You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues our series about the marriage quadrants by looking at the dynamics in

quadrant three. Because of the deep levels of hurt, historic vows, and broken styles of relating

that can be so entrenched,

Dan admits that working with marriages in this category is perhaps the most difficult.

As pastors, therapists, or friends, how can we begin to advocate for healing when there is

so much loneliness and contempt? For a visual aid as you listen to Dan discussing these categories,

look for this episode on our blog at the Allander Center.org.

As we look at the quadrants, we're now coming to quadrant three.

And quadrant three in some ways is sort of the mere opposite, and yet so many similarities with quadrant two.

Even referring to this as a matriarchal home, it underlines the fact that there is one parent who's far higher committed to influence,

individuation, power, and another parent far more conforming, committed to an absence of conflict,

and therefore, even though we'll come back to this several times,

it's a world in which there is so little capacity to deal with conflict, to engage and actually

open the door to greater desire, and therefore to honor both the distinctiveness and yet the overlap of

two hearts creating something beautiful together. What I find, and it may be again much more

an eon and a particular economic realm, but the matriarchal family does not tend to have a primary,

so-called breadwinner who is making sufficient funds to provide as adequately for the family

as what you often find in the quadrant two marriage.

And again, in our day, it is very common for both husband and wife to be dual income.

And so I'm not implying in quadrant two, the man's always going out to work, the woman's always

at home tending to the children.

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