Houston Marriage Counselor: Confession Can Bring You Closer Together

As the Houston marriage counselor, I bring religion into my sessions with clients only if it is something that they ask for or obviously feel comfortable with it. I believe that spiritual health is essential, whether one believes in a particular religion or have some other practice that connects you with some Higher Power.  It is essential to happiness in and outside of marriage and committed love relationship, for the vast majority of ‘souls.’   I also believe that there are some useful practices that have come to be seen as “religious” even though there is much therapeutic and spiritual value in them.

One of the most important of these is the act of confession. Most of you probably immediately think of Catholicism when you hear the word, and that’s understandable. Catholics have a sacrament called ‘Confession’ which involves telling a priest your sins and having him forgive you for them as a representative of God. You are thus washed clean in the eyes of God.  Most religious traditions have something similar: the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Sweat Lodge of many traditions like the Lakota, Islam’s Ramadan, etc.

Confessing to your spouse probably isn’t going to have the exact same effect, but it is something that can give your relationship help and ultimately bring you closer together if you find that you are pulling apart.

Houston Marriage Counselor: So Why Don’t More People Confess?

Simple: it’s scary. If you feel like you’ve done something wrong, it’s a natural inclination to want to hide it. The problem is that the longer you hide whatever it is that you’ve done, the more the lies build up. This causes stress and more fear on the part of the person lying, and confusion, frustration, and distance from the person being kept in the dark.

Eventually, this cycle can get so bad that you end up needing relationship help. That’s unfortunate, because the quicker you can admit your wrongdoing, the easier it will be for your partner to accept and move on. Moreover, even though their initial reaction may be to feel hurt and angry, your confession will ultimately make them feel closer to you.

With that in mind, here are some tips to make confessing easier:

  • Organize your thoughts on paper. Confessions are nerve-wracking, but writing it down makes it easier to think through what you want to say and how you want to say it. It will also help you get details right, because your spouse will most likely have lots of questions, and you need to answer as clearly as you can.
  • Tell them in private. Hopefully this is obvious, but you need to find the right time for a confession, and a work party or family dinner isn’t it.
  • Concentrate on them, and don’t be defensive. One helps the other. Chances are if you confess to something truly hurtful, your spouse will attack you at first. This isn’t pleasant, but remember that you are the one who violated their trust. If they had done this to you, what would your response be? Think how they feel, and don’t fight back or justify your behavior.

If you’ve tried and just don’t know how to confess on your own, seek out the help of the Houston marriage counselor to walk you through the process in a safe environment.

 

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Houston Marital Counseling: You Really Are Speaking Different Languages

In Houston marital counseling, I get couples coming in all the time who say that talking to each other is like talking to someone who speaks another language. Funny thing is, no one ever realizes how right they are.

Obviously, I’m not talking about “language” in the typical sense. Nor is this meant to be some kind of tacit agreement with the Mars and Venus books, arguing that all men behave one way and all women another. People are different, plain and simple – ask gay and lesbian couples if their relationship issues go away because they’re both the same sex.

No, what I’m talking about is our own personal love language, and how ignoring these differences can lead to disaster.

Learn Your Love Language in Houston Marital Counseling

Let me give you two examples from the same relationship:

Marty can’t believe how in love with Terri he is. All he wants to do is spend every second of every day with her. They eat together, sleep together, and spend their nights huddled around the TV. It’s perfect. But lately Terri seems distant, and it doesn’t seem to help no matter how much of his time he gives to her.

Terri, meanwhile, is terrified that things are going wrong. They started out great with Marty always taking her out to nice restaurants and buying her things, but now all they do is sit at home around the stupid TV. And when she buys him gifts, he barely seems to appreciate them. Does he even care about her anymore?

Clearly, Marty and Terri need to talk, or very soon they are going to have pretty big relationship issues. And why? Because what denotes “love” to one of them isn’t the same to the other – they speak different love languages.

Here’s the good news – Marty and Terri should be able to easily overcome this! All they have to do is talk about how they are feeling and what kinds of things make them feel the closest to each other. There’s no right or wrong, it’s just what works for them.

In general, love languages consist of:

Quality Time – Feeling loved simply by spending more time together, whether it’s grocery shopping or cuddling on the couch.

Acts of Service – He did the dishes for you because you were tired. She let you sleep in and took care of the kids.

Physical Touch – Cuddling, kissing, holding hands, having sex. You feel close when you are close.

Words of Affirmation – These people need to hear it – compliments and words of love work wonders.

Gifts – It’s not that these people are greedy or material; your gifts are tokens that show them how much you care.

Once you learn each other’s love language, you can alter your behavior to display your feelings in a way that speaks to your spouse. If you still have difficulty, don’t be afraid to try Houston marital counseling.

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The Houston Relationship Counselor Suggests Things to Try Before Divorce

There are counselors out there who will tell you that divorce is inevitable in some relationships, but the Houston relationship counselor is not one of them. Unless you are in an abusive relationship, I will do everything in my power to keep you and your spouse together, because I believe that we have made divorce so easy in our world that people now see it as a quick way out when things get a little hard.

If this is your mindset and you aren’t willing to change, then no marriage advice I can give you will change things. But if you love your spouse and genuinely wish that things would get better, I have several suggestions – some obvious, some not – about things that you can do to get your relationship back on track.

Get Your Marriage Back On Track with the Houston Relationship Counselor

The best marriage advice I can give you is to use the advice that seems to work for you and ignore the rest. That being said, the following suggestions have worked for countless people to help repair their marriage and strengthen their relationship.

Learn to talk – more, and better. The problems of almost every single couple I’ve worked with at my practice could have been alleviated if they talked more about how they were feeling and worked to listen to where each of them was coming from instead of acting passive aggressive and wishing for a partner that was a mind reader.

Learn to let go – and do it. At some point over the course of a long term relationship, I can guarantee you that each of you is going to say and do mean, selfish, and petty things. We’re all human, and sometimes we make mistakes. But as long as the perpetrator fesses up to their failures and apologizes, you have to forgive them – truly and completely. Holding on to resentment is a recipe for disaster.

Learn to take responsibility – instead of assigning blame. Here’s a hard truth: we can’t fix our partners; we can only fix ourselves. I tell my Houston relationship counselor clients if you dislike something about your relationship, stop blaming your partner (even if it seems like they’re “causing” it), take a step back, and think about what you can do to make things better. Oftentimes when one half of a couple alters their behavior, the other person will change, too. Blaming, on the other hand, usually just invites defensiveness.

Re-learn to love. Too many couples who come to me seeking marriage advice have forgotten how to enjoy their marriage. You decided to be with this person for the rest of your life because you found joy with them – find it again!

If it doesn’t seem like you and your spouse can save your marriage on your own, don’t be afraid to seek out a Houston relationship counselor.

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Houston Marriage Counselor: “I Need to Have My Reaction!”

As the Houston marriage counselor, it’s not often that I turn to sitcoms for relationship advice, but I loved a quote I heard a while back on Modern Family: “I need to have my reaction!”

In the scene that births this line, Cameron has just learned something very upsetting, and is having a typically overblown reaction. When Mitchell tries to calm him, Cameron shuts him down with the above line. If only people were this clear about how they wanted to be treated in real life!

One of the hardest things to handle is when your spouse is going through something extremely stressful. Depending on what the stressful event is, you might feel empathetic, sad, uncomfortable, amused, or even annoyed but – and this is important – it doesn’t matter how you feel.

Houston Marriage Counselor: In Times of Stress, Support the Stressed

That may seem way too obvious, but think about how easy it is to get caught up in your emotions – especially if you say something to your stressed spouse and he or she snaps at you. What the heck? You didn’t deserve that! But it doesn’t matter. Your job is to be there for them.

Here’s the tricky part. Some people think that this means they have to try to make their spouse feel better. Others believe in agreeing that the situation is stressful so as not to minimize the feelings of their partner. Who’s right?

Well, unfortunately, that depends on your spouse and the mood that he or she is in at the time. Does your partner respond well to being comforted, or prefer you to mirror their reactions?

If you don’t know, this is a good thing to start paying attention to in less stressful times. For now, the best relationship help I can offer is to show that you care by listening and asking what you can do. If you get a negative reaction, try not to take it personally. Instead, simply apologize and be there if they need you.

For couples that can’t deal with stressful situations without getting into fights, you may want to consider talking to the Houston marriage counselor.

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