You’re fifty-two. You run a business. You’ve raised adult children and buried a parent. And you’re lying in a full-size bed in your childhood bedroom with your feet hanging off the end, listening for footsteps in the hallway, because your mother is about to come check the thermostat for the fourth time tonight.

Welcome to the holidays.

Corey and Pam spend this one on what happens to your sex life when you go home. Not the logistics of it, though those come up. The thing underneath, which is that walking back into your family system turns you back into whoever you were in it. The fourteen-year-old. The in-law. The outsider, the favorite, the black sheep. You can be a competent adult in every other room of your life and lose it in forty feet of hallway.

The best thing in this episode is a piece of code. For the last fifteen or twenty years, “would you like a glass of water?” has meant something specific in their marriage, and the rule was that it had to come with a real kiss. They spent a lot of Christmases getting water from the back of the house and still wonder whether anybody ever noticed.

What matters is when that code showed up. They slept in those bedrooms for twenty-five years without one. It arrived once the two of them had grown up enough to need it.

Also in here. Why sex in your childhood bedroom at twenty-three was exciting and still mostly immature, because it was stress relief and anxiety discharge rather than connection. Pam’s counter to that, which is that she was tense every single time they stayed at family, while Corey was thrilled, and the two of them were having completely different experiences in the same bed. Why hosting your own holiday turns into a performance against Hollywood’s version of it, leg lamp included. Keeping a family hierarchy straight, where you play one role with your parents and a different one with your spouse, and only one of those is the top of the chain. Three helpings of dessert and half a bottle of wine as a decision rather than a circumstance. The cataract game. The buffet line.

And the heavier thing that showed up on its own, which is Pam talking about feeling guilty for getting to lie in bed next to her husband after her dad died, because her mom didn’t have that anymore. The holidays carry that too.

What we want from you. Stories. Where the holidays trip you up, what you’ve figured out that works, and especially the funny ones. The near-miss at your parents’ house when you were forty-one. We’ll read the good ones.

feedback@sexymarriageradio.com or 214-702-9565.

Happy holidays from the two of us, a couple weeks early.

The post Would You Like A Glass Of Water #806 first appeared on SMR.

Part two of two. Last week was You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See, and the homework was to write down your markers. What your sinking looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like.

You sent them. Somebody picks up pine cones in the front yard. Somebody else knows they’re regressed when their teeth start hurting. Another one goes quiet, hides in YouTube, and loses interest in family and the whole messy business of life.

Every one of those is a person trying to get rid of a feeling.

This episode goes under the markers to the thing driving them. There’s a sentence already running when you go down, and you don’t arrive at it while you’re sinking. It’s preloaded. Corey’s is I’m in this alone, nobody cares. Pam’s is I’m never enough, with there’s never enough time riding alongside it.

Pam traces hers back twice. Once to being the kid in the remedial reading group who decided she’d never feel not-smart again. And once to the first fifteen or twenty years of their marriage, after Corey disclosed his porn use before the wedding, when she was certain she could never measure up to whatever she assumed he was thinking about.

Here’s the part that matters. Those sentences were accurate when they got written. That’s why they stuck. The problem is they’re a report on an old house, and your spouse is paying interest on a loan they never took out. So the question in the moment becomes whether it’s happening now, or whether you’re eight.

Also in this episode. Why “I’m regressed” said out loud works, and why it backfires if your spouse hears it as a call for rescue. Schnarch’s descending rule, which is settle yourself down, and if you can’t do that control your behavior, and if you can’t do that shut your mouth. Why you act better before you feel better instead of the other way around. Pam’s software iteration idea, where she’s on version sixteen but version one is still in there underneath. And the distinction that carries the back half of the show, which is clean pain and dirty pain. Anger festers. Sadness heals. Under most of the anger in a marriage is grief over the marriage you thought you were going to have, and that death isn’t the end of the marriage you’ve actually got.

Your homework. Last week we asked for your markers. This week we want your sentence. The one line already running under the surface before anything even happens. And where you first learned it.

feedback@sexymarriageradio.com or 214-702-9565.

Credit where it belongs. The trench, the depths, the ugly fish and the magic words come from Dr. David Schnarch’s unpublished manuscript Living at the Bottom of the Ocean. He calls it regression. Corey calls it sinking into the trench in Go First, out in January.

The post The Meaning Underneath #805 first appeared on SMR.

You’re outside on a nice afternoon. Nothing’s wrong. Your phone buzzes, you look down, and you see the name. You haven’t answered. Nobody’s said a word. And everything in you already dropped.

That’s where this episode starts, and it’s part one of two.

A listener wrote in after the silent treatment episode with a fair question. He understood the pursuer and distancer pattern. He understood the idea of handling yourself instead of managing your spouse. What he wanted to know was how. How do you actually calm yourself down when years of wiring hijack you in half a second?

The answer takes two weeks, because you can’t fix what you can’t see. This week is seeing it. Next week is what you do with it.

Corey and Pam work the whole thing out loud on themselves. What does your sinking look like, feel like, sound like, taste like, smell like? Corey goes from six foot one to five foot six and clams up, or he overexplains the same point slower. Pam speaks before she thinks, and if she’s alone she screams in the car hard enough to lose her voice for two days. One of them heads for a spicy chicken sandwich. The other one goes back to the fridge for more dark chocolate. Those sound like throwaway details until you realize they’re early warning signals you can actually catch.

Also in this episode. Why the deeper you go the uglier you get, and why there are no friends down there. The 9 PM rule for tense conversations. Why most people only see their own descent days later, and why that still counts. And the two options that don’t come with a third one where nothing changes.

Your homework this week. Get a piece of paper. Think of a scene where you sunk. Then write down what it looked like, felt like, sounded like, tasted like and smelled like. Not the story of the fight. Your own tells.

Then send us one of them. Some of what you send is going to shape part two.

feedback@sexymarriageradio.com or 214-702-9565.

Credit where it belongs. The trench, the depths and the ugly fish come from Dr. David Schnarch’s unpublished manuscript Living at the Bottom of the Ocean. He calls it regression. Corey calls it sinking into the trench in his book Go First, coming in January. Same model, different words.

The post You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See #804 first appeared on SMR.