acf domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/digitalark/public_html/marriage.digitalark.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6170premium-addons-for-elementor domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/digitalark/public_html/marriage.digitalark.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6170Unfortunately, for many couples, one of the reasons they are in a crisis is because they waited too long to get help. Consider Tim, a man whose wife left him after he had ignored her numerous requests for them to go to marriage counseling. Now it appeared to him that she was gone for good. He was panicked and was having a hard time sleeping and focusing on his work. He was in a crisis.
I agreed to work with Tim and helped him take some immediate actions to stabilize his life, as well as some actions he might take to possibly save his marriage. We also talked about what he could do to maintain perspective and hope in the face of a seemingly hopeless situation. Tim’s story is a common one. He had been given numerous warnings to change, which he dismissed. His wife had asked to go to counseling which he had ignored, saying he thought they could handle their own problems. Out of desperation she had left and indicated she did not want any contact. It is very tempting in such a crisis to make a number of mistakes in an attempt to stabilize a troubling situation.
Here is my advice for what to do if you find yourself in a crisis like Tim:
First, be careful not to overreact. Our emotions run wild when facing a crisis. Our brain screams DANGER. We tend to panic and in our panic-driven state don’t think clearly. We think all or nothing, black and white and catastrophe. We must, as we work to calm ourselves, remind ourselves to try not to overreact and realize the storm will pass. Things always become clearer in time. It is best to pause, spend time quietly considering our situation and not make any sudden decisions.
Second, try to maintain a sense of normalcy. Yes, I know this sounds impossible, but eating well, good sleep and exercise are critical to your emotional health and will help you to make better decisions. Continue to go to work and all the other aspects of your life. As distracted as you are by your crisis, and as much as you want to do everything and anything to fix the situation, do all the activities that have brought you comfort in the past.
Third, get immediate support and seek out wise counsel. You need lots of support during a crisis. Don’t make the mistake of believing you are bothering people by asking for support. True friends will be happy you have reached out to them and are willing to listen to your story and offer hope which is desperately needed. Be very careful, however, not to use this opportunity to malign your mate or make it appear you are the “right” one in the situation.
Fourth, get professional counseling. As vital as it is to have the support of friends, they can’t replace professional, unbiased help. Find an experienced marriage counselor that will help you understand the actions that led up to the crisis, but also help you discover hope in the midst of the crisis.
Fifth, discover the critical message in the crisis. A crisis, for as horrific as it is, can be the best time to discover more about yourself and your marriage. Consider the reasons your mate took the actions they did. Why has this crisis occurred? What do you need to learn from this situation? Be brutally honest with yourself and begin the process of change and growth;
Finally, ask what God can teach you in the crisis. You are not alone in your crisis. God is in the mix with you and wants to teach you things about yourself and His will for your life. He wants to mold you into his image and cares deeply for you. Spend time in prayer and meditation, reflecting on Scriptures that offer hope and healing. Are you facing a crisis? Consider the opportunity in the crisis and what you can learn from it. If you need help right now, we are here for you. Please contact us at info@marriagerecoverycenter.com to get immediate help, or schedule a free call with a Client Care Specialist here.
]]>If only their spouse could be awakened to the harm and pain and dysfunction! That’s the desperate plea behind the desire to do an intervention. And it’s true that an intervention can be effective in bringing such an awakening. It’s also true that it’s only as effective as the planning and follow-through. In other words, it holds no weight if there isn’t a clear confrontation and an actionable plan to be put into motion immediately following the intervention.
If you’ve been wondering if an intervention might be the next step for you, these are the important basics to consider beforehand:
When it comes to an intervention, it is imperative that you say what you mean and mean what you say. This is an ultimatum! You are drawing a line in the sand and taking responsibility for your own part in becoming healthy. As much as we hope the intervention will awaken them to take the same responsibility in a positive, growth-oriented direction, you will need to be prepared to follow through if they do not. Otherwise, all this effort will boil down to simply another fight that ended nowhere.
We would love to help you avoid that! We’ve created an Intervention Planning Intensive to specifically help you walk through the steps listed above. If you’d like more information about this, or want to get signed up, please contact our Client Care Team here or call (206) 219-0145.
]]>Sandra and Tom came to The Marriage Recovery Center after years of trying short stints of marriage counseling. They had done what many couples do: reach a crisis point in their marriage, seek short term help, and drop out of counseling, only to repeat the pattern a few years later.
“I always thought that coping with my marriage problems was a sign of strength,” the weary, 43 year old mother of three told me. “I could always find the strength to keep plowing forward, even though my marriage problems remained unchanged.”
“You went to counseling at times, right?” I asked.
“Yes, but each time we only went for a few sessions. Our schedules got in the way and I think Tom became uncomfortable when he was confronted. So, I adapted to our situation, telling myself it wasn’t all that bad.”
“Was that really the truth?” I said, looking firmly at Sandra.
She paused, letting the magnitude of the problem sink in. “Yes and no,” she said. Again, she paused and looked at her husband, who was sitting and listening to her patiently. “I think I found ways to explain our problems away. I told myself that all couples go through tough times. I told myself that things were not as bad as they were. I told myself that if I pushed Tom he would leave me, and I really didn’t want that.”
“Yes,” I said. “Many couples endure really bad times and tell themselves it is not so bad. That’s called denial: Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying to myself. We all endure lots of pain to keep things going just the way they are. We cope, adapt and accommodate, all the while killing ourselves and our marriages, and tell ourselves we are doing something good. This all prevents real change.”
Scripture tells us that the truth will set us free. (John 8:32) It is actually facing the truth and applying it to our lives that will set us free.
I then asked Sandra and Tom to do something that is often quite painful. I asked them to write out all the ways they adapted to their difficult marriage. I asked them to write all the ways they told themselves things were not as bad as they were. What forms of denial did they use to keep things stable in their marriage? Asking these questions can help to determine if you are being truthful with yourself and, subsequently, what can be done to honestly face your challenges and overcome them.
First, be completely honest with yourself about your situation. As you consider your situation, are you fiercely candid with yourself? You cannot change what you do not own. You cannot change something if you don’t see the situation realistically. Write down the way things are. Talk to a friend about the facts of your situation.
Second, determine if you have been coping, adapting or accommodating. Write down the ways you have been coping and note the impact this coping has had on you. Explore why you have been coping instead of facing issues candidly. Again, honesty is critical.
Third, face your fears of telling yourself the truth. If you have been accommodating out of fear, acknowledge this to yourself, and perhaps a trusted friend or counselor. Take inventory on the impact this is having on you and your relationships. Acknowledge that accommodating out of fear keeps you trapped and reinforces a weakness in another.
Fourth, choose to act with integrity and honesty. Set out to interact in a healthier, clearer, and more honest manner. From your clear, calm, compassionate self, let your feelings inform you, not control you. As you listen to your feelings and discern a better course of action, you can address the problems with honesty. Every time you do this you will strengthen your inner self and will stop enabling a destructive process. Denial falls away and truth emerges.
Finally, stay the course. Perfect practice makes perfect. As you set out on this journey you will rediscover lost parts of yourself. As you stop adapting and accommodating others, you will come to know yourself better and have healthier, more honest relationships. You will find your relationships becoming more vibrant, alive, and filled with respect and integrity. From this new position, you will have more self-respect and will be better able to respect others.
Do you really want to be healed? Are you ready to give up harmful actions? If you would like our professional support, please go to our website, www.marriagerecoverycenter.com or call us at (206) 219-0145 to find out more about our services.
]]>No, seriously. Marriage is the absolutely best place to grow. I know some of you may think I’ve lost my mind. “Marriage,” you say, “is the last place I grow. It’s the place I cope, struggle, work to recover from.”
I understand that. But let’s begin with a quiz. Just give the first answer that comes to your mind.
While some may waffle a bit with their answers, most will answer with one person: their mate. Even in the worst of relational times, we long to be understood and accepted by our mate. When the chips are down, we want encouragement from our mate. When we feel the most insecure, we often want healing counsel from our mate.
But wait a minute. Isn’t your mate the one person on Earth you’re most likely to argue with? Aren’t they the one you may feel most vulnerable with during times of intense conflict? Isn’t your mate the person with whom you often don’t want to share your darkest secrets?
In spite of these questions, I have great news. Our mate is THE person God has given us to be a helpmate. A ‘helpmate,’ according to God, is a person able to speak into, and even bring healing to, our most vulnerable and wounded areas. More than any other person on the planet, your mate has the potential to bring healing through your relationship with him or her.
Shortly after God created the heavens and the earth, he placed man in the garden he created. While the garden was beautiful and abundant in every way, something was missing. God declared, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18) Although enjoying the garden, I can imagine Adam being pretty excited about this new addition to creation.
The historical record is clear—humankind would not always live in harmony. They would struggle and battle with each other. They would hurt one another. Still, God’s goal for man and wife was that they would help each other, defer to each other in love, and build each other up. Marriage was the place designed for great things to happen. So, in spite of the challenges you face, marriage is still an excellent place to grow. Consider the following:
the place we cultivate transparency. Marriage may be a place we put down the heavy weight of our façade. No false persona and trying to be more than we are. This transparency has been proven to be an antidote to life’s stresses. Your mate may offer the opportunity to be fully known, understood, and accepted, and this is powerfully healing. Marriage can be:
No matter your circumstances (and I want to be clear that I never encourage tolerating abuse), might it be possible to view your challenges in a different way? Might your marriage be just the place, at least for now, to gain awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, and to grow? Seeing the mirror in your marriage puts an entirely new spin on marriage and the inherent advantages of married life, seeing your marriage as a place of opportunity, which it certainly can be.
If you want help getting your marriage to a place of encouragement and growth, we’re here for you! Learn more about what we offer at the Marriage Recovery Center by contacting our Client Care team or call us at (206) 219-0145 to find out more about our services.
]]>There’s something in our hearts that comes alive when we hear a relationship story of courage, valor, and impossible odds. The latter part of the quote above gives us a much more meaningful definition of being resilient than the first sentence, which speaks of resilience as if it were a passive act, but instead, it is active, creative, and inspiring.
Psychological Resilience, as defined in Wikipedia, “is the ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly” and can be just as inspiring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience
When you’re in the middle of grief, loss, and fear, it can be hard to see what it is that even remains in your relationship for you to work with. Especially when all that grief and loss and fear has been a longstanding companion due to dysfunctional relationships and daily hardships. How do you even start to rebuild?
If I were to try to run a marathon next weekend, I would definitely not even come close to finishing it. I do consider myself a runner, but all I can run right now is about a mile. I would be totally overwhelmed to even think about what it would take to run a marathon.
But, if I decided that was a finish line I really wanted to cross, I could do so with a few months of dedicated training. I would have to create a plan that would allow me to gradually build my fitness, strength, and endurance. I would have to change my daily habits, my relationships, my eating, my behavior, even my vocabulary.
I know none of it will feel natural or normal or good. But, by starting where I am, building a little bit every day, and consistently training to run, there’s going to come a point where it all feels more natural, normal, and good. The same is true for a relationship.
Learning to change is much the same—whether it’s character, behavior, thinking, or habits. You have to decide what your finish line is, and then build the plan to get there. Start with where you are; challenge yourself to add a bit more every day and stay disciplined.
You may need to change the thoughts you think and the things you tell yourself about relationships. You’ll have to make a plan to deal with the distractions and obstacles. Be ready for none of it to feel very natural until you’ve developed the neural pathways for it to become ingrained.
To decide what your end goal is, brainstorm a bit. What do you want to change? How do you want to show up in your world? What would you like your marriage or relationships to look like? What does “healthy” look like? If you were living your best life, what would look different?
As you think about how you want to show up in your world today, consider your attitude, your character, and your influence. You have a right—and a responsibility—to live out who you are created and called to be.
What are your gifts, talents, and abilities? How do you long to influence the world and reflect the light of Christ? In what ways are you sabotaging that mission in your own head? How would your relationship be different if you weren’t getting in your own way?
Change is hard. But we were not created to stay stagnant, complacent, or trapped in fear. We were created to be resilient and live with the capacity to be in grief and still reach for joy.
The act of resilience plays an important role in staying positive. Which is something we all need right now and forever. Psychologists everywhere will agree. This article on positivepsychology.com talks about resilience and the need to continue to improve upon it. https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-resilience
We at the Marriage Recovery Center want to help you develop a training plan for effective change! To learn more about the programs and services we offer, contact our Client Care Team here or call (206) 219-0145. We look forward to hearing from you!
]]>One of the first things I do in counseling is see where your deep feelings begin to come forth. We all have feelings, even if they are denied or pushed aside. I can’t make much progress until you trust me enough to tell me what is going on and how it hurts. I have had men who can put up walls and defend themselves for hours. But it does little good to talk to a counselor if you don’t discuss your feelings.
I can’t tell you how many men say things like, “I don’t know what I feel.” Men do have emotions, but frequently feel like they can’t show more vulnerable emotions like fear. They struggle to accept themselves when they think they come across as needy or not capable. So, when their wives tell them that they feel abused (not necessarily physically, but emotionally or verbally,) many men respond with self-protection and self-deception. They push away feelings like fear, guilt, and sadness, and substitute them with a false aura of strength, frequently using anger as a cover-up.
So, these men get angry quickly in a vain attempt to control and self-protect. When something activates their fear, they push it away with anger and, if it works to make them feel better about themselves, the anger is reinforced and becomes a learned behavior. If you are practiced at getting angry, you will become pretty good at it and quickly go there when you feel like you need to self-protect.
Many men try to tell us that they cannot control their anger. While anger may feel uncontrollable, it IS possible to learn to learn to manage your anger. To say you can never gain control of anger is self-justification to continue what you’re doing instead of learning, growing, and improving. You must accept that you can control you and no one else makes you do anything. You, in fact, have power over your addictions, anger, and responses to other people.
Learning to recognize when you’re using anger to cover up more vulnerable emotions is an important step in growing and healing your relationship. When you realize that you’re actually feeling something other than anger, you can begin to discover the real feelings going on underneath the anger, at your core.
At the Marriage Recovery Center, we can help you identify these self-protective patterns that lead to anger and give you the tools to figure out what else you’re feeling. For more information, or to learn about our other programs, contact our Client Care Team here or call our office at (206) 219-0145.
]]>The one who had the affair is the one who stepped out of the sacred bounds of the marriage. Feeling intensely betrayed, enraged, and resentful, the “victim” often attacks the “villain,” creating even more distance than existed before. While it is tempting to vilify the one who had the affair, we must examine what led up to the affair.
Before we embark on this journey to examine why it happened, I must be clear—nothing justifies an affair. This is a form of acting out in a most egregious manner, a most hurtful response to inner and outer stress. It is a failed attempt to find peace that only leads to even greater pain.
While it is never justified, an affair often has meaning, and understanding that meaning can provide insurance against it ever happening again. Most affairs occur in the context of significant marriage issues. A skilled counselor can help the couple look deeper at the marriage problems that existed long before the affair took place.
Marriages susceptible to affairs often struggle with the issues below. If you find yourself with some of these “symptoms,” seek immediate, deep help. Your relationship may be vulnerable to an affair.
I fully recognize that this is an incredibly sensitive topic. It is so easy and tempting to become adversarial, shift into blaming and shaming. Recovery is best done with expert help, and we at The Marriage Recovery Center are available for this process. Please contact our Client Care Team for more information or to get started with one of our therapists or coaches.
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The first thing to note about boundaries is that very few people ever actually set them, but they sure do talk about them a lot. Saying “I don’t like when you do that,” or “When you do that, you hurt my feelings,” or “This is the last time I’ll ever put up with that,” isn’t creating a boundary, it’s simply expressing a preference. Telling your partner what you don’t like or don’t want isn’t setting a boundary unless it’s been communicated effectively that there’s an action you’re prepared to take if your boundary is violated. The other person can choose to listen, and hopefully abide, by your wishes, but if they don’t change their behavior, and there is no clearly defined thing that happens, then there’s really no boundary.
If boundary-setting is so important, why is it so difficult? Because many of us are so biochemically addicted to our circumstances (even if they’re difficult, even if it’s relationship drama,) that we have more fear of the unknown than of the known, no matter how painful. What I mean by being biochemically addicted is a little bit like how someone who loses a lot of weight often puts the weight right back on. In physiology we call this a body weight set point, where our bodies become “programmed” to be a certain weight and to store a certain amount of fat; and the body will fight back against attempts to change this set point.
In therapy, we see emotional set points. People will allow themselves to exist in terrible circumstances, even if there is a relatively easy way out, because they are more comfortable being anxious and triggered and uncomfortable than they are not experiencing those things.
Setting good boundaries and recognizing your emotional set points are incredibly important to emotional health and growth. If you don’t do this work now, you may forever be caught in a cycle of saying you want things to change, but still following the same pattern of behavior you’ve been following and wondering why nothing is different. At the Marriage Recovery Center, we offer several options to help you set boundaries and learn your emotional set points! Everything from our men’s in-person intensive, Life Skills Training, to our women’s online program, Redeemed, to individual counseling. For more information on any of these programs or if you have any questions, please contact our Client Care Team and they’d be happy to help!
]]>I consider myself a seasoned marriage counselor. And, while I feel excited at the prospect of helping each new couple and working through the challenge ahead, high-conflict couples can sometimes strain my capabilities.
Highly conflicted couples are often engaged in intense power struggles, each trying to get something from their mate, yet doing so in ways that exacerbate the problem. They demand, blame, punish, and coerce, hardly noticing their actions are adding fuel to an inferno. These are self-defeating traits that must be highlighted in counseling.
Fortunately, skills that will help can be learned. Author and psychologist Marshall Rosenberg wrote in his book, Nonviolent Communication, that highly conflicted couples are trapped in power struggles with one another, using “life-alienating language” filled with judgments about rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness. He discovered that couples who try to control each other often end up in conflict, whereas couples who accept one another are much more likely to connect.
Below are some common characteristics of high-conflict couples. While this may appear to be bad news, recognizing these traits can actually bring hope if the couple is willing to learn how to let go of these attitudes and behaviors that serve, ultimately, to create even more conflict and disconnection.
Many couples who come to The Marriage Recovery Center have been in counseling before. They tell us they have tried counseling (sometimes with multiple counselors,) but became disappointed and discontinued.
Choosing a counselor you trust is critically important to this process. If you are considering doing marriage counseling, make sure your counselor is trained in, and has experience with, high-conflict couples. Working with highly conflicted couples is a unique skill and requires a certain temperament. It is important that your counselor be comfortable in helping unravel the dynamics taking place and can offer specific guidance and skills to live compassionately with one another.
Successful intervention and treatment will begin with the assessment that both individuals are emotionally capable and willing to participate in the rigors of couples counseling. They need to both be able to take responsibility for their part in the problems and gain emotional balance and strength. A skilled marriage counselor will help the high-conflict couple to identify the issues fueling the fires of conflict, as well as assist them in connecting and gaining expertise in communicating effectively. The skilled marriage counselor teaches communication and conflict resolution skills, as well as tools for managing emotion and putting issues in perspective in order to cultivate positive intimacy.
If you are ready for this type of marriage counseling, and willing to put in the time and effort, we would love to work with you! Please contact our Client Care Team for more information on our therapists and coaches, as well as our programs.
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So why, then, when we’re so angry that we’re not in our right mind, do we insist on trying to work through things with our partner? Wouldn’t we be better off waiting until we were more calm and able to share logically? Absolutely! You’d almost always be better off waiting. So why don’t many of us do it? Because most of us have never been taught to do so. Our role models didn’t know how to put a conversation on hold so they could calm down, so they didn’t model this healthy behavior for us.
So what should you do when you’re really angry and you think that your partner caused it? Or when it just seems to make sense that you need to include them in your pain? You wait. Try to be patient until you’re back to being your best self, until your blood pressure is normalized. Try to wait until you’re able to be logical and pragmatic. Try to be patient until you have something helpful, not hurtful, to say.
Of course we know that patience is often the hardest thing to employ when we’re overwhelmed, as everything seems so critically important. But is it really? If you don’t finish that heated conversation right now, is it, or the issue that caused it, going to go away? Probably not.
I remember an example from my own life: A few years ago my girlfriend and I were in a heated argument and I was worked up. Rather than do or say something I might have regretted, I instead took a walk, alone, to the beach to think. Now my girlfriend was not happy at all at my leaving, and even expressed that she felt abandoned or didn’t know if she could rely on me to be there for her in the future if I left. But I knew I needed time to process and to cool off, and intuitively I knew that this was much more important in the long run than anything that would happen during that particular argument. So what happened to me during my time at the beach? I calmed down. I saw other perspectives that were equally as true as the one I had been so strongly holding onto. And I was able to go back and apologize and explain myself without feeling overwhelmed by the situation. Basically, I was much better off, my girlfriend was much better off, and our relationship was better off—all because I took the time to process my anger without her present.
One equally great example of what to do when you’re angry and want to work through it with you partner when you know you shouldn’t is to, instead, find an objective friend or counselor and talk it over with them. They are likely to share different perspectives that could give you more clarity. Or simply try using your breath techniques or meditating to get your mind out of its fevered pitch and back into a calm place. Don’t ever underestimate the healing power of 10-20 deep breaths or sitting with your mind for 5-10 minutes (meditation).
So, in summary, the answer to almost everything is to try to be more patient. Everything is constantly moving and changing, relationships as well, and if you can wait out the inevitable blow-up, it will eventually calm down, and there will be ample time for not only reconciliation, but maybe even growth.
We know uncontrolled anger can cause huge problems for you personally and for your relationship! This is why we’ve created our Moving Beyond Anger program, available to men and women. We want to help you pinpoint what triggers you and learn more effective ways to deal with your anger, which will help you work through relationship difficulties. You can learn more about the program here or contact our Client Care Team with any questions about any of our programs and services.
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