To download a printable version of this transcript, click here.
 
 
iQuestions Faculty, Dr. Gary Smalley 
 
 
Question: 
 
I'm discouraged because my husband doesn't understand me, listen to 
me or remember what I say. How do I get my husband to do these 
things? 
 
Answer:  
 
This is one of the greatest communication methods that I have 
learned, over forty-five years of being in the marriage and family 
work. It’s called “emotional word pictures,” and it does, in fact, get 
your husband’s attention quicker. It instantly helps him understand 
your feelings and emotions, and it’s a method where he tends to 
remember what you say for the rest of his life. 
 
Wouldn’t that be an awesome way to communicate with your 
husband? 
 
Well, let me show you what an emotional picture is. It activates both 
sides of a male brain. If you want your husband to remember things, 
the more he remembers it emotionally, the better and the longer he 
remembers something. 
 
So, the way you do that is you either use an object or a plant—and I’ll 
explain this. For example, let’s say you say to your husband, “I think 
you are so valuable in my heart, you mean so much to me, you’re 
worth a million dollars. You’re like this diamond. I bought this today to 
put on our shelf, so that every day you look at it, you realize how 
valuable you are to me.”  
 
 
 
He’ll remember that forever. He’ll see it now and then, he’ll realize 
how valuable he is. So, you’ve activated both sides of his brain—the 
words have got his reason side, and the object gets his emotional side 
going.  
 
Let’s say that I take this plant, and I rip a leaf off of it, and you say to 
your husband, “Honey, when you said that to me yesterday, that really 
hurt my feelings, but what it felt like is I’m a young plant sprouting, 
our marriage is young, and it was like you just ripped a leaf off of me, 
and you crumpled it all up, and you stomped on it on the ground, and 
I really felt crushed by your words.” Well, a man can get seeing a leaf 
ripped off a tree. He could probably feel what that might feel like.  
 
You can use thousands of different kinds of objects. You use them 
every day anyway. You’ve said before you have a headache, and you 
feel like your head is coming off or your head is exploding. Those are 
word pictures. You’ve used, “That person’s elevator doesn’t go to the 
top floor.” Or, “Their lights are on, but nobody’s home.” Just think of 
all the word pictures that we use every day anyway.  
 
People are good at word pictures. The problem is, they don’t use them 
in communication. I want to give you one that shows you how 
powerful they can be. 
 
They’ve worked on me better than anything my wife has ever used, 
and they work on my wife and my kids. It’s amazing how powerful 
these are. Listen to this. Here’s a guy who’s a professional athlete, and 
he wouldn’t commit to this girl he’d been dating for three years, but he 
said to her all the time, “You know, I can hardly wait to get married 
some day. It’s going to be fun to be married to you,” and so forth. But 
he wouldn’t commit. He didn’t have a ring. He never said, “Will you 
marry me?” He just talked about it in general terms.  
 
Page -2- 
 
 
Well, her heart was all over the place. I mean, she wanted to be with 
him. She had a desire to connect in the deepest levels, but he wouldn’t 
commit. And so, she gave him a word picture. Listen to what it is. 
When he was in high school, his coach recruited him to a major 
university and said he would be a star. He’d be an all-American at the 
university, he’d be a pro athlete some day. And so, “Come to my 
school.” He went to the school, but he was a back-up runner to a 
double all-American football player that was such a great running 
back. He hardly played at all, the guy was so good. He never got 
injured. And so, he hated the coach. He was on the bench so much, 
and if he could, he wanted revenge against that coach. Deep 
emotions. 
 
She got his emotions flowing one night, “Remember when that coach 
did this?” and he said, “Yeah. Grrrr.” And she got his emotions just 
rolling. Now, she’s got his reasoning rolling, and his emotions rolling, 
and she said, “Sweetheart, I love you so much, and I want you to 
know that I feel just like you did when you were at that university.”  
 
And he said, “What? What do you mean you feel like I did?”  
 
“I feel like you’re the head coach, and you have promised me that I 
was going to be a starting running back, starting in your life as your 
wife, and I have been on the bench, Honey, for three years, and I am 
just hurting in the same way that you are and were then.” 
 
And he went, “Uh. I hate that.”  
 
She got a ring the next week.  
 
When you touch a man’s heart through a word picture, it motivates us, 
and we understand you, and we tend to remember it the rest of our 
life, because it touched our feelings. 
Page -3- 
To download a printable version of this transcript, click here.