Free to Love – Members Content

The challenge before you is to learn to love the other effectively and to do so wholeheartedly and consistently with God’s abundant grace. Clearly some couples are ‘natural couples’; their formation makes it easy for them to express love in ways that are appreciated by the other. Other couples need to be constantly alert and…

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Take Five: Improve your Marriage

Do you feel trapped in a dissatisfying or troubled marriage? Do you feel powerless to ‘fix’ it because your spouse refuses to join you in counselling or a marriage enrichment course?   Take heart! There are lots of things a husband or wife can do on their own that can have a dramatic impact. Here…

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Take Five: The Art of Apology

Sadly many couples don’t actually know how to apologise and reconcile when they’ve hurt their spouse. People think that it’s obvious, or that it should just be instinctual, or that love should make it all happen spontaneously.   Well it isn’t and it doesn’t.   We see too many wounded couples stuck in a pattern…

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Smart Dating #2: Ask ‘Why’ before you Try

Sexual Compatibility Since the 1960’s the slogan ‘try before you buy’ became a common excuse for premarital sex. It’s still popular today and has underpinned the rise in cohabitation. We’ve been led to believe that ‘sexual compatibility’ is the most influential factor in a successful marriage. Of course when you think it through, the line…

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Stop the Train…I Want to Get Off!

Stop the Train I want to get off

How the divorce superhighway fails couples. Speaking recently with one of America’s foremost family therapists, Dr Bill Doherty, we had a lively discussion on the divorce process. He noted that there are a significant proportion of couples who are ambivalent about their divorce, but once they file, it’s like they are on a superhighway with no…

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Mid-Life Madness and other Stressors

Midlife Madness and other Stressors

As mid-lifers in the midst of working through some of our ‘issues’, we are acutely aware of how easy it would be to let our individual stuff derail our marriage. It’s normal for a person in midlife to be irritable and volatile. Some react with depressive symptoms, others get angry and aggressive, others withdraw or…

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Getting Help

Getting help for your troubled marriage

If your marriage is in strife and you need some help, it’s important to make sure you get the right help. Unfortunately, many counsellors and therapists will accept couples for couples counselling without having any specific training. Couples therapy is a unique and one of the most difficult counselling tasks and you deserve a therapist…

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Reconciliation

Love needs more than "I'm sorry".

Love means more than saying “I’m sorry”. There’s a difference between the ‘I’ centred statement “I’m sorry”, and the other centred statement, “Will you please forgive me?” The ‘I’ centred statement simply acknowledges a fact. A person might recognise that they behaved poorly, inconsiderately, insensitively, thoughtlessly or carelessly. They might also just want to move…

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