Top 10 Couples Counseling Remarks

1) "It feels like we're roommates."
It's that feeling when you "just exist". When your identities become like two ships passing in the night. Sure you do your part; the chores, the wifely or husbandry duties, present with familiar responses and predictable retaliations. You become robotic. You become detached. When this happens and you have passed the threshold of detachment, it becomes easier to blame the other person. You may find yourself painting them in a darker light. Vilifying the individual becomes very easy.

Prompt : Considering you are aware of your portion, perhaps that is where you can start. Whether or not your partner is "just existing" or operating as a roommate does not mean you have to reciprocate. You are only responsible for your actions and reactions. The only thing you can truly control is your response to your environment.

2) "I cheated because my needs weren't being met."
Your needs are completely valid. Perhaps you have found yourself lost in the relationship, having to be left without fulfillment or satisfaction. You found yourself on a gradual path toward seeking to meet your needs elsewhere. While your needs are valid, at some point it causes pain for the other party. This leaves you taking on a role that is superior to your partner. It becomes a decision to split away from your commitment in order to have your own desires fulfilled. This also has left you, yourself, broken. A piece of you is now fractured considering you were willing to break a commitment. Much healing is required on both fronts and as a relational unit. The person who cheated requires healing, the person cheated against requires healing, the person cheated with requires healing, and the definition of the couple as a unit requires healing.

Prompt : Considering the past in now placed in a concrete and fixed position, we are not able to fully erase the occurrence. However, each person can focus on their process of healing, their own journey. At some point those two paths will merge back to one if truly desired. It may be beneficial to start off with an agreed decision, a solid rock decision of what each person truly wants or needs at this point. From there the message will be clear, and you can better focus on the method of those roads toward healing.

3) "He/ She always sides with the kids!"
If the mentality has now become so two sided that kids are thought of as a source of negativity, it may be time to take a step back and restructure your perspective. You are lying to yourself if you believe there are sides to chose from. This is usually a primitive response associated with blame. We begin to believe that there absolutely must exist a scapegoat in order for our feelings to be justified or considered. People tend to find the most vulnerable placeholder to target. When we point to innocence as being the scapegoat to our problems, rather than take ownership of our portion, we in turn became the very children we are blaming.

Prompt : If you find yourself saying something like "You always side with the children, you never consider me." perhaps look in a mirror for a few minutes and really think about what you are saying. After you have done so, start your conversation with your partner over again with something like "I often do not feel heard which in turn makes me feel unloved. Can you help me understand if this is true.". Use big people words, not grunts, huffs and puffs.

4) "I am not given opportunities to lead/ He is not leading me."
So you have found yourself not being given ample opportunities to take charge! Or perhaps the opposite, you are not feeling led. First question to ask yourself, "Have I made it clear that I desire to lead?", or " Have I made it clear I require leadership?". If not, perhaps what you are truly experiencing is a communication breakdown due to passivity rather than a deep desire to lead/ be led. The first step in either desire is to be courageous enough and humble enough to do something about it. The trick then becomes to merge courage and humility within the confines of your unique couple dynamic/ relationship.

Prompt : Begin by sifting through all the emotive words you have stored within yourself. Express them. Next sit down and jot out your identified fears and develop boundaries from those fears. This draft will be your charter within your relationship. A role identifier.


5) "I have lost my identity. I don't know who I am anymore"
Years can pass in what seems like days. One day you are at the wedding alter or on your first date, the next you find yourself 10 years into a relationship forgetting why you are even in love with that person. It happens. We tend to gravitate to the routine, the familiar. We end up floating down the river of life and finding ourselves operating on autopilot. We slowly and gradually lose pieces of ourselves. It becomes harder to remember, embody, and live out our true identities.

Prompt : Reflect on what parts of your life are Anchors. Those things that keep you grounded. The ultimate truths about your self that provide bumpers for who you are and who you are not. Not sure if you have those things? Then start developing them now and put them into practice! Slowly but surely a new structure to your identity will begin to solidify.

6) "This is our last resort before divorce."

So you have tried everything. You have run out of options. All is futile. Yes I believe that you have put in a great deal of effort and time in figuring things out. However, the first step is to truly decide to either be fully committed, or not. You can not begin walking down a road you haven't decided on. Many desire to walk a road and be effected by external factors. Treating external factors as indicators or evidences to validate their decision. The opposite is more beneficial.

Prompt : Make a committed decision, one road or the other, and have that decision impact the external factors rather than having the external factors impact you. You have to know the foundation rock on which you stand in order to make that initial decision. If you can't make one, then perhaps you must dig deeper and fully understand your identity before making a life altering decision.

7) "He/ She is always on their phone."

Tools can be used to create and destroy. What more powerful tool than your phone. It transcends individuals to a place of power. Individuals become omnipresent. With a skype, or google hangouts call you can be in multiple places at once. Individuals become sovereign entities, having full control over their online domains. With the ability to control who engages with them and what is being discussed. Individuals become imminent, actively and immediately engaging with their social circles. Individuals become semi omnipotent, being able to make things happen, will their realities. They increase in omniscience, googling just about any question they may have. Gradually finding our identity in these god like attributes can leave people chasing after the wind.

Prompt : Work on finding a balance in life. Draw or write out your spheres of influence. How and where do you devote your time? Technology is not a "bad" thing. It is incredible! But what is more incredible is the person siting right next you, looking down at their screen. What does finding a balance in life look like? I'll give you a hint. It has less to do with screen time and more to do with physical face time.

8) "I don't trust him/ her. "

Trust is the hardest thing to build. It takes so much effort and time. It can quickly be destroyed. You don't want to be "walked all over" but you also understand the other person's struggles. You have positioned yourself to give half of yourself, knowing at any given time you could pull away and be fully broken. So much effort for something that is a facade of trust. If you think about it, all the work and effort that is placed in NOT trusting someone, could be calibrated to begin a path ending in trust. Because we are human and require visual stimulus to engage our mind and our heart, we tend to desire evidence for change. We want enough evidence of non painful experience to overshadow the past or potential pitfalls.

Prompt : Instead of being half in half out, mentally decide one or the other for a short while. Test drive your emotions and see how you respond. Does giving the cold shoulder actually get you the healing you desire? Does engaging in sex with your partner alleviate the pain? More often than not, the story is deeper than that. Develop opportunities of evidences. Structure your relationship to intentionally include moments of trust building. At the end of the day trust is a mix of chemical and spiritual ingredients. Start writing the cookbook to your relationship.

9) "How do I know they wont hurt me again? "

The short answer to this is that you wont. You wont know if your husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, father, mother, sister, uncle, wont hurt you again. You will never know how external factors and variable will operate because we truly do not have full control over those factors. The only true factor we have control over is our self, our responses, our minds. Not knowing if you will get hurt again places you in a nebulous and fearful position. You begin to live in the unknown and paranoia may kick in. Anxiety will increase, and you will feel debilitated. Not a very healthy quality of life.

Prompt : Don't live in fear. Live in truth. It can be easy to allow others to structure your responses. Allowing someone's actions, or your past hurts to control your current and future reality strips you of your dignity. It makes something else in control of you. You no longer become autonomous. Rid yourself of this mentality. Don't feel safe? Seek safety. Don't feel heard? Be heard. Don't feel accepted? Dialogue through the why. If it's too much for that someone to accept you and love you, then find acceptance elsewhere. You are too valuable and precious to live any moment of your life in fear.

10) "This experience has been helpful. Not horrible, or amazing, but beneficial."

Experience makes up the gritty work of counseling. It can be hard, sometimes even messy. The experience, the process sheds off the layers leaving people vulnerable if they are willing to be. By the time the process is over there is a realization. No one was the good person, no one was the bad person. Every behavior, maladaptive or not, is an attempt to meet a very real need. This reality helps to not vilify one another during the counseling process. It makes the dialogue beneficial. Its not good, not bad, but helpful and beneficial. It's not static but dynamic.

Prompt : Prior to going to counseling, understand that there will not be any taking sides. It is not a venture to prove yourself right or the other wrong. Prepare yourself to dive into the depths of your vulnerabilities in order to come out stronger.

-For more detailed prompts and directives, read through the book "How To Have That Difficult Conversation You Have Been Avoiding" by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. It offers tagged scriptures and specific examples of how to put into words what you are feeling. -