Chapter 1

Emotional Pain in Marriage: Why It Means You Should Act

From Hope for Troubled Marriages by Dr. Ken Newberger

What should you do in a marriage when your emotional pain doesn’t go away? Should you ignore it? If so, for how long? Should you try to escape the pain through alcohol, infidelity, binge TV watching, and the like? These provide temporary relief, yet all the while, the marriage is dying on the vine.

A Different Way to Look at Pain

Dr. Brand¹ worked with leprosy patients in India and America for most of his adult life. Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) represents an attack on the nervous system. Pain that would otherwise warn individuals they are in physical jeopardy does not occur. These individuals feel nothing.

In poorer regions of the world, rats chew on fingers and toes while a person sleeps. People’s hands get burned in cooking fires because there is no warning signal to prompt the brain to move the hand. Grim stories of deterioration can also be found in richer nations. Although the details differ, a pain-free existence becomes a living hell for those who contract the disease.

Dr. Brand’s goal was to create an artificial system that warned of danger. He and his team tried audible signals, blinking lights, and other innovations, but to no avail – patients would either ignore the painless yet annoying signals or simply turn them off, to their own detriment. Nothing grabs one’s attention the way pain does. After five years of work and millions of dollars spent, the team abandoned the project. Though nobody wants it, Dr. Brand concluded that pain is God’s gift to us: it compels us to take corrective action for our own good.

The Story of One Divorced New Yorker

Dr. Brand’s patients turned off their warning signals because the signals were merely annoying. Spouses do something similar – not by flipping a switch, but by tuning out. Listen to the words of one divorced New Yorker who did precisely that.

I smoked dope every day for twenty years. I thought I was pretty slick. I could smoke while working. I could get high and still run my company. I could pour concrete. I could roof a building. I felt like I could do anything.

But it ruined my marriage. I didn’t even realize it until years after my wife left me. But the dope ruined my marriage because it made me content. Nothing could bother me. Her feelings didn’t bother me. Her needs didn’t bother me. The dope put an emotional cover over what should have been obvious.

I told myself that if I didn’t see the problem, then it didn’t qualify as a problem. All I ever did was give her advice. I never asked for it. I never once felt the inspiration to say: ‘Darling, I know there’s something wrong. What can I do differently?’

This man blames the demise of his marriage on the fact that nothing bothered him. Failing to recognize and address his wife’s pain caused the marriage to crumble.

Conclusion

Emotional pain in your marriage may leave you upset and disheartened. But such distress has an upside. It not only grabs your attention. It should compel you to take corrective action. So if you are asking what to do with pain that will not go away, the answer is not to escape it or wait it out – it is to let it point you toward the conversation, the change, or the help your marriage actually needs.

That is exactly what the rest of this eBook/Course is designed to help you do. It offers practical steps, insights, exercises, and illustrations that show you how to reduce marital stress and strengthen your emotional connection. It truly offers hope for troubled marriages.

Key Takeaways

• Emotional pain in a marriage is not something to eliminate – it is a signal telling you that something needs attention.
• Numbing the pain through distraction, substances, or busyness does not solve the problem. It only delays the damage while the marriage quietly deteriorates.
• Dismissing your spouse’s pain because it does not personally bother you is one of the fastest ways to lose a marriage.
• Acting on emotional pain, rather than suppressing it, is the first step toward real change.

Questions to Consider

1. When did you last experience real emotional pain in your marriage, and how did you respond to it? Did you ignore it, escape it, or address it directly?
2. Is there something you use to numb or distract yourself – such as busyness, your phone, work, a hobby, or something else – that might reduce your awareness of your spouse’s pain?
3. What is one concern your spouse has expressed that you may have minimized simply because it did not affect you personally?
4. If pain is meant to prompt action, what is one issue or step in your marriage you have been putting off?
5. What would it look like this week to treat your spouse’s emotional pain with the same seriousness you would give to a physical warning sign?

1. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, The Gift of Pain, chapter 5. ↩