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support Archives - SYMBIS Assessment

How to Nurture Your Marriage While Parenting a Child With Disabilities

How to Nurture Your Marriage While Parenting a Child With Disabilities

By Marriage, Parenting One Comment

Are you and your spouse parenting a disabled child, caring for an aging parent, or seeing to the everyday health needs of a loved one? The circumstances around being caretakers can impact your time and availability for one another. If you have a child with a disability, you want to be intentional with the time you have for your marriage. Many couples raising children with special needs have tumultuous waters to navigate. There may be seasons when you aren’t able to spend much time with one another at all. This makes it so much more important to support one another…

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We’re in a Season Of Grief. How Do I Stay Close To My Spouse?

By Marriage One Comment

Navigating a season of grief together is one of the most challenging things you’ll do as a couple. These seasons will come and go throughout your lifetime, and it’s important to decide how you want to handle them as a team. While things in life rarely play out the way we think they should, having a plan for sticking together during difficult times could help you to stay close. Grief can bring us closer together or drive us apart. During seasons of profound grief, it can impact the way we experience the world. Whether you’re both grieving or one of…

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How to Support Your Spouse Through a Career Change

By Careers One Comment

Changing careers is daunting. No matter what stage of life you’re in, a career change can be especially disruptive to your normal routine. Depending on whether you’re making a major job change or starting an entirely new career, this situation can look different. It won’t be the same for every couple. If you need help supporting your spouse through a career change, we’ve got you covered. The most important thing is to stick together through the process. Now, let’s jump into how to do that. 1. Set Realistic Expectations Early On You and your spouse need to expect that making…

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What To Do When Your Spouse is Diagnosed With A Chronic Illness (Part 2)

By Marriage 3 Comments

In our last post, we began a discussion about how to support your spouse when they’re diagnosed with a chronic illness. These diagnoses can be debilitating, and have the potential to permanently alter what your life looks like from now on. How you respond to the situation, particularly by supporting your spouse, will affect your shared experiences going forward. If you’d like to read part one of this series, you can do so here. As a quick recap, the first things you can do to support your spouse include: Pausing to understand your spouse’s condition and how it might be…

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What To Do When Your Spouse is Diagnosed With A Chronic Illness (Part 1)

By Marriage 5 Comments

When we get married and say our vows, we commonly include the phrase “in sickness and in health.” And when we’re young and vibrant, it’s often difficult to grasp what this actually means. For some married couples, one spouse might eventually be diagnosed with a serious chronic condition. When either partner receives this kind of diagnosis, it can rattle the entire landscape of the life you’ve built since the beginning of your marriage. In many ways, illness can alter the way your day-to-day life looks–not only for the spouse who received the diagnosis, but for your whole family. A serious…

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What You Need to Know About Everyday Problems in Marriage

By Conflict, Marriage 3 Comments

Every couple experiences problems in their marriage, and those issues seem to be universally common. If you could be a fly on the wall in our office during the counseling sessions we’ve held over the years, you would hear many similar stories and scenarios repeating themselves among a host of different couples. While the individual features of each scenario are unique, many of the issues come down to the same core problems. Once the honeymoon phase of a marriage has passed, many couples are perplexed when issues and disappointments begin to take root. Building a happy, lifelong marriage takes work,…

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Careers in Marriage: How to Help Each Other Grow Professionally

By Careers, Marriage No Comments

Professional growth spans the whole of many people’s careers, requiring time, commitment, and change along the way. Some people choose to attend college for postgraduate degrees, pursue a promotion, or embark on a new career after marriage. In fact, sometimes, spouses are pursuing their own career goals side-by-side. How can married couples support one another in order to achieve their career goals and grow professionally? Read on. Communicate your needs, dreams, and professional goals to one another. The first step of working together toward your professional goals is to clearly communicate your needs and dreams to one another. You can’t…

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How to Make Memories Together in a Time of Upheaval

By Marriage, Relationships, Time 5 Comments

During at time of upheaval, our lives feel very out of control. It’s very easy to get bogged down by the uncertainty, negativity, and anxiety associated with difficult times–whether economic, health-related, or otherwise. That’s why it’s so important to intentionally make memories together during the hard times. It seems counterintuitive, but working to make happy memories helps you and your spouse find positive things to focus on. Rather than feeling deprived of happy times, you have the power to create them yourself. This can be pivotal for couples and families who are feeling the stress of a difficult time. Today,…

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How To Support Your Spouse After a Traumatic Event

By Communication, Marriage 7 Comments

Those who have gone through a traumatic event can often develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The cause of PTSD varies greatly. It appears different in each person and can be the result of varying factors such as a traffic accident, encountering a life threatening or emotional event, experiencing the loss of a loved one, and so on. It may be hard to detect that your spouse is hurting. Physically they may seem okay, but something is troubled under the waters and deep within them. Often, people who suffer from PTSD don’t know how to connect words with their experience….

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4 Things to Do When Your Spouse Self-Sabotages

By Communication, Conflict, Self Reflection 9 Comments

Whether your spouse is pursuing a career promotion, a job change, or a personal goal, it’s incredibly painful to watch them set themselves up for failure. We want to help, so we throw ourselves into offering advice and assistance…only to realize we can’t change the situation. While we all self-sabotage at one time or another, some individuals seem to be caught in a pattern. If this sounds like your spouse, you’re not alone. Self-sabotage is easiest to identify when your expectations (or in this case, your spouse’s) don’t align with your efforts—or the outcome. At the core, self-sabotage is rooted…

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