. Like, that’s just stupid. Women don’t like getting scales at Christmas. Women don’t like getting blenders. Well, actually, I do like getting a blender. But anyway.

Dr Merry Lin
My husband would so much prefer for me to tell him what I want, rather than him having to go and try to read my mind right? Yeah. No, I didn’t get much out of that section whatsoever. Other than, like you said, it felt really manipulative. It felt dishonest. It felt superficial.

Sheila
It’s like you’re having this really superficial marriage. Yeah.

Dr Merry Lin
Like when you’re first dating, you know?

Sheila
So you’re not really telling him anything that you think, and you’re doing it so that he’ll buy your jewelry.

Bethany
And also the way that she describes it as like a woman’s perceptiveness and her ability to receive is like part of our core essence of like femininity. I was just like that doesn’t resonate with me.
Dr Merry Lin
Like I said, it’s very binary how she sees men and women and she wants even more so with these six skills to put everybody in those very clear boxes of what they’re supposed to do.

Sheila
Okay, I want to move on to skill five. Oh my gosh. Okay. So skill five is to reveal your heart with vulnerability. So she’s telling you to be vulnerable with your husband on the things that you’re feeling, which is kind of the opposite of what she’s been saying for the rest of the book.

Right. But suddenly we’re supposed to be vulnerable. And one of the first things she does is she has a word that you can say that will always work. And she stresses the word always so many times that this will always work to reframe conflicts and to help your husband understand your perspective. When he says something that hurts you, you’re just supposed to say ouch. Yeah, saying ouch always works. And that’s it. You’re that’s all you’re supposed to say is ouch.

Bethany
Yeah. And she cautions to not explain any more about how this specific incident was really hurtful because that’s the way that my dad would talk to me. No, that’s too much. That won’t be helpful. It will kill your intimacy. Just say ouch.

Dr Merry Lin
And the other thing too, with the word ouch. I have come to realize that people don’t always interpret what I say in the way that I mean them to hear it. Oh gosh. This miscommunication thing, it happens everywhere. So when I just say ouch. And out of that, I’m supposed to assume that of the you know, 100 words I said of the you know 20 micro expressions I threw at him of the emotions that came and went of all of those things. He’s supposed to go and pick out the one thing that somehow is associated with ouch! With my saying nothing more than ouch. I’m sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Because again, it’s putting. Now here is where we’re putting a response to him. It suggests somehow reading our minds on what it is that’s bothering us and somehow just change it. And even to know how to change it because he knows I don’t like it, but does my husband know what I don’t like about it and what I would have and ask him to change? No, because I’ve just said ouch.

Sheila
Yeah, and you’re not allowed to say anything more than that or else you are trying to be controlling.

Bethany
Yeah. And you’re blaming him so you can’t say when you did this, I felt that you just have to say ouch, ouch.

Sheila
Yeah. And that and because he wants the best for you and he loves you, he’s going to change.

Bethany
Those are really big assumptions right. They’re like we’re assuming that men can’t be selfish, abusive, manipulative and all that. We’re just always saying he’s a good guy. He’s a good guy and good guys just genuinely want you to be happy. So just say ouch and he’ll stop that behavior that made you unhappy.

Sheila
Speaking of abuse, let’s now go to the worst part of this whole book.

So there is a heading that is called the Myth of Verbal abuse.

And here is a quote. “Verbal abuse is a symptom that the wife hasn’t learned the six intimacy skills yet. This does not mean that his temper is your fault. It just means that you haven’t yet discovered how to express yourself while preserving emotional safety. Chances are, when you think there’s verbal abuse present, that you either started it or piled it on.”

She also says most incidents of verbal abuse are actually two way streets, and she says that verbal abuse is a temporary, curable condition. So if it’s a temporary, curable condition, how can it be a myth like you can’t have it both ways on this.

Dr Merry Lin
Where do we start? Where do we start on this one?

Sheila
I mean, do we even need to like, can we can we even can we just simply say that is atrocious? Like, I don’t even know if we need to say anything more than that. This shows that this book is completely unsafe.

Bethany
Yeah. I will just say that this other line kind of shows that she doesn’t understand abuse is about power and control and about entitlement. So she has this other quote in that section where she says, I saw a lot of other marriages where verbal abuse completely cleared up thanks to the intimacy skills. First of all, clear up like it’s a rash or like acne, like, not something that can psychologically destroy you.

This. So if verbal abuse cleared up when you learned these intimacy skills, what does that potentially tell you? Because what we know about abuse and power and control is that there is kind of a lack of conflict, and there’s peace when the person with less power is existing exactly as they’ve been conditioned to exist, to not push back, to shrink themselves, to not protect their autonomy and agency.

So if the verbal abuse completely cleared up, thanks to the intimacy sales skills that actually is like a sign to me of what this whole dynamic is that is being fostered in this relationship.

Sheila
There it is in a nutshell. Yes. There it is Bethany. Beautiful.

So all this book is teaching you is how to exist in an abusive relationship without. Yeah. And how that.

Dr Merry Lin
Works. It works because it has worked for so many years of these women’s lives. That’s how they’ve survived abusive marriages, is to shrink themselves, not have a voice, be their partners punching bag verbally, and just keep smiling and doing their job and being a good wife and mother. It works. But it’s not a happy, intimate marriage at all.

Sheila
I don’t know, I don’t think she knows what intimacy is.

Dr Merry Lin
I don’t think so. Based on what she’s saying here. And the phrasing of it. Okay. She accepts that the temper, his temper might be his fault, but that’s because you’ve triggered it. Yeah. You haven’t discovered how to express it properly while preserving emotional safety. Well, emotional safety is a relational dynamic. I can’t create emotional safety for the entire situation if there’s multiple people in it. Everyone contributes to that feeling of emotional safety. And even if I have emotional safety with my spouse, it’s not always emotionally safe. So what I am responsible for is tracking when I don’t feel emotionally safe. And how do I protect myself and how do I help my husband understand that he’s created a situation that is impacting my sense of emotional safety, and vice versa, that’s how you do intimate, real, honest, hard work.

And that was the other myth that marriage is not hard work. Oh, gosh. Yeah, marriage is stinking hard work. If you want to have a true, intimate, loving marriage where both of you show up not just with your needs and your feelings, but your opinions, your thoughts, your intelligence, your gifts, your abilities, all of that. That’s not what she’s teaching us.

Sheila
Okay, let’s move on to the crazy part of the book. It’s just crazy. Like, this is just downright insane and nuts. Yeah. So she talks. And the next two sections are in this section on being emotionally vulnerable and and so being able to feel your feelings. And it talks about how to save marriages when they’re, when they’re destructive, like when they’ve basically blown up. So how to save a marriage when she’s the one who wants to leave, and then how to save a marriage when he’s the one who wants to leave.

So in the section on when she’s the one who wants to leave, she says the way to save a marriage is to get off the fence, to stop trying to figure out if you’re going to leave or not, and just decide you’re not going to leave. And she gives the story of Patrice. So Patrice was a woman who had been physically abused, and she was married to an alcoholic, and she decided to leave. So she moved out with the kids. But then there’s a heat wave, and there was no air conditioning in the apartment where she was, but back in the house, it became unbearable. And so she moved back in with the husband during the heat wave, and things got so much better, and she realized she just needed to decide to stay and she did. And because of that, he stopped being abusive and he stopped being an alcoholic. Like, that’s just simply crazy, right?

Bethany
Yeah. I think the way that this also exposes her children to potential harm and abuse is really concerning for me. Again other stories when she describes like incidents of violence or how she was worried about her husband’s alcoholism and what the kids saw and experienced, like even if for yourself, you want to buy into this formula, like, how does it affect the safety of your children and what they’re witnessing, experiencing what they’re learning about how to exist in these relationships?

Sheila
But this whole idea that the way to save your marriage is to decide that you’re going to stay no matter what, and you’re never going to leave. She’s right. And the sense that, yes, when women make that decision that I’m going to stay, they do start putting up with more things. They do start shrinking themselves more because they don’t have a choice.

Right. Like me, if I’m going to stay no matter what, then I have to make this survivable. Yeah. And so how do I make this survivable?
Right. And yeah then you end up shrinking. And that’s why like if you want to have a healthy marriage you have to realize that you might leave because you know what if you’re being abused you leave. And if you realize yeah there are certain things that I will not put up with for the sake of myself and my children. Then you have an incentive to make sure those things don’t happen. But if you realize, no, I’m going to put up with anything and everything, then your only incentive is to figure out how to survive.

Dr Merry Lin
Patricia’s situation, she came back only because there is a heat wave and realised that the conditions that she’s living in apart from her husband physically are worse, in terms of the home. And so that’s the reason that took her back. It wasn’t because she’s choosing to stay in the marriage because she had hope in the marriage. It’s like what you said, Sheila. She went back. And a lot of women do feel powerless to leave for financial reasons, for, just self-doubt in their ability to be independent so they feel like they have no choice. And so all they can do is try to make it survivable, which is go back inside that little box which she reinforces with these so-called skills that she’s teaching.

Sheila
Yeah. And again, the idea that her husband will stop being an alcoholic and will stop abusing you just because you’ve decided you aren’t going to leave. Like, what universe.

Bethany
Yeah, I mean, that is part of the cycle that we see is that when the abuser gets a hint that he actually might lose control, that he will either ramp up his abuse or he’ll go into a period of pretending that he’s changed. And it’s going to be different from now on. I’m not going to treat you this way. It’s going to be different. If you just come back, I will treat you differently. So like there’s a little bit of reality in there, but not in any way that will help anyone reading this book understand the dynamics of abuse and power and control.

Sheila
All right, let’s get even crazier. Okay, so what about if he’s the one who leaves? All right, so he’s leaving, and you want to save the marriage. So what she says is you’re not allowed to show any grief at all. You’re supposed to smile because smiling is more attractive. Because if you show any kind of grief, that’s an implied criticism. And you don’t want to criticize him at all. So you’re not supposed to have even a drop of blame in any sadness, okay? Because you have to own your own sadness and not projected onto him. You have to realize that if he’s cheating, it’s because something was missing in your marriage.

I need to read you this paragraph because, like, I literally started laughing at this. I thought, oh, my gosh, this is so ridiculous. So he’s she’s talking about, a husband who’s cheating. Okay. This is a situation where the husband is cheating and leaving the wife, and you’re supposed to treat it like a seduction. So she says, dress up and doll up, let him open the door and thank him with a sweet smile. Have some fun with it. You might even seduce him. This is your husband we’re talking about. So even if he’s being intimate with someone else, he’s still yours, not hers. You might be tempted to retaliate, locking him out of the bedroom. But when you’re trying to restore intimacy, why not start with physical intimacy?
It’s a great springboard. Make every meeting a date if you see him, even if it’s at the divorce attorneys, the marriage counselors, or just to hand off the kids, pretend it’s a date. So you’re going to the divorce lawyer to make the terms of your divorce, and you’re supposed to pretend you’re on a date with him.

Dr Merry Lin
I feel that what she says is so disrespectful of women, so disrespectful, minimizing not just our autonomy and agency, but that all we are is this sexual being that is supposed to keep her husband by sexing it up and seducing him?

If that’s what it takes to get my husband back because he wants to leave me, I’m sorry that I don’t want that.

Sheila
Have some self-respect, honey. Have some self-respect.

Dr Merry Lin
Yes. And I want a husband who respects me. Is more than just someone who’s going to seduce him. I want somebody who respects my mind, my decision making, my opinion on things.

Sheila
But I really want to know everyone. What does it look like to seduce him while you’re at the divorce attorney?

Dr Merry Lin
Your finger up his arm, while you sign the paper. Trying to seduce him at a custody exchange.

Bethany
Oh, my goodness. But this is so much of her advice, it runs the risk of just exposing women even more to, like, harm. And to pain and hurt. Like, she talks about how, like, women talked about how she separated from her husband. But when they hang out, they sleep together. And she has mixed feelings about that because she doesn’t feel emotionally close.

But Laura is like, no, that’s great. Like sexual intimacy can pave the path for emotional intimacy. So she regularly advises women to engage in behaviors that they themselves already have concerns on, and can actually make them more susceptible to being harmed and hurt. She really does ask women to just put everything out there on the line. In situations where it’s just like, patently unwise to do so.

Dr Merry Lin
And unsafe, unsafe. So she talks about psychological safety in one section. In the next section, she’s asking the woman to throw that all away.

And Sheila has done a ton of research about sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy and how that’s all. And I say ass backwards.

Sheila
Okay. I know this is a super long podcast. I’m going to try to keep this to one podcast, okay? Because I want to say, okay, there’s just two more things I want to cover really, really quickly. Yes, she does have one chapter on sex. And I mean, to her credit, she does talk about women who want sex more than men do.

A case in which, you know, not a lot of authors even acknowledge that happens. So that’s good. But then she explains that if he doesn’t want sex because of something you did because you tried to control him, right? So if he doesn’t want sex because you disrespected or tried to control him, which is simply like, that’s not the majority of the reason.
And then she says about porn or masturbation in this verse, wow, that’s a take. So let me read. “You may not like it that he views porn or masturbates. You may feel strongly that those are unacceptable behaviors and that you wouldn’t tolerate them. But relinquishing control means that you recognize where you end and he begins. Your husband is solely responsible for how he handles his own sexual urges”.
You certainly have influence, but letting him know you don’t approve is a sure way to squander that influence. So you’re not even allowed to tell him that you don’t like it. That he watches porn and you’re supposed to keep having sex with him regardless.

Dr Merry Lin
Yeah. I mean, that is the worst possible advice that you can give. A couple whose one other partner is struggling with masturbation and porn addiction.

Bethany
And it’s so coercive like do this or else. So when you have coercion you don’t have consent. And I just think like talking about destroying actual intimacy and any sense of emotional safety.

Sheila
Yeah. It’s just crazy. And if he wants you to do wild and crazy things, you’re supposed to do the wild and crazy things, like, it’s just it’s it’s. Yeah. Even if you have real problems with them. So that whole section is problematic. The last skill, which again, I don’t want to talk about too much because I think we’ve talked about enough of the elements.

But she says refocus your view with gratitude. So just always focus on what you’re grateful for about him. And then she talks about how you can get this spouse fulfilling prophecy where when you speak things into being so and she uses the example of the woman who said, my husband doesn’t drink much. And then he stopped being an alcoholic.

So as we find the things that we’re grateful for, we speak those things into our lives, he will suddenly become that. It’s like, it’s like the secret that Oprah Winfrey was trying to get going to manifest. Yeah, yeah. The man. Yeah. It manifests. It’s the same thing that Josh Howerton says when he says, you know, give him a crown and he’ll become a king.

So it’s everywhere in evangelicalism as well, but it’s the idea that if you speak something into being, that people will rise to it and will become that. And it’s just simply untrue, because all you’re doing is enabling immaturity and selfishness.

Dr Merry Lin
I like the idea of gratitude. I think gratitude is very important because in a marriage you can focus on the person’s positive qualities. And when you feel your mind thinking about these positive qualities, it does help give you strength and capacity to try to then do the hard work of dealing with some of the problems in the marriage and the things that you’re not grateful for.

So if you focus only on the things that are wrong with the marriage, that is true. You’re going in already with a smaller window of tolerance. Your stress talent is very low so that negativity can breed further negativity. I get that, but so gratitude is great because unless we marry somebody truly evil, there are things we can be grateful for.

But to say that that is the thing and therefore we don’t need to do the other hard work of dealing with hard truths and realities that need to change, that is just so dismissive of, a what a truly intimate, honest, vulnerable marriage is and just, you know, wanting to reinforce again that I find some of the healthiest marriages have a fair degree of conflict.

And I don’t mean that blowout type of thing, but there’s disagreement all the time because people are being honest and hopefully doing it in a respectful way. But when I don’t do it in a respectful way, my husband calls me on it and we move on. But there’s always this: the secret of a healthy marriage is the capacity for repair.

And do I trust that our relationship is moving for repair and there is research on healthy marriages or the things that really tear down marriages? Gottman, Marriage Institute has a lot of research around that. And he does talk about criticism as being, again, how you word things. But the worst one that is directly linked to struggles in marriages is contempt.

So if your husband is treating you with contempt or you’re responding to, you know, wanting things to change with contempt, yeah, that’s not the way to go. So I’m not saying that what she says, some of the skills she’s saying aren’t helpful. I’m just saying that there’s just a small piece of the actual strategy, that it goes far deeper than that.

So gratitude is great, but that does not take over or replace the fact that we need to do the hard work of making changes in our marriages and having hard conversations.

Sheila
Yeah. Okay. If we were to sum up the book, like you think about this whole book now, we’ve gone through the whole thing. What really strikes me is that the audience that she’s writing for, I believe she’s from a Mormon background. But the audience that she’s writing for tends to be quite conservative. One of the things conservatives really like is conservative economic policies. Okay. One of the things that conservative economic policies believe is that if you want more of something, you subsidize it. If you want less of something, you tax it. Right? And that’s why we shouldn’t tax things, because if we want jobs, we do. And there’s all kinds of economic theories about this. Right. But they’re always saying that old people gotta lower taxes.

We’re gonna lower taxes. Because if you tax something it’s bad. If you want more of it, you subsidize it. Okay. Here’s the problem.

What is this book telling us to do? This book is telling us to subsidize immaturity. Right. Like if you want more of something you reward it. If you want less of something, you tax it. Well this book is telling us to make sure that we subsidize that. We give lots and lots and lots of wonderful feedback every time we’re treated terribly. So all it’s doing is enabling bad treatment. It is enabling men to stay emotionally immature.

Men don’t naturally mature because all impetus for them to mature is taken away. Right. Like it’s often friction. It’s discomfort that makes us change. And this whole book is about making your husband’s life as absolutely easy as possible.

Dr Merry Lin
And that somebody will make you happy.

Sheila
And that is not going to make him become something better. That’s simply going to enable him and reward him for staying exactly the same way as he is right now.

Dr Merry Lin
And I would add to that because I think that’s the theme of this book women over function. Yeah. And when you over function your life will go the way you want and you’ll have a happy marriage. But the downside that she doesn’t talk about is that invariably if somebody is over functioning in a relationship, the other person will underfunction. They will not gain the skills. Like you said, Sheila. They will not understand the things that they do that contribute to problems in their relationship. And if it’s true that she says that the men want their wives to be happy, if their wives are doing all the work of creating that happy marriage, that husband never actually learns what truly makes her happy because he’s under-functioning. He doesn’t have the skills, he doesn’t have the insight. He doesn’t have the motivation to do the hard work that it takes to be that great husband he potentially could be. So to me, this is about reinforcing that, in a way that, as we know, links to a lot of health, physical, mental and psychological damage to women.

It’s a dangerous book.

Sheila
Yep, yep. What do you think, Bethany?

Bethany
Yeah, I agree with what you said. I think it is a dangerous book. I think I just couldn’t get over the way that she instructs women to exist. It really mirrors what happens in these abusive relationships where the husband’s mood is kind of like the temperature of the home of this family, and he weaponizes his mood. And everyone has to adapt and learn how to placate and manage those moods. And that it’s really just teaching women different strategies for managing that, but not really asking anything more from him. And so it just strikes me that I think it seems like Laura values being married and staying married more than being able to exist as a full person with your full personhood, your feelings, your thoughts, your desires. That it’s too much to expect that to be valued and seen within a marriage. So her whole goal of ending global divorce?

Sheila
Yeah, she says that explicitly in the book that that is part of what she Wants to do is to end divorce.

Bethany
Will end global divorce, and that divorce is unnecessary. And there’s a line, she says, I can’t think of a bad reason to stay married. So I think that shows that her priority is marriage above everything else, even above the flourishing of the wife’s full personhood and autonomy. And if that’s not your value, then this book isn’t for you.

Sheila
Okay, so I have a question for both of them, for all of us, as we end that New York Times article, saying that so many women swear by this book. And when I put up my Facebook post asking people about this book, a lot of women did say this book saved my marriage. Like, there are a lot of women who genuinely say this book saved their marriage. Why? What do you think is going on there?

Dr Merry Lin
I think this book saved their marriage as defined by this author and as defined by many evangelical spaces, that there is no conflict, that they are legally still together. That, the husband is the one who ultimately is the temperature and that one who’s the head of the household. And because it reinforces that, and it doesn’t change, that keeps women back still in that same space that they’ve been in for years. That seems to me that the women are going, yeah, this works for me. The other thing I would say is it really does take a lot of hard work and honesty and vulnerability and persistence to change a marriage that’s not intimate and good into a healthy one. And it’s easier to say, I’ve read this book, I’ve applied these six steps, and now my marriage is happy.

And I think there’s a lot of self-deception. It’s like they’re drinking the Kool-Aid. Because that’s what they’ve been taught, that that’s the way to a happy marriage. But to what Bethany said, the loss of self and agency is so significant. And if that’s the cost to stay in a happy marriage, I don’t think it’s worth it.

Sheila
Yeah. What do you think, Bethany?

Bethany
Yeah, exactly what Merry just said. Like, if you’re already told that divorce is not an option, then your only choice is to learn to exist and survive within this controlled structure. And so this book gives you the rules to be able to exist within that and to maybe prevent, some kind of like backlash and like anger and rage and all these things. So if that’s your worldview that you can’t get divorced, then I could see that for those women, they would be like, this book really helped me exist and survive within this marriage.

Sheila
Yeah. Here’s my final thoughts. As I try to process all this too, we know that, when people leave marriages, they very rarely leave the first time people leave, it often takes years to actually exit a marriage. And women have often tried several times, even not necessarily abusive marriages, but in marriages where, you know, there’s been infidelity, where there’s just extreme emotional immaturity, emotional regulation issues, etc., that never seemed to grow right.

And if you were to take a snapshot of someone at six months after they read this book and maybe they started going to coaching, maybe they even paid the $30,000 and became a coach and went all in. I want to see those women five years or ten years later, because one of the things we found in our data for the marriage you want is that people put up with a lot of stuff for five years, and it doesn’t bother them that much. And then at ten years, it’s starting to bother them. At 15 years it’s really bothering them, and at 20 years they’ve had it. And by year 25, we start seeing an uptick, because often the people who have really had it leave. And so there’s a bit of a survivorship bias going on after 20 years.

But yeah, for those first few years, people can put up with an awful lot of unfairness.

Dr Merry Lin
Especially if there’s kids involved. And you really believe that staying together as a couple is what’s best for the kids. And so you can make it the best possible way to survive.

Sheila
So you convince yourself that you’re happy, but you’re not. Yeah. And when you are not happy, when you, when you are shrinking yourself, when you are self-censoring, you can only do that for so long before everything starts falling apart. And often the thing that starts falling apart is your body.

You know, your mental health and your physical health start falling apart. Absolutely.

Dr Merry Lin
And so they blame it on menopause. And that’s menopausal women going crazy as opposed to maybe we’re just mature enough to realize we’re just done with this.

Sheila
And yeah. So this book is terrible. It doesn’t work. Please get rid of it. Download the one sheet so you can give it to all your friends who are swearing by it. Because I know, I know, a lot of people in churches go through this book. The link to our downloadable one sheet is in the podcast notes. Send this podcast to other people you know that are buying this book.

And please make sure that everyone knows to never, ever, ever listen to the Empowered Wife or to Laura Doyle. So thank you ladies. Bethany, where can people find you on social media?

Bethany
They can go to my website freefromcontrol.ca. I have lots of resources there. Talk about my services, my work with coercive control survivors, and also people in high control groups so they can check me out there.

Sheila
Okay. And Merry?

Dr Merry Lin
Drmerry.com

Sheila
And I will put those links and links to your social media too. So thank you I really appreciate you taking one for the team everybody.
Dr Merry Lin
This was a good conversation. But yeah, it was painful reading the book. But good.

Bethany
I feel like I started to doubt myself at points. I’ve been married for 16 years, but then I found myself asking my husband, Tom, being like, is this true? Like, do you men think this way? So it’s just interesting that after 16 years, even Laura Doyle kind of got in my head a bit like, should I not be doing this? So it’s interesting. I think we’ve recovered though, so I’m okay now.

Dr Merry Lin
I’m like, that’s excellent.

Sheila
Excellent. Thanks, ladies.
I always appreciate talking to Merry and Bethany there. They’re great. They add so much to the conversation and so please check out their stuff. The links are all in the podcast notes. Merry, our book, Fawn how a trauma response became biblical womanhood and how women can reclaim their agency. I think you can preorder it on Amazon now.

I haven’t talked about that much because I don’t think they filled in all the details too much, but you can find it on Amazon, so I’ll put a link to that in the podcast notes too. And remember, you can download her one sheet on The Empowered Wife, and give it to everyone you know. And then don’t forget our simulcast.

So I think that’s all her announcements. And thank you for sticking it out in such a long podcast, but a lot to say. Lots to learn about. And can we please, please, please stop these ridiculous conversations like can we please stop these ridiculous books? Can we please stop this from being something we even have to talk about? Let’s all show more discernment in the books that we read.

Let’s all be more discerning listeners and readers, and let’s make sure these books find the dust heap of history. Okay, thanks. That’s what we did here at Bare Marriage, and we’ll be back next week for more. We’ll see you then. Bye bye.