Why Your Selfish Husband Doesn't Respect You

On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

On today's episode, Coach Jack will help you to understand why your husband has low empathy for you and disrespects you.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

• How to get your spouse's respect and keep it.
• Get a book to help you with a difficult husband.
• Decide between marriage counseling and marriage coaching.
• Work with Coach Jack to improve your marriage to a difficult spouse.

Transcript

Why Your Selfish Husband Doesn’t Respect You

(Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:29)

Coach Jack: Do What are the signs you are being disrespected in your marriage? What made your husband become selfish and disrespectful? How can you effectively deal with his selfishness and disrespect?

What is it about your husband that makes him disrespect you? Some men become disrespectful as soon as the honeymoon is over. Others don’t become disrespectful until after a number of years.

Becoming familiar with signs he doesn’t respect you and why he has become this way will help you to restore respect and feel more loved.

(0:59)

What are the signs of a disrespectful husband?

All toxic relationships include signs of disrespect. Many people have toxic relationships and don’t even realize it.

A toxic relationship is one that gradually becomes worse as if you were drinking a little bit of poison every day. 

Sometimes we can become so used to the little bit of poison that we don’t notice it anymore. If we grew up with it as a child, we might even think it is the way relationships are supposed to be. Likewise, we can get so used to disrespect that we become numb to it. Whenever you are able to discover something unhealthy, you have taken the first step toward health.

We need to see signs of disrespect both in ourselves and our spouses if we are to deal with it. Improving relationships always begins with improving our own behavior first. Also, if you treat your husband with respect, you will feel much better about requiring respect from him.

(1:56)

What is a disrespectful husband? A disrespectful husband is one who treats his spouse as less important than himself. Don’t confuse that with an unloving husband. An unloving husband may treat you respectfully, but not demonstrate love toward you. Many people we do business with in our day to day lives are respectful, but unloving. 

Business partner style marriages are often respectful, but lacking in love.

While unloving husbands may be respectful, disrespectful husbands are seldom loving. It is difficult to disrespect someone and love them at the same time. Restoring respect is another necessary step for getting more love from your spouse.

Signs of a disrespectful husband:

• Dismissive of your feelings and concerns,
• Treats you as a child or employee,
• Does not involve you in decisions which impact you,
• Withholds practical information such as finances,
• Holds you to standards which he does not live by,
• Criticizes you,
• Does not value your time and shows up late or not at all,
• Does not listen when you talk,
• Talks badly about you to others,
• Sides with the children against you,
• Sides with his family against you,
• Treats you as an object or slave,
• Is demeaning,
• Is unconcerned about your desires and needs, as long as his are being fulfilled.

(3:26)

This is not an exhaustive list, but you can see that the basic tenets of disrespect are inequality, control, and selfishness. If your husband’s behavior fits one of these three areas, he is most likely disrespectful. The same could be said for you, so make sure you are not behaving in any of these ways.

Two wrongs never make a right. There is no justification for the Christian to treat others badly even when treated badly by others (Romans 12:17-21). Rather than return evil for evil as many do, we need to love our spouse enough to take action which restores respect and promotes a better marital relationship. Our goal is never tit-for-tat revenge, but always to restore.

(4:16)

So, Is respect something that is given, or earned?

Respect, like trust, is something that is earned. With trust, for example, we are not going to trust someone who does not behave in a consistently honest fashion. How trustworthy they actually are is independent of our personality. 

Our perception of them, however, is also going to depend not only on what they do, but also on our past experiences. If many people have been dishonest with us, in our past, we will tend to trust less. If most people have been honest with us, we will tend to trust more.

(5:00)

Respect works in the same way. How respectable you actually are depends on what you do. 

Namely:

You are respectable to the extent that you: 

1. Live according to your values, 
2. do whatever you say you are going to do, and
3. do not allow other people to mistreat you.

If you don’t do these three things, then your husband would not respect you even if he were not selfish. No matter what man you married, you would not be respected if you did not do these three things.

This means that good ways to lose respect are:

• being a hypocrite,
• making empty promises we don’t keep,
• making threats we don’t carry out, and
• failing to use good boundaries when mistreated (for example, arguing rather than refusing to argue).

Your husband’s past experiences also play a role.

(5:54)

If your husband has gotten his way by being selfish, controlling, or disrespectful, then he has learned it is an effective way to interact. This is apparent when he is respectful to people at work, but not at home. He has learned that being disrespectful brings loss at work, while it brings gain at home.

What does he gain by being disrespectful at home?

• the power to upset you,
• distance to do his own thing,
• attention,
• compliance and control if you are doing things so as not to upset him.

While there are some people who will care more about others than themselves, it is rare. Selfishness is the human condition when we don’t have more standards such as we do with Christianity. So, without a moral code, people will do whatever they have to do to make their lives easier and to get what they value most. 

If they have to treat you well to get what they want, they will. But, if they don’t have to treat you well to get what they want, then they won’t.

(7:03)

Telling your husband he has to treat you well is meaningless to him if there are no bad consequences to him other than making you upset. His being able to upset you actually gives him power.

If you are one of the very nice and considerate people, you nevertheless need to understand that most people are not and learn how to deal with them effectively. Helping such people to understand how it makes you feel is not going to matter much to them.

If you are nice to nice people, they will be nice to you. For everyone else, you need to be nice and have good boundaries if you want them to be nice to you.

If your husband was nice for a long time and then changed, it may be that he no longer got the benefits of being that way in your relationship. People can only be nice for so long when they are being shortchanged on a relationship. 

(8:02)

So, in addition to working on those three behaviors which will earn you respect, you also need to make sure that you are:

• making your husband feel important,
• making your husband feel admired,
• being a good companion for talking, activities, and sex, and
• cooperating on goals that are important to your husband.

A lousy wife will get no more respect than a lousy waitress, even by the best customers.

Couples counseling is NOT a good choice for dealing with a disrespectful husband

Disrespectful men avoid taking responsibility for problems. They don’t want to work together in therapy and will sabotage therapy if they feel blamed. Sending your husband for individual counseling or coaching also will not be helpful. You are the one who needs to change your interactions so that your husband has no choice but to respect you.

(8:59)

This is one of the many times that dealing with a spouse’s behavior is very similar to dealing with a child’s behavior. Sending a disrespectful child to therapy will not help. The parent needs to learn to provide both love and good boundaries to maintain the parent-child relationship and get respect from the child.

A plan you can follow to get more respect from your husband

Here is the three step plan I use to help my coaching clients to improve their marriages and get more respect:

1. Stop any needy behaviors that are preventing him from enjoying you,
2. Use good connection skills that will create more of a desire for him to be with you, and
3. Use boundaries that enforce reasonable standards for his behavior.

Some people are confused about what a needy behavior is. Needy behaviors are those ineffective things that people do, thinking they will improve their relationship. Prime examples are criticizing, complaining, arguing, and explaining. 

(10:10)

If you think you don’t criticize, but do share with your husband things you don’t like about his behavior, guess what? You are criticizing him. You only need to look at the results to see that it is an ineffective, needy behavior. For help with this or other needy behaviors, I refer you to my book on overcoming neediness.

The right steps, in the right order, at the right pace make the difference between a marriage improving or getting worse.

Case example: Debra

Let me tell you about Debra’s problem:

(10:47)

Debra had been married for 15 years and had two children 12 and 14. She described her early relationship with her husband as ideal. They were best friends who enjoyed talking, traveling, and a good sexual relationship. Having had two children shortly after getting married changed all that. She had given up her job to raise her two children, while her husband worked extra to pay the bills. She and her husband neglected their daily time together and became disconnected.

Their happy marriage became a conflicted one and they would often fight about money and parenting. Her husband started talking to her with a harsh tone of voice, then became more sarcastic and belittling. He was no longer affectionate and had no interest in doing things with her. Debra complained about her husband’s behaviors, which just made things worse. Debra was tired of fighting and wanted her husband to treat her nicely again. He had no desire to work on the relationship with her. That’s when she got coaching with me.

(11:58)

Let me tell you how Debra and I made things better: 

In coaching, we worked on stopping Debra’s criticism and complaining about her husband. Those were both needy behaviors that made things worse rather than better. This reduced the tension level, although her husband remained distant and disrespectful. 

Next, I helped Debra to begin to validate her husband, show interest in him, and be more friendly while having no demands on him. This helped her husband to enjoy their relationship more and to behave better, though he still had some disrespectful behavior. 

The third part of our plan was for Debra to choose one of her husband’s behaviors to start using a boundary with. Debra chose to help her husband stop his sarcastic questioning. I helped Debra to communicate to her husband how to ask questions in an acceptable way and to let him know what would happen when he did it in an unacceptable way. 

(12:59)

Whenever Debra’s husband questioned her sarcastically, she would immediately distance from him for at least an hour, even if they were in a public situation. This made him pay attention to how he talked to her and took away any reward he was getting for that behavior. After Debra could become consistent with her boundary, the sarcasm quickly decreased.

Had Debra used this boundary without improving her own behavior first, it would have escalated their conflict rather than improving their marriage.

Debra and her husband were both enjoying their relationship more than they had in years. Debra still had some work to do with other boundaries, but was equipped to work on the rest on her own.

Is coaching for you?

The goal of coaching is to equip people with skills to repair and maintain their relationships, without the need for ongoing coaching or counseling. Sessions are primarily for learning new skills and not for getting emotional support or venting frustrations. Most marriage problems only require one month of coaching to learn the skills for repairing a marriage.

(14:11)

As with all clients, if Debra had run into additional problems or got stuck, she would have been able to get additional coaching sessions.

The one month coaching package which Debra got is called Restoring a Loving Relationship with a Difficult Spouse. This and other coaching packages are available on my website at coachjackito.com.

(14:35)

 [Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.