What is Your Losing Stragey Profile?
In today’s post, I outline five losing strategies couples use toward each other that can eventually kill their relationship. These five strategies come from Relational Life Therapy (Terry Real).
When Small Mistakes Feel Huge: Resting in God’s Grace
Small mistakes, loud inner critic? Learn to tell conviction from condemnation and rest in the grace of a God who fully accepts you in Christ. Start today.
The Same Fight, Over and Over: Breaking Cycles of Conflict
Most long-term couples aren't actually arguing about twenty different topics — they're having the same one or two arguments in different costumes. The specific trigger changes (money, in-laws, chores, tone of voice), but the underlying pattern repeats: one person pursues and the other withdraws, or both dig in and neither backs down, or the same unresolved hurt from years ago gets reactivated every time.
Broken Trust: When Betrayal Threatens the Relationship
Whether it's infidelity, financial dishonesty, or a smaller but repeated pattern of broken promises, betrayal shatters something that took years to build and can't be rebuilt on the same timeline. The betrayed partner often oscillates between wanting to reconcile and feeling foolish for wanting to. The partner who broke trust often wants forgiveness faster than trust can actually be restored, mistaking remorse for repair.
Growing Apart: When You Feel Like Roommates, Not Married
This quandary rarely announces itself with a crisis. It arrives quietly, through years of full calendars, tired evenings, and the assumption that the relationship will simply take care of itself while attention goes elsewhere — work, kids, ministry, the next deadline. Then one day someone looks up and realizes they're coexisting rather than truly knowing each other.
Feeling Unheard: When Communication Breaks Down
One of the most common complaints in close relationships isn't about a single event — it's the slow accumulation of not feeling understood. One person talks, the other listens just long enough to formulate a defense, and both walk away more convinced than ever that the other doesn't get it. Over time, people stop trying. They either go quiet or they escalate, hoping volume will accomplish what words haven't.
When It’s Time to Cut Ties: How to Know If You Should Leave a Narcissistic Spouse
Every other post in this series is about living with someone. This one is about whether you should.
Deciding to end a marriage is one of the hardest choices a person makes, especially for people who take vows seriously. If you're asking the question, you are almost certainly not being casual. Here are the criteria that help.
8 Tactics That Never Work with a Narcissist (And Why)
Most people married to a narcissist spend years trying things that feel logical and fair. Nearly all of them backfire, because they assume a partner who processes criticism, empathy, and conflict the way you do. The tactics below fail for reasons that follow directly from what we know about the pattern: fragile self-esteem, heavy defensiveness, and low reciprocity.
When Your Self-Worth Rides on Your Performance: The Hidden Cost of Perfectionistic Faith
What the research says about performance-based religion and perfectionism, and how to get off the treadmill
What Actually Helps: A Practical Guide to Living with a Narcissistic Spouse
If the last post felt discouraging, here is the useful part. You can't control a narcissist, but you can change how you show up, what you tolerate, and what supports you build around yourself. Those changes often shift the dynamic more than any argument ever did.
First, a safety screen. If your spouse threatens you, controls your movement or money, or has been physically violent, skip ahead to the last post. Managing the relationship isn't the goal in that situation. Your safety is.
Understanding the Narcissist in Your Home: What Theodore Millon Got Right
If you're married to someone with strong narcissistic traits, you've probably asked some version of this: How can someone so charming in public be so cold at home? Why does a small comment set off a storm? Why does nothing I do ever seem to count?
The psychological literature has some answers. Understanding them won't fix your marriage, but it will stop you from making things worse.
Soaking with God
As I grow older, I have a stronger desire to slow down and be with God. I want to learn how to enjoy his presence. I believe that God’s presence - in and by itself - heals so many wounds and corrects so many wrong beliefs that it is difficult to overstate our need to simply “be with God.”
There’s a Difference Between Being Boss and Being Bossy
Every marriage needs someone to book the flight, call the plumber, decide where the money goes this month, and make the call when a decision can't wait for both people to feel ready. Someone has to lead in a given moment — that's not the problem. The trouble starts when leading turns into ruling: when “I'll take care of it” becomes “I'll decide it, and you'll go along with it.” The line between the two isn't about who holds the pen. It's about what happens to the other person's voice once a decision needs to be made.
The Five Hidden Wounds Behind Most Emotional Struggles
In Changes That Heal, Dr. Henry Cloud makes an observation that reshapes how many people understand their own pain: most emotional and psychological struggles aren't random. They trace back to a handful of core dysfunctions — patterns formed early, often without our awareness, that keep replaying in adulthood until they're named and addressed. Five of the most common are suppressing anger, suppressing sadness, feeling like we don't have a choice, feeling isolated from those we love, and always being one-down in relationships.
Why Do I Always Expect Bad Things to Happen?
You get a text from your spouse that just says “call me when you can” and your stomach drops. You wait for a lab result, a performance review, a phone call from your kid’s school, and your mind has already sketched three worst-case scenarios before your phone even rings. If this is a familiar pattern for you, you’re not alone — and you’re not simply “being negative.” Something deeper is usually going on, and understanding it is the first step toward a different way of living.
After Twenty Years, My Husband Isn't Interested in Me Anymore. What's Wrong With Me? What Should I Do?
Twenty years is a long time to build a life with someone. It's also long enough for silence to grow around a hard topic without either of you quite meaning for it to happen. If sexual intimacy has quietly faded, and you're left wondering what you did wrong, please hear this clearly: a husband's loss of sexual interest is rarely, if ever, a verdict on his wife's desirability. It's almost always a symptom of something else — and most of those somethings have nothing to do with you.
The Road to Healing: Restoration from Pornography Addiction for Christian Couples
We've covered a lot in this series — the documented impact of pornography on Christian marriages, the underlying roots of the struggle, and the real trauma a betrayed spouse experiences. This final post turns to the question every couple in this situation is really asking: Is there a way back? The honest answer is yes — but restoration is a process, not an event, and it asks something real of both spouses.
The Betrayed Spouse: Understanding and Healing From Betrayal Trauma
The first two posts in this series looked at pornography's broader impact and the roots of the struggle for the person using it. This post turns to someone whose experience is too often minimized: the spouse who discovers it.
The Root Causes: Why Christians Struggle With Pornography
A common question Christians ask when they encounter marital and relationship problems is some version of this: "I love God, I love my spouse — how did I end up here?" It's asked with genuine confusion, and often with deep shame. Understanding the honest answer matters, because most approaches to this struggle fail by treating surface behavior instead of the root.
How Pornography Affects Christian Marriages: What the Research and Real Couples Show Us
Pornography rarely announces itself in a marriage. It arrives quietly — a private habit that feels contained, manageable, harmless. But couples who sit across from a counselor after discovery almost always describe the same thing: this was never as contained as it felt.
For Christian couples, this topic carries an added weight. It isn't only a relational or psychological issue — it touches vows, covenant, and a shared understanding of what marriage is meant to reflect. Talking about it honestly, rather than in hushed generalities, matters.