Welcome to Counselors on the Couch Podcast
(This page is undergoing revisions)
Listen in as Counselors, Coaches, and Specialists openly discuss a variety of common life struggles. Learn what you can do to address your own issues as our guest share with each other their insights and tools to help solve problems for others.
Upcoming Podcast Series:
February 2021–Surviving Divorce This all new 12-part series presents an ongoing conversation on the challenges, myths, hurts, and survival tools for anyone considering, going through, or coming out of divorce. Dr Chuck and his guests, Kathy Ahearn and Dr. James Strickland use their collective experience to share how they help others who are being impacted by divorce.
Bios: Dr. Chuck Carrington is the founding director of Virginia Beach Christian Counseling. He specializes in relationships, communication skills, betrayal trauma, parenting, and life struggles. Kathy Ahearn is a 17-year veteran group leader for divorce care in Virginia Beach (DivorceCare.org for more info), and Dr. James Strickland is also DivorceCare group co-facilitator. What the all have in common is the experience of being divorced themselves, and learning to take their lives back over time.
Overcoming Divorce Episode Guide:
Part One: Facing a New Reality
-
- Episode 1: Making the Intolerable Tolerable. The Trauma, Grief, & Loss in Divorce can be devastating, especially in the beginning.
- Episode 2: Healing is a Process
- Episode 3: Anger, and expression of hurt (Anger-Bitterness-Rage: Put a Stop Depression & Aggression).
Part Two: Reacting and Responding to Stress and Loss: Reestablishing Separate Identities
-
- Episode 4: Is it a Boundary or is it Control? Establishing healthy and effective boundaries protect you and others from continued conflict and hurt.
- Episode 5: Being Responsible to, not responsible for. Knowing where and why to say no, limiting your actions to ones that protect you, and knowing when to accept or own a problem versus when it should remain with someone else.
- Episode 6: Relationship, Sex, and Soul-ties. For the newly separated or divorced, relationships can be a real source of conflict and fear. When understanding how past relationships have affected your love-map and self-image, you can confidently re-enter the world of togetherness once more.
- Episode 7: Collateral Damage: The dividing of a family. Far too many unintended consequences will happen and wound or affect others around you. You cannot stop all collateral damage, but you can prevent some, mitigate others, and work to heal the rest.
- Episode 8: Divorce and Financial Assault. Divorce will cost you–now and for some time to come. The upfront costs are significant, but the ongoing costs are often under-estimated. Dividing lives instantly reduces your financial security, increases your personal cost of living, and can have major impacts on your stability, family interactions, and future planning. The short run can be devastating, the long term needs expanded awareness and planning.
Part three: Moving Beyond
-
- Episode 9: Alone by not Lonely. Leaving a marriage means living single again. At times loneliness tells you are actually all alone. Being alone isn’t the same as being all alone. All alone is a belief that you are somehow unworthy, unloved, or rejected-perhaps permanently. All alone is a misinterpretation of the occasional sense of loneliness as a threat to happiness. Learn that being alone can be healthy, healing, and energizing while rejecting fear-based beliefs of rejection or abandonment.
- Episode 10: Forgiveness is Necessary. Forgiveness is not what we think. Forgiveness is for you first, not for others. Choosing to forgive unburdens you from the debilitating weight of pain caused by betrayal or abandonment in divorce. Forgiving the people who hurt you releases you to live once more. Unforgiveness ties you to the past and stops you from moving forward in life. What we have been taught as children about forgiveness is incomplete at the least, dead wrong at the worst. Forgiveness is empowering for you. Learn to practice it now, and live again.
- Episode 11: Do Overs; How can I avoid repeating my mistakes? (God has provided guidance on marriage and divorce…)
- Episode 12: Authoring a New Chapter in Your Story Reconciliation-The Mission of God (relationships)