The Core Brokenness Model in Marriage Counseling
1. The Fracture Beneath Every Fight
Most couples show up in my office carrying different stories, but the x‑ray always reveals the same break. Somewhere along the line, he retreated and she grasped. Call it the abdication–control cycle. Left unchecked, it colonizes every conversation, budget, and bedroom until a marriage feels less like a covenant and more like a cold war.
2. A First Failure Echoing Through Time
Larry Crabb labeled the wound in The Silence of Adam. Genesis gives us the image:
“She took of its fruit and ate; **and she also gave some to her husband who was with her.”
Adam was present yet passive—physically in the garden, spiritually on mute. His God‑given mandate was to name, guard, and cultivate. Instead, he folded. Passivity became man’s signature sin.
Eve’s step, often caricatured as mere rebellion, was first a reaction to that vacancy. In the vacuum of male abdication, she reached for control. Her move was driven less by malice than by anxious necessity: “If Adam won’t act, someone must.” Two complementary fractures—abdication and control—now pulse in every home.
3. How the Cycle Spins Today
- Husband Abdicates. He sidesteps spiritual leadership, emotional intimacy, or financial foresight.
- Wife Feels the Weight. Anxiety rises: If he won’t carry the load, I have to.
- Wife Grabs the Reins. Control looks like criticism to him, but feels like survival to her.
- Husband Reads Criticism as Emasculation. Shame whispers, You can’t win, so he retreats further.
- Anxiety Spikes Again. The wheel turns, carving deeper ruts.
4. Collateral Damage: Heart, Home, and Next Generation
- Emotional distance replaces tenderness.
- Parenting splits along battle lines—one permissive, one punitive, both exhausted.
- Spiritual anemia starves the household; sermons rarely reach a soul still braced for the next skirmish.
5. Breaking the Abdication–Control Cycle
For Husbands: Sacrificial Stewardship
- Own the Garden. Name where you’ve been silent—finances, faith, or family rhythms.
- Move Toward, Not Away. Courage is proximity to difficulty, not freedom from it.
- Serve First. Stewardship is self‑expenditure for another’s good, not authoritarian lordship.
For Wives: Courageous Release
- Anchor in God’s Safety. Trust that your protection is not ultimately in your grasp but in His goodness and protection.
- Offer, Don’t Seize. Express desires plainly, then leave space for your husband to respond.
- Encourage Growth. Affirm baby steps of initiative; celebration is rocket fuel for nascent leadership.
6. Why Transformation Feels Like a Crucible
Because it is. The shift requires death to self‑protection—Adam must die to sloth; Eve must die to fear. But resurrection follows crucifixion. When a husband shoulders sacrificial authority and a wife releases anxious control, the household reorients around vertical order. The fruits are immediate and compounding: peace, play, and a shared sense of mission.
7. Looking Ahead
Future posts will drill deeper into:
- Husband’s Initiative—how to take ownership of the city: yourself, the household and your domains of influence.
- Wife’s Trust—practices for rooting anxiety in the safety of a Good Father.
- Restoring Intimacy—re‑learning affection after years of strategic distance.
There is a lot I appreciate about this article and portions of it are familiar to me. However, I wonder if there is a better way to describe what is happening with Eve. Is she really falling into control and anxiety and fear? Maybe it is more a recognition that if I don’t do it, nobody else will. Has she taken control? She certainly has taken responsibility. Does she feel anxious and fearful? Maybe primarily she is tired. Maybe she feels forsaken by a man who hasn’t pursued her since they took vows years ago. Maybe she feels like the only adult in the room.
Another point I would make: God gave dominion to both male and female. Each has authority. Each tends the garden. Together, they own the garden. I would like to see this paradigm in your materials. We are, after all, yoked together. Side by side, together, we are pulling this wagon.
I think a great factor in the cycle described above is a lack of maturity. I heard a talk by someone with Life Model Works about maturity, and they estimate that most men are at an infant or child level of maturity. (This is measured by stated characteristics and skills which are part of each stage of life.) Even in the church, there is a lack of older teaching younger. There is little growth and building up of one another. When was the last time one confessed his faults to another? We are closed up and isolated and not living as a body.
I don’t disagree with any part of your response. I think the differences are more about emphasis than substance. “If I don’t do it, nobody else will.” This is certainly at the heart of having to take things over. Are fear and anxiety always central? Not necessarily. But they are a common part of the wife’s experience when a husband is abdicating, and rightfully so. And is she tired? Definitely. Wives were not meant to have to carry this alone. In the midst of a husband’s abdication, she will feel forsaken by the husband who has retreated, and in some meaningful sense IS the only adult in the room.
God did give dominion to both male and female. Each does have authority. But there is a peculiar nature of the way I encounter this brokenness most frequently: passivity and abdication are core to man’s misalignment in ways that are just not as evident with women. So it is, way more often than not, the husband who needs to be called to take it up. I think this can be true, and we can acknowledge the need of faithful male leadership, without diving into what is an often counterproductive debate over roles/headship/lordship that have been so often misunderstood and abused in the church.
– Andrew