S2 E37 | Why She Asks the Same Question Forty Times

I want to start this episode with a sound.

It's the sound that I made countless times in the first two years of recovery.

[sighs] That's it.

That was my contribution to my wife's healing on about a hundred occasions.

I would do it when she would ask a question, and often it was a question that I had already answered countless times, maybe even the day before or the hour before.

And even before I would say a single word, that's what came out of my body, was the sigh.

That and other non-verbal expressions are actually communicating a lot.

If we look at the research of John Gottman, who studied couples for fifty years and is highly accurate in predicting divorce, he says that contempt, in particular, is the single most reliable predictor of divorce that he's ever found, and a sigh is contempt.

Here's what I was saying to Jacqueline when I would sigh.

"This again? You're being unreasonable.

I've already given you what you asked for, and you're still asking.

So the problem is you.

You're the problem in our relationship right now.

Not what I did, but what you're doing right now with these questions." I said all of that without using words, and then I was confused why the conversation didn't go so great.

What I did not understand, what took me a long time to understand, is what the question was actually doing.

I thought she was asking for information.

She had the information.

She was asking for something else, and I was answering the wrong request.

So this episode is about why does she ask the same question forty times... what the repetition is actually doing, and why the fortieth answer matters just as much as your first answer, and how to answer without the sigh, which is actually harder than it sounds.

Because the sigh has a false belief that's underneath it, and that belief has to be dealt with.

Let me tell you what I believed the question was.

I believed it was an interrogation.

I was being punished.

I believed that she was shaming me.

I believed that she was stuck.