The Second Happy by Pastor Kevin MyersSampl

Evict the Elephants from Your Marriage

There’s a phrase for disregarding a big problem. It’s called ignoring the elephant in the room. Imagine if a real elephant walked into your living room with your family, and you pretended not to notice: a huge elephant of a problem wreaking havoc on our household, blasting our ears with its trumpeting, and assaulting our noses with its pooping, and pretending it’s not there. The absurdity of it reminds me of a cartoon I once saw where an elephant is lying on a psychiatrist’s couch and lamenting, “Sometimes even if I stand in the middle of the room, no one acknowledges me!”

Yet that’s what we often do in our marriages and families. In my family of origin, we ignored the elephants, and we knew not to say anything about them. We learned to pretend that everything was fine. We became the Fine Family. We put all our efforts into trying to look better than we actually lived. And we never addressed our real problems. We ignored the temper tantrums. The fights between mom and dad. The yelling and the cursing. The violence. The financial mismanagement, poor work ethic, pornography, adultery, and hypocrisy.

Pretense! What a great strategy for success! If you don’t talk about  the elephant, you’ll be fine. Right? Nope. Our elephants never went away. And we were not fine. We were deeply broken.

I’m not attacking my parents or my family. Lord knows I’m not good enough to condemn anyone else. What I’m saying is that pretense kills. Ignoring problems and being silent about them is a death sentence to a marriage. And to a family. My parents divorced when I was in middle school. Our family pretense ruined my early life. And if you don’t deal with it, pretense might ruin yours.

How do you begin to evict your elephants? First, evict the elephant inwardly. At its core, pretense is rooted in self-deception. You have to say to yourself, “I have a problem, and I’m going to stop pretending I don’t.”

Second, you have to evict the elephant outwardly. You need to go to your spouse or your family and say, “There’s an elephant in the room with us, and we need to deal with it to have a better, richer, happier life.” Begin talking with your spouse about the problem and you will be on your way to getting that elephant out of the house. But you’ll need to take one more step to complete the process.

Third, you have to solve the problems one shovelful at a time. You must take action to change. And you have to work your way out of the consequences of your actions. That may feel daunting. Just focus on one shovelful of the fallout at a time.

Prayer: Lord, show me the elephants I am ignoring in my life, give me the conviction to name and confront them, the courage to bring them up with my spouse, and the power to remove the fallout of them one shovelful at a time.