Relationships

10 Ways to Be More Productive During an Argument or When Trying to Express Yourself

1) Listen to what your spouse has to say, even if you disagree! Hold back from interrupting because quite frankly, it is very rude to interrupt people when they are trying to express themselves, even if they are expressing themselves in a negative way.

2) If there is anything ambiguous that your spouse said to you then have them clear it up so you do understand. What’s the use in listening if you aren’t really hearing?

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What Can You Do To Help Your Angry Spouse?

Anger never resolves issues. If you live with an angry spouse you should learn to detach so the anger won’t gobble you up with it. Anytime you retaliate with angry and abusive words back to an angry person you’re fueling the fire. Simply walk away. You want to put the fire out, not rekindle it. Anyone who lives with an angry person needs to learn how to emotionally detach from the anger. Don’t let the abuse control how you feel or control what you do, or control your behaviors.

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Enabling – the Wrong Kind of Help

Many are godly people who have prayed for their loved ones, yet they watch painfully as they continue down a path of rebellion and destruction. So what can you do to help you loved ones? Stop enabling!

Enabling – Offering the Wrong Kind of Help.
Enabling is rescuing your loved ones so that they do not experience the painful consequences of their irresponsible decisions. Enabling is anything that stands in the way of persons experiencing the natural consequences of their own behavior.

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Does Your Husband Lack Affection?

Ask Angie: My husband was raised without anyone showing affection and love. I on the other hand, need it. How do I teach him?

Marriage Guidance: I hope that you did not marry your husband in the hopes that you could change him. We can’t change others to meet our needs — it will not work, especially if that is the way they were raised. This is not to say that people cannot change for the better but this kind of change happens through Christ. When one spouse demands and controls a behavior of the other all it creates is resentment and animosity between them.

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How To Bring Intimacy Back Into Your Marriage

Everyday my husband and I will take a long walk together, alone, away from the children, and with no distractions of any kind whatsoever. I call these walks together “special time”. We do this because we don’t want to lose touch with each other; we want to remain close. I believe all couples should dedicate themselves to having special time with their spouse one hour each day.

You don’t have to take walks to enjoy special time. You might want to meet somewhere, for instance. That meeting might be in a café or on a park bench. It doesn’t matter where you are when you have special time, what does matter is that you make special time an intimate moment for the both of you. It is so easy to lose touch with the person we married. Don’t let that happen to you and your spouse.

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Do You Reject Your Spouses Feelings?

Couples who reject each other’s feelings are probably not very good communicators. Part of the communication process is to accept what our spouse has to say, whether we agree with them or not. It is perfectly okay to disagree with your spouse but to do it in a way that doesn’t put them down in the process. Understand that acceptance is not the same thing as agreeing. For instance, you can accept another person’s faith but that does not mean you have to agree with it.

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Long-suffering In Marriage

I saved my marriage when I finally gave up trying to be in control of my spouse. We all think that once we get married that we can change our spouse to be what we want them to be, or we may even think they will change on their own, but what faults bother us about the person we’re thinking of marrying will only become bigger faults after the wedding. It’s wrong to think we can change people or control them to be the people we want, and if we think like this before the “I do’s” were going to be in for a big surprise.

After marriage if we dwell on the faults of our spouse it will only make us feel more superior to them, and then we start to justify reasons why we should leave them, or worse why we should have an affair. People think like this – they really do! I have my share of wives and husbands that tell me they think they married the wrong person. Can an attitude get any worse than that? I don’t think so. We must always come back to the long-suffering that God talks about.

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Married to an Abusive Alcoholic: Am I Helping My Spouse to Drink?

It can be very difficult when living with an alcoholic. You never know what to expect from one moment to the next. If you are married to an alcoholic then you need to set boundaries for your personal self. You NEED to take care of you now. You do not have to allow the alcoholics verbal abuses to take control of your emotions another minute longer!

We’ve all heard the saying “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”. Well, this is pretty much what it’s like when living with a verbally abusive alcoholic. Learn to not let “the names” hurt you by emotionally detaching. You should never allow the alcoholic behavior control how you will behave because by doing this it shows that you are controlled by alcoholism just as much as the alcoholic is.

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How to Not Change Your Spouse

Loving our spouse is giving them the freedom to be who it is they are. When we love without WANTING anything in return, that is when we have accepted our spouse for being who they are, faults and all.

This of course, doesn’t include iniquitous behavior because if anyone is carrying on and regularly doing things in err against spouse or God, they certainly are not being the person they were meant to be. Therefore, this article does not apply to them.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change!

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Learning Not To Take Offense

According to John Bevere in his book,The Bait of Satan, the bait of taking offense is the number one trap that the enemy – Satan – sets for Christians. And the closer the relationship between the people involved in the offense taken, the deeper the wound and the deeper the offense, as seen in the depth of David’s suffering when he expresses his suffering after being betrayed by one near and dear to him in Psalm 55:

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