*This is a guest blog post by my friend Zion Montgomery, licensed marriage and family therapist. She has a wealth of insight from working with couples and individuals. And check at the end of this article for a wonderful resource – and a discount code! 

A problem I’ve observed as a couples therapist is that we are all allowing our attention to be taken without our say so. We are leaking. It’s common with anything we do not steward with intention.

But I’m not sure there is anything as detrimental to our personhood, and to our union with our loved ones, as allowing this to be the case with our attention.

Here’s what’s really scary. We do not actually see the world as it is. We see the world as we pay attention to what it is. There are an infinite number of things to notice at any given moment, so our brains categorize. They splice out what is pertinent based on what they’ve been taught matters.

And here is the part that should grieve us: our brains are trainable. What we practice attending to, we get better at attending to. What we consistently ignore, we get better at ignoring.

Which means that every time we reach for our phone in the middle of a conversation, every time we half-listen while scrolling, every time we are physically present but mentally somewhere else, we are teaching our brains that this person, this moment, this life is not where the interesting thing is happening.

And the brain listens.

Attention and Your Relationship

Over time, your spouse starts to fade into the background. The person who should be the most endlessly fascinating human in your world, the one you chose, the one whose interior life you have barely scratched the surface of. Their expressions go unread. Their subtle bids for connection go unanswered. The way they laugh at something, the thing they almost said but didn’t, the worry sitting just behind their eyes. All of it passes by unnoticed, because you have slowly, accidentally, trained yourself out of noticing them.

Your children are not exempt from this. Their needs, often expressed in the quietest and most indirect ways, become white noise. The kid who lingers in the kitchen a little longer than usual. The one who asks a strange question before bed that is really a different question entirely. The ordinary moments that are, if you are paying attention, not ordinary at all. They require a quality of presence that a distracted brain simply cannot offer.

Life with the people you love should be engrossing. Immersive. Rich in a way that no feed can replicate, because it is real and it is yours and it will not come back around. And yet we sit in the middle of it, unable to taste it, because we have handed our attention to something that was engineered to take it.

Screens, since their origin, have been attractive. Presented to the American public in 1939, televisions became common in the 1950s. Only 1% of households owned one in 1948. That number skyrocketed to about 75% by 1955 and 90% by 1960.

The difference then was that televisions were still communal. People gathered around a single set. Although attention was not focused on one another, families at least found themselves in the same physical space, sharing the same experience.

That is no longer true for us.

Today, a family can sit in the same living room and be in four completely different worlds. A husband scrolling through sports highlights. A wife deep in a comment thread. Children absorbed in their tablets. Everyone physically present. No one actually present.

Choosing What Gets Your Attention

I sit with couples every week who are starving for each other and neither of them knows it. What they know is that they feel alone, that the distance between them keeps growing and they cannot quite name why. They are not fighting. They are not unfaithful. They are just somewhere else. And screens are how they got there.

Robert and Eileen were one of those couples. They are entrepreneurs, and deeply involved in their church and community. They love Jesus. They love each other. They have a blended family they are working hard to build well, and they are clear-eyed enough to know that the way they are operating with screens is out of alignment with the home they are trying to create. They want their kids to have a different relationship with technology than the one they inherited. They have had that conversation more than once.

But every time they tried to address it together they end up in the same place; defensiveness, gridlock, and the quiet, exhausting resignation that this was just how things were going to be.

They did not need more conviction. They had plenty. What they needed was a structure, a way to have the conversation that did not immediately become a conflict, a framework that invited them to be collaborators instead of opponents.

That is what moved me to create Fixed Attention: A Technological Rule of Life for Couples.

The concept of a regula, a Latin word meaning not a rigid law but a trellis, comes from centuries of Christian community. Just as a vine needs a trellis to lift it off the ground and position it to bear fruit, a Rule of Life is a support structure, an intentional pattern of practices that helps you become who you actually want to be, rather than drifting into whoever the culture is shaping you into.

Romans 12:2 in The Message puts it this way: Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God.

Fix your attention. That phrase stopped me when I first read it. Because fixing our attention is exactly what we have stopped doing. We have handed that power over to algorithms, to notifications, to the endless scroll, and we are paying for it in the currency of presence.

John Mark Comer, whose writing on attention and the spiritual life has shaped my thinking on this deeply, puts it plainly: the solution is not willpower. It is structure. Not white-knuckling our way through temptation, but designing our lives so that the things we love most are protected, and the things that drain us are given less and less access to our hearts.

Fixing Your Attention

Fixed Attention is a 37-page couples workbook designed to help married couples have the honest, structured conversation that most of us keep putting off. It walks you through an honest self-assessment of your individual relationship with technology, your household and family dynamics, your character and spiritual life, a shared vision for your home, a discipline menu of practical faith-rooted practices to choose from, and a real accountability plan. Not vague good intentions, but specific agreements you make together and a rhythm for revisiting them.

The goal is not to produce a household of perfect people who never pick up their phones. The goal is direction. A shared north star. A collaborative commitment to the kind of home you are actually trying to build.

What makes this different from a digital detox challenge or a social media fast is that it is covenantal. You are not doing this alone. You are doing it with your spouse, which changes the dynamic entirely. Instead of one person policing the other, you become collaborators, building something you both believe in, for the sake of the marriage and the home you love.

If you have sensed, even quietly, that your screens are costing you more than you are consciously aware of, in your marriage, in your parenting, in your peace, this workbook was made for you.

And when you order Fixed Attention, use code DCM for $8 off! It is designed to be completed in one or two sittings of 60 to 90 minutes. The conversation itself is part of the formation.

Your attention belongs to you. And to the people sitting right next to you.

It is not too late to reclaim it.

Zion Montgomery is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the creator of Fixed Attention. Visit therapywithzion.com.