“Fire the lawyer inside you”: The arguing strategy that changed Pastor Craig Hill’s marriage

 In the first few years of their marriage, Pastor Craig Hill and his wife, Janice, had many conflicts.

“After seven years, God gave us a strategy,” said Ps Hill, founder of Family Foundations International (FFI), a ministry dedicated to helping individuals, couples and families. 

During a recent visit to Singapore for a marriage seminar, Together Forever, he shared with Salt&Light the strategy that saved his marriage, as well as insights on passing on the faith to children, and healing after infidelity.

How can couples disagree without hurting their marriage?

Pastor Hill: Learning how to move the conversation from what I call the topical level to the relational level really is the key. That happens by asking questions rather than making statements.

What I find is an illegitimate way to argue is the way that people escalate an argument and really wound each other by accusing each other. I have found that in any kind of conflict, one person feels devalued, the other person feels falsely accused.

In our case, I was the one who usually felt falsely accused, and I was motivated to defend myself. Jan would say: “You don’t love me, you don’t care about me. You did this wrong, you did that wrong. You don’t do this, you don’t do that.” And it would feel to me like a false accusation.

Ps Craig Hill and his wife Janice fought for the first seven years of their lives until they learnt how to listen to the impact of their words on each other. They have been married for nearly five decades. Photo courtesy of Ps Craig Hill.

So there’s a little lawyer inside each of us. When a person feels falsely accused, the defense attorney rises up and wants to explain and defend and justify and say: “That’s not true.”

Then in the other person that feels devalued is a prosecuting attorney who wants to accuse and criticise and say: “You did this, you did that, you did this other thing wrong.”

So these two attorneys fight with each other, and that’s what happens in many, many marriages.

What I realised after seven years is that we needed to move the conversation to a totally different level.

First of all, fire the lawyer inside you. Your wife doesn’t want to talk to your defense attorney. Your husband does not want to talk to the prosecuting or accusatory attorney.

The way we found to resolve conflicts quickly is by asking a couple of simple questions. I would simply ask Jan: “I sense by the tone of your voice that I’ve hurt you. Is that true?”

What we’re doing is shifting the focus from me defending myself, to finding out what has been my impact on the other person.

This is the quickest way to resolve a conflict: You make it your business to consider the impact you have had on your marriage partner, rather than, in selfishness, the impact they’ve had on you.

Put aside your own hurt and offence for the moment, and make a determination in your heart: I’m going to find out what impact I’ve had on her.

The second question is: “Could you share with me how did I do that? How did I make you feel?” Shift the conversation from focusing on whatever the issue at hand is, to asking about the impact.

When that person shares with you what your impact has been, let God give you empathy for the heart of your wife, empathy for the heart of your husband.

What I found to do is just to say: “Jan, I didn’t see that when I made that comment, how that would hurt you. I see that now. I’m so sorry. The last thing I’d ever want to do is make you feel like I don’t love you or like I don’t value you. Will you please forgive me?”

The third thing is: Take responsibility for wounding this person that you love. If your heart is sincere, the heart of your marriage partner will release forgiveness and the problem is finished.

How can a couple survive infidelity, whether emotional or physical?

Pastor Hill: We have seen many, many, many couples be restored after emotional infidelity or actual physical adultery. Adultery is not the unpardonable sin.

The good news is this: Jesus died to pay for every sin that I’ve committed, to pay for every sin that my marriage partner has committed. So the ultimate way that we’re going to overcome adultery is that I’m going to have to deal with the betrayal that I feel in my heart.

If I’m the person against whom the adultery was committed, I’m going to have to find a way to get my heart to the Lord because, in the end, I will blame my marriage partner for their adultery and insist that they pay for it. Or, I can allow Jesus to actually pay for the sin of a person who deeply betrayed me or wounded me. It’s a binary choice. So that is a key – being able to forgive.

If infidelity has taken place in your marriage, please don’t try to solve that on your own. Please get some help. Get some counselling. The wound and the betrayal is deep, and it’s not something that you can just easily solve yourself. Let somebody walk with you through that time.

I’ve noticed the biggest strategy the enemy has in destroying couples is isolation. The reason that adultery occurs is because there’s emotional isolation already taking place between a husband and wife. Once the adultery is discovered, the strategy of the enemy is to isolate each person and make each person feel hopeless.

So one of the most critical things you can do is find a pastor, find a counsellor, get some help. Let that person walk you through a process of healing and forgiveness with each other.

How can we pass on our faith to our children?

Pastor Hill: We have found one of the keys to that is impartation of blessing – learning how to bless your children.

What does blessing do? Blessing creates emotional connections with sons or daughters. Children receive the faith and the values of those they’re emotionally connected to. If parents are the ones to whom they’re emotionally connected more than anyone else, then they will receive the faith and the values of their parents.

If parents wound their children and never repent and never make it right, then children will emotionally disconnect from their parents, reject the faith of their parents, reject the values of their parents, and they will go in search of someone else to emotionally connect to, and they will connect to that person and receive the values and the faith of that person.

So, how to retain emotional connection with them? I like one of the habits that Jewish people practice. Once a week, they have dinner together. Jewish people do it on Friday evenings, the beginning of the Sabbath. They have dinner together. They look their children in the eyes and impart blessing to them.

What I’ve discovered with my own children is if you look your children in the eyes once a week to impart blessing to them, if you’ve wounded them that week and they are emotionally disconnected, they’re not going to be able to retain eye contact with you, and you’re going to find out immediately.

Then if you simply ask a couple of questions: “I sense that I’ve hurt you. Is that true? Could you please share with me? How did I hurt you?”, that son or daughter will open up.

Rather than justifying, defending why you did what you did, you take responsibility for wounding them, for the impact you’ve had on that son or daughter, and you repent and ask for forgiveness. Their heart will release forgiveness and you’ll be emotionally connected again.

Now you can impart blessing to them. And I define blessing as a very simple thing: Blessing is simply imparting to the heart of another person what God says about them. Cursing is imparting to the heart of another person what the devil says about them.

What does God say about your sons or your daughters? Two simple things: “I love you. And you’re very, very valuable.” So blessing is speaking into the heart of a son or daughter: “I love you. You’re very valuable.”

Speak about the good qualities you see in your son or your daughter: “I notice, son, that you’re very loyal to your friends. I notice, my daughter, that you’re very intelligent. I notice, son, that you’re perseverant, that you don’t give up. And that makes me very, very proud of you.”

I found if you do that once a week, your children will never depart from from the faith. They’ll never depart from the values of their parents, and they will carry that on into their adult lives.

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