Sarah: What have you learned from your past weeks of being marriage counselors? What is the best advice you can give to newly married couples, or what is a crucial lesson you and Cris have learned yourselves?
Jean: Let me catch everyone else up first. Cris and I spent 6 weeks in May and April being equipped by a local psychologist/counselor to help walk with married couples through marital challenges. This opportunity was provided to us by our church to train regular people on how to help deal with this rising need in our world.
I feel that the curriculum surprised me on two fronts:
1) Listening well to your spouse takes A LOT of work and 2) ways that we can hurt each other can arouse old wounds from our childhoods. I realized that many of my conflicts with actually related to how his actions would trigger my past traumas. So small things he did would cause overreactions from me.
Ultimately, the curriculum helped identify ways that we as spouses push each other’s buttons. Additionally, it taught methods of communication and prayerful intentionality to engage healthily in conflict. I feel like we’re still new in trying these methods ourselves, but it has helped our own communication already. We hope to offer these skills to our own church soon.
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