145: Marriage Burnout: Protect Your Marriage, Heal From Past Hurts, And Move Forward Together with Carey and Toni Nieuwhof

There has been a lot of talk about personal burnout as the result of everything we have been experiencing. In the same breath, there have been lots of conversations about how we can practice self-care to improve/protect our mental health and overall well-being. And while these conversations are important, one crucial piece of the puzzle has not been highlighted enough: marriage burnout.

Marriage Burnout: Why We Need to Name It

Today, we have the amazing privilege to chat with Carey and Toni Neuholf about Marriage Burnout. How to Protect Your Marriage, Heal From Past Hurts, And Move Forward Together. I think we can all remember a time where we have personally been burning the candle from both ends and were approaching our own personal burnout. But, have you ever considered that your marriage could possibly experience burnout as well? 

We love that we are exploring this topic because if we name it, then we can address it. There is lots of talk about self-care and how we can protect ourselves from personal burnout. There are tools out there to protect our marriages from burnout too, but if we don’t know the warning signs of relationship burnout, then by the time we apply these tools, it may be too late. 

I wasn’t asking for a divorce . . .

As we were thinking about who we would want to explore this topic with, Carey and Toni Nieuwhof immediately popped into our minds. Not only have Carey and Toni both written books about personal and relational burnout, but they’ve also walked through it in their own marriage and have lived to tell the tale.

In Toni’s book, Before You Split: Find What You Really Want For The Future Of Your Marriage, she shares a story about a season of their marriage where she literally ripped the ring off of her finger and threw it at Carey. To be honest, I completely identified with this story because I did something similar. I took off my wedding ring and put it on your dresser. Looking back, I wasn’t actually asking for a divorce, but it was my way of saying, “I’m about to give up, I’m losing hope, I need you, but I don’t feel like you’re here for me.” 

Carey’s newest book, At Your Best: How To Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working In Your Favor, talks about building a life you no longer want to escape from, talks about his personal burnout which led to these marital challenges. He is a bestselling author, speaker, podcaster, and former attorney. He is also a Canadian friend and fellow meat-smoking fanatic.

Toni is an author, podcaster, and previous divorce layer. She has firsthand seen through her client’s eyes what the journey through divorce and out the other side looks like. Both Carey and Toni are such an incredible blessing to leaders and marriages alike.

Let’s listen in: 

In this episode, You’ll Hear About:

• What marriage burnout is and how to prevent it.
• The crucial link between getting healthier personally and having a healthier marriage.
• The difference between surviing and saving your marriage.
• Recommended guard rails to put into place to protect your marriage.
• Ways to heal and move forward together if you are experiencing marriage burnout.
• Today’s Tool: Complain without blame

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• Hear more about our toughest year of marriage and what we learned from it by listening to What 15 Years Of Marriage Has Taught Us
• Take a look at Before You Split: Find Out What You Really Want For The Future Of Your Marriage by Toni Nieuwhof
• Grab a copy of Carey’s newest book, At Your Best: How To Get Time, Energy, and Priorities, Working In Your Favor
• If working through conflict in your marriage has been tough, Toni’s Better Conflict Cheat Sheet is here to help.  The Cheat Sheet gives you 10 practical ways to approach conflict, to help you make decisions together and feel connected despite your differences.

Quotes And Tweets:

• There’s a danger in allowing the emotions you’re experiencing right now to lead you to make long-term decisions. Yes, your emotions are real, and you need to accept them for what they are. Examine them. Learn from them. But don’t necessarily give them the lead role, because there may be a story underneath your feelings, both for you and for your partner, that you haven’t discovered yet. @toninieuwhof
• No matter how troubled or even chaotic your marriage may seem, you have more control over its future than you think. Regardless of what your partner decides, you need to start your own mud cleanup plan. You don’t have to do it for your partner’s sake. Your motivation? Simply to become a more loving version of you. @toninieuwhof
• Happiness is something you bring to a relationship, not something you get from it. Only you can be responsible for your emotional health. And expecting to have the experience of unending good feelings in your marriage isn’t realistic. @toninieuwhof
• Surviving in marriage should be both intentional and temporary. This is what I invite you to consider: Could you survive in your marriage as part of a strategy to save it? Surviving may be exactly what you need to do while you and your partner work on personal growth and learn to love each other better. But make it your goal to not get stuck surviving. @toninieuwhof
• Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. – John Calvin
• God is very present in the dark night of the soul. @careynieuwhof
• Surviving our relationship meant we were basically roommates. Saving our relationship means let’s rebuild the friendship that made us fall in love in the first place. That’s what we’ve been working on for the past 15 years.@careynieuwhof
• Instead of thinking about what you can get out of your marriage, think about what you can bring to your marriage. @careynieuwhof
• A healthier you produces a healthier marriage. @careynieuwhof

Save and Share Images:

Today’s Tool: Complain without blame

Subscribe and connect with us:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Stitcher

• Google Podcasts

• Instagram

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Pinterest

Meet Carey and Toni Nieuwhof:

Carey Nieuwhof is a bestselling leadership author, speaker, podcaster, and former attorney. He hosts one of today’s most influential leadership podcasts. His podcast, blog, and online content are accessed by leaders over 1.5 million times each month. He speaks to leaders around the world about leadership, change, and personal growth. Carey and his wife, Toni, live north of Toronto.

Toni Nieuwhof is an author, speaker, former divorce attorney and family law mediator. Toni co-founded and co-hosts the Smart Family Podcast to help people love being home.

She has just released Before You Split; a book that offers a way forward for people in struggling marriages. From her attorney experience, Toni helps expose the hidden realities of divorce while also sharing solutions that transformed her marriage with Carey from that bad to this good.