Many issues can help contribute to the decline of a relationship
Published in the Feb. 19 – March 4, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Staff Report
David Nellis
Morgan Hill resident David Nellis believes that when life hurts, it helps to talk. The couples and individual counselor has many years of experience helping people with relationship issues, counseling them on how to more effectively communicate.
With Valentine’s Day just passed, it’s important to continue building relationships between people beyond the dozen roses and box of chocolates. Morgan Hill Life asked Nellis how couples can best work together to build a solid and lasting relationship.
In intimate relationships, sometimes the fires of passion grow cold. From your experience as a couples counselor, what have you found is usually the reason for this?
For a few couples it begins way up front. They may not have married the “right” persons, or for the right reasons (passion without love), or at the right time. Still for the many who did things “right,” love can still slide downhill. Infidelity seems to be a big reason these days. Otherwise, it usually comes about because of inflated or distorted beliefs, assumptions, and unrealistic expectations each brings to the relationship.
Going unfulfilled, disillusionment and disappointment sets in. The relationship isn’t going as well as expected. This usually opens the door to a cascade of resentment, hurt feelings, anger, communication breakdown, doubts, distrust, disaffection, contempt, and hostility. Love gets lost.
What are some things couples should consider if they would like to re-ignite the passion in their relationship?
Absolutely first, each needs to be honest about wanting to re-ignite the relationship, and then commit to whatever it takes to get it done. I think the next step is for each to stop blaming, and to own-up to what he or she has done or is doing that fuels their unwanted situation — to be personally accountable. Without these first steps, nothing else will work.
These open the way to other healing paths: couples retreats, meeting and working things out using a trusted third-party like a pastor or counselor, sex therapy if needed, and/or getting away to have together to have fun, talk things out, commit to some agreements about changes each will begin making, and about personal and mutual accountability.
Open and honest communication is key to building trust and re-connecting. How can a couple develop this kind of communication to help improve their relationship?
I think doing the things given in my answers to the previous two questions can catapult a couple into talking better with each other, even while disagreeing. Other than that, another way a couple can improve their communication is a self-help approach. They can actually get some valuable mileage out of reading a good book on relationship-based communication, and discussing it with open minds. Such a book will typically include a questionnaire or two for examining what is going on. It will then offer appropriate steps for tuning things up. Each person will need to take responsibility and be personally accountable for making improvements in his or her part of the relationship.
What advice would you give women for re-igniting their relationship with a husband or boyfriend?
I think we know that each of us has an appetite for an assurance of personal self-worth — approval, acceptance and appreciation. This appetite needs to be fed. Unfed in a relationship, “starvation” threatens survival. For men the primary route to personal worth is significance — importance, purpose, value, adequacy, sense of manhood. Any threat to or loss of his significance sets off serious relationship problems. Therefore, I think that everything a woman can do that consistently feeds her man’s need for significance sets off sparks that can re-ignite their relationship.
What advice would you give men for re-igniting their relationship with a wife or girlfriend?
Pretty much the same thing can be said to men, that the woman in his life also has a fundamental personal need for a sense of personal self-worth — approval, acceptance, and appreciation. However, for women the primary route to personal self worth is security — love unconditionally and consistently expressed. Any threat to or loss of her security raises serious problems. It follows then that everything a man can consistently do that feeds her need for security will contribute to re-igniting their relationship.
David Nellis is a therapist with 15 years in ministry and 39 years in counseling and consulting. He can be reached at (408) 612-8800 or visit www.christiancounseling2.com.
