Meluleki Ncube, Green Lake Christian Counseling

Food for Anxiety: What’s Eating You? (And What You Should Eat!)

Food for Anxiety: What’s Eating You? (And What You Should Eat!)

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-12-16T03:21:56+00:00December 16th, 2024|Anxiety, Featured, Individual Counseling|

Anxiety is real and it’s no respecter of persons. It’s that gnawing little pest that sneaks up on you when you least expect it, like a toddler with a permanent marker near your freshly painted walls. Anxiety may be real and frustrating and even life-altering, but it doesn’t get the final say over your life! There are many strategies you can implement to help attack the anxiety that plagues you, but one that is often overlooked is also one of the simplest to put into action: your dinner plate. In this article, we’ll look at healthy food for anxiety and how it can help. What is anxiety, anyway? Anxiety can make your thoughts race, your heart pound, and try to convince you that the worst-case scenario about why your boss called a meeting is true. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) can make this a daily reality, affecting everything from your sleep to your relationships. The world tells us to medicate or meditate – both of which can help – but did you know that there’s a divine design to what we eat and how it affects how we feel? Let’s dive in! (And don’t worry, there’s dark chocolate ahead!) Food for Anxiety Before you roll your eyes and think, “Great! More Stuff I can’t eat,” let me assure you – this isn’t a conversation about diet restrictions. This is about freedom! Yes, freedom! Galatians 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Freedom from the worry that stalks your brain at 3 AM. Freedom from anxiety that makes you want to wear your blanket like a cape all day. And believe it or not, part of that freedom might just come from your grocery cart. So, what food for anxiety should you eat when it feels [...]

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Rewriting History: Overcoming Depression’s Legacy in a Family

Rewriting History: Overcoming Depression’s Legacy in a Family

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-12-07T04:38:50+00:00December 9th, 2024|Depression, Featured, Individual Counseling|

We can see the fingerprints of our Father’s grace in the pages of scripture. God’s family story begins in Genesis when He formed Adam from earth’s dust and continues to the end of Revelations. God continues to extend righteousness and truth in our world today, just as He did with the families noted in Scripture. The enemy also seeks to work through the generations (Psalm 100:5) through cycles of sin and dysfunction. He causes us to repeat the patterns of those who preceded us to destroy the destiny of those who come after. Deconstructing Devastation When we consider his evil intentions, we must recognize that some of the trauma imposed in our lives was designed to destroy us and the families we love. Each family’s trauma history will vary, but the unresolved pain that results in depression and other mental health challenges universally disrupts our lives. We can plug in our own family’s unique variables and still find a common element; every family in humanity encounters suffering at some point. The odds we thought we’d beaten appear again, and hopelessness hits close to home. Despite the war waged against our bloodlines, our faith cuts its teeth in darkness and despair. It locks its jaw, sinking a bite into the promises of God. When grounded in the Word, faith refuses to cut our families off from God’s goodness, despite every ominous threat. We may feel like abandoning ship, but God has anchored a hope within that keeps us and those connected to us from detaching from His purpose (Hebrews 6:19). Inevitably, storms will rage and impact us differently, but God remains steady, enabling us to weather impassible waters with Him. It’s bewildering how quickly trouble can spiral in our lives. It’s often in hindsight that we see God’s plan working together. [...]

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It’s More Than Sweet Talk: 9 Tips for Healthy Communication in Marriage

It’s More Than Sweet Talk: 9 Tips for Healthy Communication in Marriage

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:33:04+00:00August 8th, 2024|Couples Counseling, Featured, Marriage Counseling, Relationship Issues|

One of the biggest tools for having a long-lasting marriage is the tool of communication. Understanding how to talk to your spouse is the key to creating a relationship that works to overcome any situation. Communication in marriage is not something that just happens. It takes a willingness to listen before speaking. God’s Word leads us in how to be good communicators in our marriage. It is up to us to apply those instructions. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. – Ephesians 4:29, NIV Communication is not just about words. It also can be exhibited in your actions. That is why it is important to make sure your actions reflect the love you have for your spouse. When does communication affect marriage? This may seem like a needless question, but the reality is many people are not familiar with when communication affects their marriage. They may not realize that what they have said was hurtful because they were just joking. All too often people harmlessly say things not knowing how their spouse will react to what is said. Understanding how communication in marriage creates a partnership will help you learn to monitor what you say before you say it. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. – Proverbs 15:1, NIV When there are unspoken expectations It can be wonderful when we know what each other is thinking. Then there are those times when we don’t realize that others don’t have a clue what we are thinking. When this happens, we find that we have set an expectation for an answer or an action that our spouse doesn’t realize [...]

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Giving the Green Light to Your Emotions: Relationship Advice for Men

Giving the Green Light to Your Emotions: Relationship Advice for Men

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:33:15+00:00June 7th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Men’s Issues, Relationship Issues|

Facing the unfamiliar can be daunting, precisely because you don’t know what will happen. Not only that, but you don’t know how you’ll react in that situation, or what you’ll discover about yourself. One reason we stick to a routine and often have clearly defined habits is because it makes life predictable and manageable. We know what to expect and when we seek out adventure, it’s on our terms, especially where emotions are concerned. Talking about emotions and giving them the green light can be unfamiliar territory for many men. Some may be familiar because they are socially sanctioned, but others may be harder to pin down and express for a variety of reasons. However, it’s important for the health of their relationships that men come to terms with the entire range of their emotions, and learn how to express them in a healthy way. This article will explore how emotions factor into relationships and the ways men can learn to embrace them for the health of themselves and their relationships. The role of emotions in our lives There is a broad variety of emotions that a person can experience in a single day, let alone a lifetime. If you look at one of those emotion wheels, you will glimpse the bewildering depth of feeling in us. When you watch a well-crafted movie, read a great book, or watch a nail-biting football or basketball game, you can experience a roller coaster of feelings. The fact that we have feelings isn’t an accident. God created in us the capacity to experience the world in many ways. We feel joy, awe, fear, hope, anger, sadness, anxiety, and many other emotions and shades of those emotions. Our emotions function somewhat like an instrument panel. They tell us what we are experiencing, register [...]

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How to Have and Handle Healthy Expectations in A Relationship

How to Have and Handle Healthy Expectations in A Relationship

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:33:25+00:00April 12th, 2024|Couples Counseling, Featured, Individual Counseling, Marriage Counseling, Premarital Counseling, Relationship Issues|

Building a healthy relationship takes time, care, and a lot of effort. One area where couples often struggle is in managing their expectations. Your expectations are about what kind of behavior or attitudes you desire to see come to pass in the future. Depending on the kinds of expectations you have, you can either nurture your relationship or put it under strain. Should you have expectations in a relationship? Depending on one’s experiences, some believe that you shouldn’t expect anything from a romantic partner in a relationship. There are several reasons for this, some of which are helpful, but others aren’t so much. One unhelpful reason to avoid expectations is to avoid being let down. Past experiences may lead to the conclusion that having expectations simply means leaving yourself vulnerable to disappointment. A potentially helpful reason to avoid expectations is that they can end up putting your partner under pressure and undermining the health of the relationship. Of course, one could say that sometimes people have unreasonable expectations, and those can cause serious problems in a relationship. We all have expectations - the question is whether your expectations are reasonable or not. Fear of disappointment shouldn’t lead you to ditch expectations altogether, especially if your expectations touch the needs you have. If your needs aren’t being met in the relationship, something isn’t right and should be addressed. Reasonable expectations, far from hindering a relationship, can help it thrive and help keep you both accountable. Clear and reasonable expectations help to support and nurture healthy relationships. No relationship is perfect, but if you aim for a relationship that’s “good enough,” one that keeps a good balance between reasonable and high expectations while being aware of unreasonable expectations, you can form a healthy and well-rounded partnership. Healthy expectations function to ensure [...]

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How to Talk About Intimacy Issues

How to Talk About Intimacy Issues

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:33:38+00:00March 22nd, 2024|Couples Counseling, Featured, Marriage Counseling, Premarital Counseling, Relationship Issues|

One of the hardest things to talk about in a relationship is intimacy issues. You can be the best of friends with your spouse, be open about everything else, and feel that you have no secrets. And yet, in the bedroom, people shut down. It becomes almost impossible to talk about what is going on. Even if there is mutual respect and a desire for both partners to find sex enjoyable, intimacy issues silence even the most attentive of partners. Is it because sex is just so intimate? It involves the core of who people are. It is not just an act of reproduction. If it were, why would there be so many nerve endings and emotions and heightened senses involved? God could have left the joy and fun out of sex, but He didn’t. Before the fall, man and woman were naked and unashamed, and that may well have included sex. Our country does not talk about sex. We treat it like a bad thing to be left in the bedroom. The church does not teach young people about their bodies, or how to approach intimacy openly. Premarital counseling often does not get into intimacy and how to figure out what makes both people tick. Men are left to porn to answer their questions. Women live in a culture rife with messaging that their needs don’t matter, sex is not about them, and their bodies are somehow bad things. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. – Genesis 2:24 God created sex to be the union of two people. The human body reacts and functions the way it does because God made it that way. He made the woman’s form to take time, [...]

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Anger in the Bible: Help and Healing for Anger Issues

Anger in the Bible: Help and Healing for Anger Issues

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:33:50+00:00February 6th, 2024|Anger Issues, Featured, Individual Counseling|

If we ask the question, “What does the Bible say about anger?” we might first be thinking about anger as a negative thing, and in many cases, it is. It doesn’t take much to think of an example of sinful anger. But it might be helpful to think of anger as simply one of a range of human emotions. It can be healthy or unhealthy, righteous or sinful, but it can also be redeemed and used by God for good. Human emotions are no stranger to God. He created our capacity to experience them, and Jesus experienced emotions when he walked the earth, including grief (John 11:35), joy (John 15:11), and anger (John 2:15-16). As he was perfect in every way, we can be confident that emotions, including anger, are part of being human and are not automatically wrong. Emotions themselves are neutral. Our thoughts and actions, how we respond to those emotions, determine whether we will act out our feelings in a godly or ungodly manner. We’ve all witnessed the destructive force of sinful anger, whether in our own lives or that of others. To take it a step further, we can all acknowledge that sinful anger is one of the greatest forces of destruction in the world. Along with power, it’s a deadly and evil thing that can be used to harm, abuse, and destroy people, relationships, and even entire countries. But anger starts in the same place every other human emotion springs from; the heart. So, to get to the root of destructive anger, we must start with the heart. Addressing anger issues, whether in a child or an adult, as soon as possible can allow us to get to the root quickly and begin to find another path that doesn’t cause destruction. If you’re interested in [...]

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Some Old, Some New: 12 Causes of Resentment in Marriage

Some Old, Some New: 12 Causes of Resentment in Marriage

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:34:02+00:00December 15th, 2023|Couples Counseling, Featured, Marriage Counseling, Relationship Issues|

Take a read through this article and see how many of these causes for resentment in marriage you identify with. While this may not be a checklist you want to score well on it may be useful to know what specifically needs work from you as well as your spouse. One contributes more than the other. Between household chores, time with the children, the school run, and the financial contribution to running a household, there are many areas in a marriage where one may feel that they are doing more than their fair share and the other is not pulling their weight. There are also times when one partner feels they are actively building the marriage more intentionally than the other. When partners do not have the time, words, or emotional reserves to clearly explain how they are feeling in their relationship this type of resentment slowly accumulates and builds on itself. Try this: Sit down once a week with a weekly planner and discuss the plans and expectations each of you has for the week. Talk about when you will spend time together doing things you enjoy. Allowing the phone to suck up your time. Are there any rules or understandings in your home on what happens with phones around dinner time? Always having your phone, in your hand or at the table, ready to divert your attention away from your marriage with every notification can be a problem. Also, if you find yourself regularly checking it throughout times that are set aside for personal relationships between you, the message to your spouse is clear: They are not as important as whatever is on your phone. Try this: Create a phone bowl or box where the muted phones are placed once family time starts in the evening. Some [...]

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How to Cultivate Healthier Relationships Through Effective Listening

How to Cultivate Healthier Relationships Through Effective Listening

Meluleki Ncube, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:34:12+00:00November 1st, 2023|Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development, Relationship Issues|

Therese and Steven are a young couple that’s been happily married for three and a half years, but the past six months have been quite difficult. Therese’s job has steadily required more from her, especially as her company had to downsize during the pandemic and they aren’t able to hire new people just yet. She’s often home quite late, and leaves early to get her day started. When she’s home, she feels tired and finds it hard to go out and have fun like she and Steven used to. Steven is in graduate school, and his studies consume much of his time. He struggles to maintain boundaries, so he often finds himself helping others in his cohort with their work. The effect of that is that he sometimes falls behind and has to work extra hard to meet deadlines, and that puts pressure on any plans he may have made with Therese. The last few months, it feels like they’ve been living alongside one another, and they both feel disconnected - emotionally, mentally, and physically. They had a big fight the other day because Steven had to cancel their date to submit an overdue assignment. What angered Therese even more was that when she tried to talk to Steven about it, he was distracted and wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying. In that way, what started as a tiff about the canceled date escalated and became a bigger conversation about their relationship and how they had lost their intimacy as a couple. Situations like that of Steven and Therese are quite common, even if the particulars differ somewhat. Couples and friends can find themselves feeling disconnected, and it’s not necessarily because they don’t care about one another. When life gets busy and you find yourself under pressure, [...]

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