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When and How to Leave a Toxic Relationship

When and How to Leave a Toxic Relationship

Angela Yoon, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:31:17+00:00June 12th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Relationship Issues|

Our relationships play a profound role in shaping us as people. In them, we can find our most ardent supporters who challenge us to become the best versions of ourselves and to exceed even our wildest dreams. These people help us to flourish and become the loving and whole human beings that God made us to be, and they are truly a blessing in our lives. It’s also true that relationships aren’t always positive or nurturing. Some relationships are challenging; undermining our self-esteem, sense of competence, and self, diminishing us as persons, and bringing out the worst in us. Such relationships also shape us, and they affect how we view ourselves and our world, negatively impacting our relationships with others, our work or school situation, and much else besides. Not only is it helpful for us to be able to identify the second kind of relationship, but to know when and how to leave such relationships. Identifying a toxic relationship Sometimes we can find ourselves in a terrible situation, and while the people around us know what’s going on, we might be oblivious to what’s going on. Of course, it’s also possible to know that your relationship is toxic but to remain in it because it is familiar or because there seem to be few options and alternatives. It may not seem safe to leave, either. A toxic relationship is marked by a few signs, and these include: Physical violence, such as being assaulted with hands, feet, or an object. This also includes sexual abuse. Verbal, financial, and emotional abuse, including being insulted, threatened, shouted at, undermined, gaslit, manipulated, being taken advantage of. Controlling behavior, including the other person refusing you access to the car keys, always wanting to know where you are, tracking your movements, wanting access to [...]

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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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Procrastination and Mental Health: Finding Support

Procrastination and Mental Health: Finding Support

Angela Yoon, Kate Motaung2024-11-14T12:31:29+00:00May 21st, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development|

At some time or another, anyone can struggle to push themselves through an unwanted or difficult assignment or task. However, people with mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, and ADHD, are far more likely to struggle with procrastination than someone without these issues. Research has shown that procrastination is both a cause and a result of stress, particularly for those with a mental health diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, or depression. Procrastination and ADHD Procrastination and ADHD are often linked together. People with ADHD are more likely to procrastinate than those without ADHD. There are a few reasons for this. Distractibility People with ADHD are easily distracted, making it difficult to stay focused on a task. This can lead to procrastination, as people with ADHD may find it hard to get started on a task or to stay on track once they start. Impulsivity People with ADHD are often impulsive, which can lead to them making decisions without thinking about the consequences. This can also lead to procrastination, as people with ADHD may be more likely to put off tasks until the last minute. Low frustration tolerance People with ADHD often have low frustration tolerance, which can make it difficult to stick with a task that is challenging or boring. This can also lead to procrastination, as people with ADHD may be more likely to give up on a task before they finish it. If someone has ADHD, there are some skills they can build to overcome procrastination. For example, breaking down tasks into smaller steps can make tasks seem less daunting and more manageable. Likewise, setting deadlines can help a person to stay on track and avoid procrastination. Other tips include finding a quiet place to work helps focus and avoids distractions and taking breaks to stay refreshed [...]

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Why Couples Seek Premarital Counseling

Why Couples Seek Premarital Counseling

Kate Motaung2024-11-27T12:46:55+00:00April 23rd, 2024|Couples Counseling, Featured, Marriage Counseling, Premarital Counseling, Relationship Issues|

Premarital counseling is one way to intentionally evaluate your compatibility with your future spouse. Even if you and your significant other get along great with few squabbles, premarital counseling provides a safe environment for you to open up about concerns and practice conflict resolution and communication skills. Why seek premarital counseling? Often, couples rush into a relationship, never stopping to ask the important questions, such as: How well do we communicate? How do we deal with conflict? Do we want to have children? If so, how many and when? What are our expectations for sex and emotional intimacy? Where will we live? How will we engage with extended family, and what boundaries will we set? How do our personal goals fit in with our relationship? What are areas in our life where we are rigid, and where are we flexible? How will we manage finances? How do we align in our values and religious beliefs? Premarital counseling opens the door to these discussions and uncovers possible hurdles. It allows you to work out problems before they occur and prepare for future conflicts. Armed with conflict resolution strategies, you can remind each other about finding a solution and defusing a potential argument before it gets out of hand. Choosing Christian premarital counseling will combine faith-based principles with the researched-backed methods of Psychology. Marriage expectations How you were raised may influence what you expect in your own marriage. For example, do you expect your spouse to do most of the housework because you work full-time? Do you expect to have sex most nights of the week? When arguing, will you resort to what your mother may have done and storm out of the house or slam the doors? Perhaps you have an ideal of marriage regarding your spouse. Maybe you expect [...]

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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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Using Christian Meditation to Reduce Stress

Using Christian Meditation to Reduce Stress

Kate Motaung2024-12-19T10:31:13+00:00March 27th, 2024|Coaching, Featured, Individual Counseling, Spiritual Development|

Life is full of stressors. From work pressures to family challenges, personal anxieties, and life changes, the list of things that cause stress can feel endless. While we often hear suggestions for managing these stressors, it can be hard to put them into place. Often, these things feel like one more thing to add to an overwhelming list. Instead of focusing on a big list of things to change, you can start with one thing. Simply start small. You don’t need to make sweeping changes all at once. Those often don’t work because they are too difficult to maintain. Instead, you can choose one thing and implement it slowly. The results may not be immediate, but they are more likely to last. Meditation is a great skill to begin introducing into your life to manage and reduce the effects of stress. Meditation is a way to “be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). What is meditation? There are a lot of misconceptions about meditation. Upon hearing the word meditation, people have preconceived notions about what it is without having any personal experience or education about it. The simplest concept of meditation is a settling of the mind. While meditation can involve deeper ideas like awareness, mindfulness, training, perspective, and clarity, all these ideas go back to the root concept of intentionally settling one’s mind. Does meditation align with Christian beliefs? Meditation is used in many cultures and religions. This has sometimes caused people to be concerned about Christians using meditation. When people consider how a different culture or faith tradition uses meditation, it may not align with Christian beliefs. However, when we take the definition of meditation described above and use it in a context that applies to being a Christ-follower, we discover that it supports [...]

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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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Help for When You are Overwhelmed by Feeling Insecure

Help for When You are Overwhelmed by Feeling Insecure

Kate Motaung2024-11-27T12:47:24+00:00March 8th, 2024|Coaching, Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development, Professional Development, Relationship Issues|

Everyone feels insecure now and again. It could happen before a big event or a presentation at work, starting a new job, or entering a room full of strangers. We can feel insecure after we make a mistake. We might not feel assured in raising our children, interacting with our partners, or in our vocation. For some of us, feeling insecure is how we feel most of the time. Insecure feelings may permeate much of our daily activities and relationships. At times, we might even feel like we never fit into any situation or like we have “imposter” stamped on our foreheads. We see how everyone else does things better, faster, and smarter. We never believe that what we do, or who we are, is enough. We spend our days rebuking our decisions, questioning if we have done enough, and feeling like the least qualified person in every room. We might feel afraid to put ourselves out there in relationships because the amount of insecurity we experience inhibits us from taking risks or being vulnerable. Feeling insecure and anxious Insecurity is something we can feel in big or small ways. It can be related to how we see ourselves, how we experience our relationships, and how we show up in the working or productive parts of our lives. It can force us to pull back from relationships, say no to opportunities we would love to accept, and live in regret. Feeling insecure makes us retreat further into ourselves, where we often don’t like what we find there either. Constantly feeling insecure can lead to anxiety. We scan the horizon, cultivate the worst case in our heads, and wait for the other shoe to drop. When we feel insecure about who we are and our choices, we often feel anxious [...]

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The Impact of Childhood Emotional Neglect On Adult Relationships

The Impact of Childhood Emotional Neglect On Adult Relationships

Kate Motaung2024-11-27T12:47:42+00:00February 27th, 2024|Abandonment and Neglect, Featured, Individual Counseling, Relationship Issues|

When you’re a child, you’re at your most vulnerable. You depend on the people around you to meet your needs, including your need for food, shelter, attention, and nurture. Children cannot provide for these themselves. Having caregivers who are attentive to your needs and capable of meeting them is essential. Whether or not we flourish in life greatly depends on how much and how well our needs were met or whether we've suffered emotional neglect. Unfortunately, one of the harsh realities of living in a broken world is that one’s needs aren’t always met for various reasons. Many parents are well-intentioned but without the means or the knowledge for how to best meet children’s needs, they can go unmet. Even more harmful is when one sees a need and deliberately decides not to meet it. In either case, whether intentionally or not, childhood emotional neglect is a reality many children face. What is childhood emotional neglect? Childhood emotional neglect is when a parent or caregiver doesn’t respond adequately to a child’s emotional needs. Emotional neglect can be intentional, but it may also be the result of a parent overlooking this one area of a child’s needs. For instance, a parent or caregiver may fulfill a child’s need for food, shelter, education, and medical treatment, but fail to pay attention to the child’s expressed concerns. Mishandling this one area of a child’s needs is neglectful, even though it may be entirely unintentional. It may be helpful to provide an example of childhood emotional neglect. A child may express the fact that they are sad or anxious about going to school, and the parent responds by brushing them off or ignoring the concerns the child expressed. A parent may be thinking that the child isn’t serious, or the situation isn’t serious [...]

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Postpartum Depression: What It Is and How to Treat It

Postpartum Depression: What It Is and How to Treat It

Kate Motaung2024-11-27T12:47:53+00:00February 22nd, 2024|Depression, Featured, Individual Counseling, Women’s Issues|

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a disorder that women develop after giving birth. The symptoms can include feeling sad, anxious, and exhausted, making it difficult for the mother to take care of herself and her child. PPD can emerge right after birth but commonly emerges one to three weeks after delivery. Often, women who experience PPD have never experienced another form of depression. A lack of understanding and experience with PPD can be a barrier to seeking help. Because of this, many new moms feel that these symptoms are their fault, or they are weak or inadequate moms. This is not true. While various factors influence the prevalence of post-partum depression, on average, 10-15% of women develop PPD. It is important for the mother, child, and the existing family that PPD be diagnosed and addressed. Caring for a newborn is difficult enough, and the symptoms of PPD cause the mother to struggle mentally and emotionally. This makes it difficult for her to care for herself and her child(ren). When a mother struggles this way, it affects the bonding process between mother and infant. Less-than-ideal bonding can then affect the overall development of the infant. Women often struggle with feelings of guilt and shame when struggling with post-partum depression due to an inability to be the mom they want to be. All of this can also impact the family unit. Women who suspect they might have post-partum depression should seek medical attention. Many women need medication to help them with the symptoms of PPD. Antidepressants can help alleviate the symptoms of depression. For people in faith communities, taking medication for depression can be “controversial.” It is essential to realize that treating mental health issues with medication is not much different than treating physical ailments with medication. It might be necessary to [...]

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