Understanding Men, Part 2, The Rest of the Story

So we have a few topics to cover today. Let's dive right in.

Three secrets: what he won't say about his hopes, fears, and feelings three reasons why he does what he does and not something else, and three ways to upgrade how you can inspire him to become a better man. Are you ready for this?

Hello, I'm Dr. Debi, and I've been helping men, women, and couples grow together for more than twenty five years. Now it's your turn to learn what I learned and taught as a couples counselor and university professor. You are the Wise Woman, and this is your personal development podcast packed with instant encouragement and practical tips.

And men can learn about women too, because this is a safe place where women are valued and men are respected. We talk about biology, socialization, behavior, emotions, communication, and connection because men and women are different. Always have been, always will be. And that's a very good thing.

Let's talk about three reasons.

There are three reasons that every man does certain things and doesn't do other things. And sometimes those other things are the very things you think he should do. But when you realize that he's got so much of this embedded in his DNA, and that is really the way God designed him, it is the purposes that God has given him to fulfill in life. And he's going to go for that first.

It's just part of his nature, if you will, to do these things. And the first of those things is protect. A man is driven to protect. He protects other people.

And he protects other people lots of times to his own greater risk. You know, he might risk hurting himself. You look at our heroes, the marines, soldiers, sailors, policemen, firefighters, all of those predominantly male heroes that will go out of their way, will step into harm's way to protect someone else. Now I got to tell you, if he is under attack, whether it's physically or emotionally, he will protect himself.

You can count on that. In fact, that's the primary reason that men stumble is they are protecting themselves. But again, we don't have time to go into all of that. Just know that he is driven to protect and that he will protect himself if he needs to.

The second reason he does what he does is he looks for ways to provide for you. A lot of men really want to be the breadwinner. They want to be the one that makes the most money. That isn't always the case in every family.

And when it's not, the relationship is a little bit more difficult. I've not seen a situation where the woman made more than the man and the man felt great about it.

He always wants to be the one to provide. And if you will, that could be part of the way that he tries to protect her. But he's looking for ways to provide. He's looking for ways, if you will, to contribute to her life, to make her life better.

There are reasons for that. We'll talk about that in the next section. The other thing that seems to be so deeply ingrained embedded in a man's personhood is to solve problems. He actually finds great satisfaction in being able to take a problem and figure out a solution.

And that's why he doesn't listen to you when you're complaining about somebody or you're expressing emotions. His brain gets triggered right away. There's a problem here. We've got to fix this.

Now, it doesn't feel that way to you because most of the time you just want him to listen.

But in his mind, his automatic response is to solve the problem. Remember, he has been taught not to express his own emotions. In fact, he's been taught to avoid them altogether. So if he's going to avoid his own emotions, guess what he's going to encourage you to do?

He's going to encourage you to not dwell on your emotions, but to move real fast to a solution. Now here's a quick tip for you. If you want to share something with him, that's emotional. Keep it as brief as you can.

Okay? Because he's going to get flooded with his own emotions pretty quickly. But tell him at the start, I've got something that I want to share with you. And I don't need a solution.

I just need my best friend to hear me out. And when I'm done, I just want you to hold me and tell me it's going to be okay. And then get his consent for it. And then keep it brief.

Take your comfort from him when he offers it and be very glad that he loved you enough to listen and to offer the comfort that you asked for instead of trying to solve the problem that you didn't want his help with in the first place. Really kind of a a tricky one in that in that problem solving area. Again, we could say more about that. I could talk for days about all of this stuff, and there's so many examples that I'm I've got in my head that I really don't have time to share with you right now.

But, there will be a point for that. When we talk about a man's purposes or the reasons that he does things, the why behind his behavior, we have to remember there is a bottom line on that. And the bottom line comes, I believe, from Ephesians five, where Paul says, Submit to your husbands out of reverence for Christ. Why should you submit to your husband?

Well, let's see if he's supposed to protect you, if he wants to provide for you and he loves solving problems for you, then you're going to submit to Him so you can let Him do the job God gave Him to do.

It doesn't mean you're not capable. It doesn't mean that you have to dumb yourself down. It simply means that you allow space and you allow freedom for him to be the man that God created him to be. And oftentimes that means he's taking leadership. And how he takes leadership depends a lot on how you respond to him. No one can be a hero if no one will let him be the hero.

No one can lead if no one is willing to follow. That's the beauty of marriage, I believe, is that we engage in this beautiful dance together where the woman gets to be the woman and the man gets to be the man. And you orchestrate something that you can't orchestrate any place else in your life. You can only do it in your marriage.

You can accomplish a lot of things. But like I tell my clients, it's like, this is the one place where you get to be the girl. Let's admit it. Every one of us deep in our heart longs to be the princess.

And this is the place where we get to do it every single day. And I love it. Okay, now we are ready for our three upgrades. So again, by upgrades, I mean, these are the things that you can do to facilitate an upgrade.

How does that sound? You know, in the beginning, when God said that it wasn't good for the man to be alone, it was because he needed another someone. He needed someone who was like Him, but not like Him at the same time.

What is true of Eve in the Garden of Eden is also true of you and your own marriage. You were created for your husband to adore, to pursue, and to please. Now that stuff all sounds really, really good, doesn't it? So what happened?

This is where the serpent came in for Eve. And I think he approached Eve because he knew the power that she had to influence Adam, the same kind of power that you have today. Now, we can argue that the men have more power. And certainly in some situations, that is true.

But I believe that women still have power that they don't even realize they have.

Eve listened to the serpent. She ignored what God had said about eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And she gave it to her husband, and he followed her. He went right along with the whole thing. You know, the Bible says He was right there with her when this happened, and He did nothing.

So she offers Him the fruit. He partakes of it. Then when God comes looking for them, He goes like, Because you've done this thing, here's what's going to happen. And He pronounces the curses.

He gives a curse to the snake. He gives a curse to Adam. He tells Eve that she's going to have pain in childbirth. But He also tells her about her relationship with her husband.

He says that she is going to have a desire to fix, manage and control her husband and that her husband is going to resist her. That's the way I interpret that Scripture. That then becomes woman's default position, the one that she falls into matter of factly. Under the curse, we have a desire to fix, manage, and control our husbands.

But that's not where the story ends. Jesus came and redeemed mankind, womankind, if you will. And He redeemed woman to inspire, influence, invite her husband into a richer experience of life, the very things that God created her for in the first place. She has been reset.

If you look at those, you can see inspire.

She's adored again. Influence. She is the one that he is pursuing. Where she goes, he's influenced by where she goes.

He wants to go after her. The invitation is that part of him that wants to please her. She lets him see how much richer life can be. And oftentimes, just a richer emotional life.

And He wants to please her. And so He is willing to engage in that deeper experience of life. You know, years ago, when I started my clinical practice and worked with mostly with couples, I had a tagline and the tagline said, I love helping the boy win back his girl. And some years later, a woman that I'd been working with told me, you know, I think you should change your tagline to I help women get what they want.

You know what? Both are true. I still love helping the boy win back his girl. But I also am really invested in helping women know how to get what they want.

So what exactly does it look like to inspire, influence, and invite a man? So how do you encourage a man? Well, first of all, you need to learn how to respond to his failures. And trust me, every man has plenty of failures, and every man knows what they are.

And I'm going to tell you what you need to do is ignore them. I'm not saying you never give him negative feedback. You absolutely can do that. But what you don't realize is because you have so much power in his life, he can usually tell by expression on your face and your body language that you're not happy with him.

Now, sometimes you might actually use words and sometimes that's appropriate to do that. But you only want to bring it up one time because there's a lot better way to encourage a man than pointing out his faults. And that is that you want to do something called reward successive approximations.

Holy cow, what does that mean? Well, I learned that term when believe it or not, when I was training rats in the behavioral sciences lab way back in my undergrad. And what we learned to do was we had to train these baby rats to run-in a maze and to get them to go in the right direction to get to the end of the maze, where eventually they were going to get a treat. We had to actually give them the treat when they were just even pointed in the right direction in the beginning.

And then the next time we would put the treat a few inches farther. You may not know this, but baby rats are very nearsighted, so they can't around a long distance from where they are to be able to see that treat. So you want to keep it kind of close to them. So first, you're rewarding the baby rat when he turns in the right direction.

And then when he turns in the right direction and he goes a couple more inches. And then the next time when he turns in the right direction and goes four or five inches, then when he turns in the right direction and he goes ten inches, when he goes in the right direction and he makes it all the way to the end of the maze. Those are called successive approximations of the target behavior. When you're training baby rats in a maze, you don't yell at them.

You don't attack them, blame them, criticize them. You don't hit them with a rolled up newspaper because that's actually not gonna work. However, continual reward when they're moving in the right direction. You can train a rat to do a lot of things.

Now I know your husband's not a rat. Okay? Actually, when I use this example, men are not terribly offended. Of course, I typically use a dog instead of a rat because it has a little bit less negative connotation.

Right? Anyway, the ideas point out, reward the things that he's doing that move him in the right direction.

For example, if you want him to be the spiritual leader in your family, whenever he does anything like take you to church or pray before a meal, you want to look him in the eye, touch his hand, and simply say, Thank you.

You have just rewarded him for doing something spiritual.

You can't really take over and say, We need to have a time together to read the Bible and pray. And I think we should do it at ten o'clock on Tuesday nights after the kids have gone to bed and before we go to sleep. And by the way, here's a book that I think would be really good for us to read together. If you do all that, you have actually taken over the leadership.

And now he's following you. You're giving him the directions. Instead, if he shows any interest in any books at all that you think would be good for the two of you to study together, then you simply say to him, Well, that looks interesting. I'd like to take a look at that with you if you have time.

You're actually rewarding that successive approximation again of something that he's moving in the right direction, just like that little baby rat. He's turned in the right direction and you want to give him that smile and the touch and the thank you. Really important stuff to do. And it's the rare woman who really is able to grasp this concept because we typically use our power in a very negative way.

And we point out the man's faults. We tell him what he's doing wrong. And he glazes over and he just feels like a failure. And remember, if we go back to one of the earlier parts of this, men don't have a lot of confidence in the first place.

They already are unsure of themselves. And many even feel like they're failing miserably at certain aspects of life. And we don't want to add to that. Instead, we want to be able to reflect back to them all the wonderful things that they're doing.

And surprisingly enough, they will actually repeat those things that are rewarded.

In fact, that is the very definition of a reward or reinforcement. I'll use those words interchangeably. The very definition of a reinforcement is anything that increases the likelihood that the behavior will occur again. So we want to do those positive things that cause that behavior to occur again and again and again.

So the bottom line on all of this is that you remember Proverbs thirty one. We've heard about that one a bunch. It starts off with a woman of noble character is a rare find. That section on a godly woman or a woman of noble character begins with a whole idea.

This kind of woman is a precious jewel. This is really rare. And if you find one, you should hold on to her tight. And another thing it says is that she helps her husband find favor and goodness all the days of his life.

And that's the kind of woman I hope that you want to be. It certainly is the kind of woman I want to be. And it's something we're all still learning how to do well.

In summary, you are created to be adored, pursued, and pleased. You have a choice. You can fix, manage, and control, or you can choose to inspire, influence, and invite. We always want to remember to reward those successive approximations. We want to keep that man moving in a positive direction to become everything that God intends for him to be. The bottom line, remember, a wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands, the foolish one tears hers down. Your action plan.

Change one small thing that you do. It can either be to reduce the amount of negative comments that you make toward him, or it could be touching him and smiling more frequently. Just a simple touch on the hand or the shoulder, means a whole lot to a man.

Observe his responses over time. He may not respond immediately to some of the changes that you make, but you can count on that it has registered with his brain, even if he holds back an outward response in the beginning. But very often they respond very, very quickly. But you want to watch this over time.

If you get a positive response, keep it up. If not, then consider why that might be. The bottom line? Learn, apply and repeat what helps.