Here’s a little Funday Friday animal humor to help give you a smile to start off your Friday as you prepare for the weekend.
If you would like some help adding a smile to your daily life, give CornerStone Family Services a call at 614-459-3003 to talk with a coach or counselor.
There are times in life when all seems hopeless. Our thoughts are pitch black. Our physical energy seems drained. Our emotions are dreary at best. Our social supports feel like weights. Our spiritual strength is sapped.
During our times of hopeless, taking action – no matter how seemingly small it may seem – can be a first step in getting up off the floor and finding a flicker of hope.
James Altucher gives several ways in his chart to help us find that light of hope, refocus, and get off the floor when all seems hopeless.
Give one of them a try.
And if you feel ambitious, try two of the ideas.
Also, please reach out for help when you find yourself on the floor.
For example give Netcare a call at 614-276-2273 if you feel at wits end and completely hopeless. Check out some other resources of support here.
You can also give CornerStone Family Services at 614-459-3003 to set up an appointment with one of our supportive counselors or coaches.
Words are important. Both the words we say to ourselves about ourselves and about others, and the words we speak out loud to others.
Both internal and spoken words impact how we view ourselves, how we view others, and how we view the world around us.
If you would like help with your words – internal or spoken – please contact CornerStone Family Services at 614-459-3003 to set up an appointment with one of our counselors or coaches.
By Shaunti Feldhahn
Every little girl dreams of finding her prince and knowing she is his princess. Husbands, you need to know that even after years of marriage, your wife probably still has some of that little girl inside. A little girl who wants to know she is still your leading lady. And one of the greatest ways you can get that truth to “stick” is by regularly telling your wife she is beautiful!
Our surveys found that inside nearly every woman is a deep desire to know she is beautiful. This is true no matter what age she is, or how successful or confident she may be.
You may be thinking, “But I do think my wife is beautiful!” The thing is, it’s easy to forget to put the thought into words! The best thing you can do is take every opportunity to tell her you feel that way.
Think about the last few times you both went out together—like on a date night or out with friends. It is very likely that your wife put in effort to look nice. Maybe she bought a new outfit to catch your eye, or took extra time on her hair and makeup. As you continued on to the restaurant or movie, did you ever hear her ask, “Honey, how do I look?”
Her question is pointing to her hope that you will say those magic words: how pretty she looks.
You see, every day your wife is bombarded with constant images from the media setting unrealistic expectations for beauty. These images tell her she must lose more weight, be sexier, look younger or dress better. It can take its toll on even the most confident of women. I know you want to make your wife happy, and the best relief you can give her from that pressure, the best antidote you can find for the forever-young, forever-size-two Photoshop expectations of this culture, is the encouragement of hearing how beautiful she is to you, in all her individuality.
One man told me that on his 30th anniversary, he did something he had never thought to do before: he took his wife’s lipstick and wrote on the mirror in their bathroom: “You are the most beautiful woman I know.” Three months later, that message was still there. She couldn’t bear to wash it off.
So find ways to say it out loud, and put it in writing. When you have date nights or she gets dressed up in a pretty outfit, tell her how amazing she looks. If you need to, take a sticky note and stick it on your computer or in your closet to help you remember. You’ll see so much delight on her face – you’ll see her start to believe it — as you get into the habit of putting into words that she is the most beautiful woman in the world to you.
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For more help in enriching or working through relationship rough spots, please call CornerStone Family Services at 614-459-3003 to set up an appointment with one of our counselors or coaches.
CornerStone Family Services is having an Open House on Saturday November 7, 2015. (That’s tomorrow!) Stop on by for as little as 5 minutes or for all four hours between 12:00pm and 4:00pm (and yes, we will be done before the OSU football game).
When you stop by the Open House you will have the opportunity to meet our staff, enjoy some free food, get a free gift just for showing up, and enter to win one of several gift baskets loaded from great resources & prizes.
Even if you can’t make it, invite your friends, family, and coworkers to stop on by on your behalf.
We are located at 1115 Bethel Rd., Columbus, OH 43220. We look forward to seeing you on Saturday.
Humor and laughter is good for the heart. For help in bringing more joy into your life, please contact CornerStone Family Services at 614-459-3003 to talk with a counselor or coach.
By Drs. Les & Leslie Parrott
“We want someone who holds nothing back from us, someone who trusts us with personal secrets. Intimacy fills our hearts deepest longings…”
Straight from our bestselling book Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, comes this truth about trust: it’s the cornerstone of all intimacy.
Trust is truly the foundation of all healthy relationships. A strong sense of trust is essential to the longevity of a marriage. Whether you’re establishing trust in the beginning of your relationship, or whether you’re trying to rebuild damaged trust between you and your spouse, these six tips will get you on the road to a more trusting relationship.
To the best of your ability, always do the things you say you’re going to do. If you tell your spouse you’re going to be at a certain place, be there. If you’ve said you’re going to spend time with friends or family, be with the people you said you would be with.
It’s simple, but being true to your word goes a long way toward creating a solid trust between you and your husband or wife. Knowing that you are honest about your location, the company you’re keeping, or just knowing that you’re going to keep a promise will help your spouse feel secure–and that is priceless.
Are you afraid to be honest about someone you’re communicating or spending time with? Places you’re going?
Would you hand your phone or computer to your spouse without a second thought? Or are you afraid of what he or she may read or see?
Transparency means that you and your spouse don’t have anything to hide from one another. It’s not about allowing your spouse to control or dominate you. It’s about feeling safe enough to open yourself fully before that person–voluntarily–without worrying about what he or she may see.
If you’re not transparent now, it’s time to clean up the areas of your life that you may not want your spouse to look into, so that you may share deeper intimacy and a stronger marriage. If you use social media like tinder and facebook and you aren’t transparent about those who are you talking to on these platforms, you might find that it could cause a trust issue between you and your spouse.
Lying is so damaging to trust, and it’s difficult to overcome. For the sake of your marriage, don’t tell lies–even if they seem harmless. Dishonesty ultimately causes immeasurable pain, and can lead directly to divorce.
It’s a given that lying to your spouse is a no-no, but you should also be careful not to lie to anyone else. Your spouse observes your behavior more closely and more often than anybody. If you lie to other people, what’s to keep you from lying to your spouse?
It’s important for your husband or wife to see that you are not only honest at home, but honest with the other people you come in contact with on a daily basis.
Holding onto secrets in a close relationship is very draining, and it can dampen intimacy. If you’ve got a secret that could be damaging to trust, it is best to open up and share it with your spouse now–before it has driven such a wedge in your relationship that your spouse becomes suspicious of you.
If your secret is particularly painful, you and your spouse will have to work together to rebuild trust and move forward in your marriage. But if you have taken the incentive to approach your spouse despite the potential fallout of your secret, you’re one step closer to a healthier connection.
Husbands and wives are meant to be best friends–confidantes and companions of the very closest nature. You should be able to confide fully in one another without fear of outside parties learning your private business.
Can your spouse trust you with personal, private information? Can he or she confide fully in you without fear that you will repeat the conversation to others?
Be sure that you carefully keep confidence between you and your spouse. You want to be the first person he or she comes to, every time–and the safest.
Continually developing and building your character and integrity will help your spouse maintain trust in you. If you’re actively improving yourself and always growing, he or she will see the positive changes you’re making.
If you have damaged trust in your marriage, visible and measurable personal growth is critical to moving forward. When you’ve broken that bond, your word is no longer enough; you have to show your spouse on a daily basis that your resolve to change for the better is intentional.
When You’ve Broken Trust
The process of rebuilding trust in your marriage will take time, hard work, and skill. When trust in a marriage is broken, its very foundation is shaken.
If you’re committed to healing your relationship, you and your spouse both have some hard work ahead. For your part, you must be fully accountable to your spouse. Even though you may have confessed your dishonesty, you’re not entitled to act as if nothing happened.
Expect your spouse to have questions regarding your dishonesty, and be open and willing to answer them. Commit to transparency, however uncomfortable it may feel.
If you are willing to do whatever it takes to regain your spouse’s trust, you’re much more likely to reap the rewards of a repaired marriage, with a deeper intimacy than ever before.
The Big Picture: Trust and Intimacy
Trust is inherently linked to intimacy, and intimacy is a key element of the passion-intimacy-commitment triangle. Understanding this “triangular model” of love, first developed by Robert Sternberg, is vital for a healthy marriage.
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If you would like to enhance, enrich, or work on repairing trust in your relationship please contact CornerStone Family Services at 614-459-3003 to set up an appointment with one of our counselors or coaches.
CornerStone Family Services is having an Open House on Saturday November 7, 2015. Stop on by for as little as 5 minutes or for all four hours between 12:00pm and 4:00pm (and yes, we will be done before the OSU football game).
When you stop by the Open House you will have the opportunity to meet our staff, enjoy some free food, get a free gift just for showing up, and enter to win one of several gift baskets loaded from great resources & prizes.
We are located at 1115 Bethel Rd., Columbus, OH 43220. We look forward to seeing you on Saturday.
By Joe Carter (Originally Published March 8, 2013 on The Gospel Coalition)
“Because the human brain is the biological anchor of our psychological experience, it is helpful to understand how it operates.” says William M. Struthers, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College. “Knowing how it is wired together and where it is sensitive can help us understand why pornography affects people the way it does.” Here are 9 things you should know about pornography affects the brain.
1. Sexually explicit material triggers mirror neurons in the male brain. These neurons, which are involved with the process for how to mimic a behavior, contain a motor system that correlates to the planning out of a behavior. In the case of pornography, this mirror neuron system triggers the arousal, which leads to sexual tension and a need for an outlet. “The unfortunate reality is that when he acts out (often by masturbating), this leads to hormonal and neurological consequences, which are designed to bind him to the object he is focusing on,” says Struthers. “In God’s plan, this would be his wife, but for many men for example those whose visit the website Nu Bay it is an image on a screen that they are bound to. Pornography thus enslaves the viewer to an image, hijacking the biological response intended to bond a man to his wife and therefore inevitably loosening that bond.”
2. In men, there are five primary chemicals involved in sexual arousal and response. The one that likely plays the most significant role in pornography addiction is dopamine. Dopamine plays a major role in the brain system that is responsible for reward-driven learning. Every type of reward that has been studied increases the level of dopamine transmission in the brain, and a variety of addictive drugs, including stimulants such as cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine, act directly on the dopamine system. Dopamine surges when a person is exposed to novel stimuli, particularly if it is sexual, or when a stimuli is more arousing than anticipated. Because erotic imagery triggers more dopamine than sex with a familiar partner, exposure to pornography leads to “arousal addiction” and teaches the brain to prefer the image and become less satisfied with real-life sexual partners. Websites like https://www.hdpornt.com/ are extremely stimulating so we can see why.
3. Why do men seek out a variety of new explicit sexual images rather than being satisfied with the same ones? The reason is attributed to the Coolidge effect, a phenomenon seen in mammalian species whereby males (and to a lesser extent females) exhibit renewed sexual interest if introduced to new receptive sexual partners, even after refusing sex from prior but still available sexual partners. This neurological mechanism is one of the primary reasons for the abundance and addictiveness of Internet pornography.
4. Overstimulation of the reward circuitry-such as occurs with repeated dopamine spikes related to viewing pornography-creates desensitization. As Gary Wilson explains, “When dopamine receptors drop after too much stimulation, the brain doesn’t respond as much, and we feel less reward from pleasure. That drives us to search even harder for feelings of satisfaction-for example, by seeking out more extreme sexual stimuli on https://www.hdpornmovies.xxx/, having longer porn sessions, or more frequent porn viewing-thus further numbing the brain.
5. “The psychological, behavioral, and emotional habits that form our sexual character will be based on the decisions we make,” says Struthers. “Whenever the sequence of arousal and response is activated, it forms a neurological memory that will influence future processing and response to sexual cues. As this pathway becomes activated and traveled, it becomes a preferred route-a mental journey-that is regularly trod. The consequences of this are far-reaching.”
6. What makes Internet porn unique? Wilson identifies a number of reasons, including: (1) Internet porn offers extreme novelty; (2) Unlike food and drugs, there are almost no physical limitations to Internet porn consumption; (3) With Internet porn one can escalate both with more novel “partners” and by viewing new and unusual genres, a prime example of an unusual genre is shemales, seeing the human form having both breasts as well as male genitalia and then watching both men and women having sex with a shemale like the videos that can be seen at shemalehdsex just leads to even more confusion. Why is there such confusion you ask, normally someone will find either the female or male form arousing, yes admittedly some are attractive to both but a shemale has half of each on the same body that’s what can be confusing; (4) Unlike drugs and food, Internet porn doesn’t eventually activate the brain’s natural aversion system; and (5) The age users start watching porn. A teen’s brain is at its peak of dopamine production and neuroplasticity, making it highly vulnerable to addiction and rewiring.
7. Men’s exposure to sexually explicit material is correlated with social anxiety, depression, low motivation,erectile dysfunction, concentration problems, and negative self-perceptions in terms of physical appearance and sexual functioning.
8. The following video offers a brief overview of the affect of pornography on the brain.
9. In this video, Gary Wilson discusses the disturbing symptoms showing up in some heavy Internet porn users, the surprising reversal of those symptoms, and the science behind these phenomena. Although it is not presented from a Christian perspective, the discussion is highly recommended for better understanding the deleterious and wide-ranging effects pornography has on men.
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If you or a loved one struggles with the use of pornography, please contact CornerStone Family Services at 614-459-3003 to talk with one of our skilled counselors or coaches.