Articles
Keeping Promises to Yourself: Stress Eating Over the Holidays
The holidays are such a joyous occasion. For a day or two, you can feel the magic of Christmas as you honor Jesus’ birth with traditions. You spend time with your family, watch your favorite movies, and recreate family dinners. However, the holidays can feel like a trap for someone who struggles with stress eating. The weeks leading up to Christmas may have been spent with worry about making ends meet, gift-giving, menus, extracurricular events, working overtime, and keeping the family healthy. Maybe you shrug on Halloween night when the candy comes out and decide that you will not think about [...]
Figuring Out Physical Intimacy After Infidelity
Few things can damage a committed relationship more than infidelity. The closeness that a couple cultivates can be shattered through an affair, regardless of the length of that affair or whether it was an emotional or a physical one. One of the main areas that is affected in the relationship is the couple’s intimacy. Their emotional, spiritual, and physical intimacy can suffer damage, and it takes a lot of work to rebuild that broken trust.Why intimacy after infidelity is hard.Physical intimacy with someone, particularly sex, requires vulnerability. One spouse puts themselves out there by initiating and expressing their desire, and they must [...]
Parental Codependency: Understanding and Breaking Free
Codependency is not just related to substance abuse relationships, it now includes the emotional connections of dependence on anyone in a relationship. Parental codependency is when a parent feels that they have an intense feeling of being responsible for their child and an excessive need for approval. This creates an unhealthy relationship with the child. The codependent parent tends to exercise an overabundance of control. This makes the already complex relationship between parent and child more complex. These relationships become harmful and can lead to unintentional abuse. These relationships have little to no boundaries. What are the causes of parental codependency? [...]
Understanding Disenfranchised Grief
Grief is the emotional and psychological response people have after suffering significant loss. Different societies have norms, rituals, and attitudes toward grief that are considered normal. When grief does not align itself with these norms and attitudes it is termed disenfranchised grief. The term was coined by Dr. Kenneth Doka, a respected authority on understanding grief and bereavement. According to him, disenfranchised grief is grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. Though a person’s grief is normal, real, and legitimate, society denies the grieving person space and support to grieve. For grief to be felt fully and [...]
7 Causes of Resentment in Marriage
Most couples get married with the hope of a, “happily ever after” etched deeply in their hearts and minds. In the early days of marriage, husbands and wives proclaim undying love for each other, telling each other how they couldn’t imagine living a life without the other. Passion, romance, affection, and sharing of hopes and dreams are probably the most common and expected characteristics of the early stages of marriage. It is in these early stages that most people experience the cliched marital bliss and unfortunately, it is also in these same years that the tone is set for whether a [...]
Overcoming Offense: Tackling Conflict in Relationships
Belonging to a family, whether by birth, faith, or choice, develops connections. These can sometimes be marked with apparent contradictions. They can prove exhilarating, but also exhausting. We love each other, but don’t always align. We toggle between the tensions, finding ourselves at odds and offended by each other. Instead of covering faults with prayer and love, we expose one another and misuse our relationship as an opportunity to injure and retaliate. It can result in cutting each other off or continuing in a relationship that is suffering because wounds and major issues are left unaddressed. It is not always intentional, [...]
Types Of Depression: There’s More Than One
Depression is more than feeling unhappy or down in the dumps for a few days. It is a real mental health condition that affects mood and ability to function. It can vary in intensity from mild to severe, be brought about by numerous reasons, and impact you in unique ways. Although the exact cause of depression is not fully known, risk factors include a family history of depression, abnormal brain chemistry, significant losses, chronic stress, and life circumstances. Typically, it develops over an extended length of time and, left untreated, can lead to a downward spiral. There are many different types [...]
Hope in Between: Navigating Therapy’s Messy Middle
Congratulations! You’ve decided to begin the process of working through your heart’s hurt and healing your soul. Yet, when we initiate a counseling journey, we don’t realize how exhausting the process can be. Somewhere between the treatment plan and goal, we find ourselves exhausted and ready to check out. We can wonder if it’s worth it to: Keep appointments. Do the self-examination work. Ask the challenging questions. Negotiate the coping. Cultivate peace with the change. You can have greater hope for navigating therapy’s messy middle with the tips below. The case for counseling. Doubtless, there will be times when it’s difficult [...]
7 Principles About OCD: A Biblical Foundation
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a common, chronic, and long-lasting disorder in which a person has seemingly uncontrollable, recurring thoughts (“obsessions”), and/or behaviors (“compulsions”) that they feel the urge to repeat over and over. It is a complex, anxiety-related disorder that Christian counselors can help patients with, using a Biblical foundation and a dependency on God to overcome something that can seem very difficult to treat. Principles about OCD. To learn more about OCD anxiety and its alleviation, consider the seven principles below: Knowledge is Power. Many people suffering from OCD anxiety are unaware of what is happening to them, so education [...]