Quotes by Counselors - Page 8

Truth is its own defense, therefore if something can’t speak for itself, it’s not truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Wounded parents often unintentionally inflict pain and suffering on their children and these childhood wounds causes a laundry list of maladaptive behaviors commonly called codependency. These habits restrict people to love-limiting relationships causing much unhappiness and distress.
David W. Earle
Parenting, similar to aging, is not for the faint of heart. It is a sacred journey, filled with learning experiences for both parties, not all of which are easy. This journey requires that we are brave, honest, noble and resilient. Love for our children carries us through this journey and encourages us to feel more, give more, and be more than we ever thought we were capable of.
Jeanmarie Wilson
Because we don't know the state of our children's souls, and because they might simply want to please us by praying to be saved, we must continue to give them the Law and encourage them to ask God for faith to believe that He is as good as He says He is.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
The balancing act we parents attempt is convincing our children: 1. You are loved more than you can imagine. 2. The world does not revolve around you.
John Eldredge
We are partners with our children because we are just like them, dearly loved sinners.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
The Lord teaches us of His grace and the Gospel through difficult children. We learn what it's like to love like He loved. It is there, in our personal upper room, where we learn to wash the feet of those that are betraying us. It is there, kneeling before our rebellious children, that the real power of God is demonstrated.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Parents know all about the verses related to how children should behave but not so much about those that remind them about how they should behave.
Jeff VanVonderen
I cannot make my kids obey. But I can control my responses to their disobedience—that is, I can respect their choices and provide wise consequences for their actions, so they can learn just as much about wisdom from disobeying as from obeying. And I can respond in ways that create an environment in which their poor choices are their problem.
Jeff VanVonderen
In other words, children's choices are their responsibility, and result from how they decide to meet their own needs. Once you understand this, you can learn to stop interpreting their choices as statements about you. When your kids act weird in front of the in-laws, it is about their choices, not about your value as a person. Grace-full in-laws will already know that. You need to know that too. Otherwise, you will parent to fix your kids, so that when they are fixed, you are fixed. You will parent to control, not to serve. How things look and what people think will become more important than what is real.
Jeff VanVonderen
Your children should not have to act appropriately so that you can feel like a valuable person. It is not their job to validate you or erase past relationship indictments against you with their performance. In a healthy Christian family children are not there for the adults, adults are there to be resources for their children.
Jeff VanVonderen
Believe that God is strong enough to save your children, no matter how you fail.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will ‘give way’ and it is I who will ‘fall.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To assume that I and I alone have all the answers is to eventually find myself entirely alone without any answers.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe it’s a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we’re all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we’re all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At the very point that I’ve taken something for granted, I have at that same moment taken it to its grave. And if I look around, I realize I’ve cultivated quite a cemetery.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We somehow have led ourselves to believe that our questions are big enough to encircle life, and that life is small enough to be contained by the answers. The real question might be, are we ignorant or just plain stupid?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There appears to be value in getting past a mentality that good things can only rest in good things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
This is what we desire in intimate relationships but this deep connection is often so frightful that most do not take advantage of the opportunities presented for honesty.
David W. Earle
Lies are like paper-Mache in a rain storm.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Truth speaks for itself if we’d just let it speak.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Such is the power of truth that even the slightest whisper of it can handily drown out the most boisterous of lies, which may explain why in many instances God only needs to whisper.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If God created great things with a point of vulnerability, it would lie in the reality that great things die in the hands of great ignorance.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I want to stand on the belief that great things are the product of ordinary people who are made great when they stand.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We want greatness, but we prefer it tamed and on a leash short enough for us to control it, yet long enough to allow it to retain some remote yet diminished flavor of greatness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A woman in her glory, a woman of beauty, is a woman who is not striving to become beautiful or worthy or enough. She knows in her quiet center where God dwells that he find her beautiful, has deemed her worthy, and in him, she is enough.
John Eldredge
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It might not be about perfection. Rather, it may be that that which is imperfect is that which has the most character.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The love hidden within is always greater than the hate displayed without.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To love those who hate us is to refuse to borrow their hatred.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hate feeds on itself, while love will always find itself fed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our beliefs about the sources of joy are frequently experienced as colored imaginations that captivate our hearts.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Ignorance is not bliss. Rather, ignorance is blistering.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s thinking that I had the solution that probably created the problem in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the case of our fair maiden, we have overlooked two very crucial aspects to that myth. On the one hand, none of us ever really believed the sorcerer was real. We thought we could have the maiden without a fight. Honestly, most of us guys thought our biggest battle was asking her out. And second, we have not understood the tower and its relationship to her wound; the damsel is in distress. If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized. Eve is the crown of creation, remember? She embodies the exquisite beauty and the exotic mystery of God in a way that nothing else in all creation even comes close to. And so she is the special target of the Evil One; he turns his most vicious malice against her. If he can destroy her or keep her captive, he can ruin the story.
John Eldredge
Easter is a time where we are reminded that conclusions in man's mind are beginnings in God's plan.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Love that is fueled solely by feelings will suddenly find itself out of gas on a long road with no gas stations.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury.
Lundy Bancroft
We violated each other’s boundaries with verbal missiles of anger disguised in the pretense of “just kidding.
David W. Earle
Real, lasting closure is never secured through retribution or retaliation.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Has it not ‘dawned’ on us that many of the things that we incessantly blame others for are actually things that our actions originally set in motion? Or, are we too weak to experience a ‘dawning’ of that sort?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We want our children to know and believe the one good story. Every other story is a copy or shadow of this one. Some copies of it are quite good and shout the Truth. Others see only the faintest whisper of it, or, in its absence remind us of the Truth. We want our kids to know the one good story so well that when they see Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Anne of Green Gables, Arielle, or Sleeping Beauty, they can recognize the strands of Truth and deception in them. Saturating our children in the one good story will enable them to discern Truth and error as it comes to them from the world.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God’s majesty.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We might do well to take a look at what we’ve crammed into our pockets as it will say much about what we’ve crammed into our hearts.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Fear says that what God has called me to is blatantly impossible. Selfishness says that the cost is unacceptably prohibitive. My humanity harbors other lesser agendas that seduce me to my own death. And I would be wise to believe none of it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I suppose it doesn't matter what form love takes, maybe you just need to take it when it comes.
Albert Borris
However, sexual anorexics do have a definite profile that separates them from the larger population of those having difficulty being sexual: They are often extremely competent people who are committed to doing things very well and have a fear of making mistakes and being human.
Patrick J. Carnes
To enjoy beauty in the company of myself is to experience beauty bound by the limits of the sole person that I am. But, to experience beauty in the company of God is to experience beauty bound by the limits of Who God is, which is to experience beauty without limits.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest gains that we will ever experience arise from the greatest sacrifices that we have ever known.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I looked at myself through the prism of awareness, great tears came as I connected with how this wounded child felt.
David W. Earle
When one person attempts to “fix it” for the other person, the connection of acceptance is snapped and the sender and receiver miss an opportunity for understanding.
David W. Earle
Only God understands how incredibly far we’ve fallen, and only God understands how incredibly far we can rise. And only we can determine if we’re going to wallow in the mediocrity that is born of the refusal to understand either.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we limit love to being nothing more than a feeling, we have no real feeling for what love is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough