Growing Your Relationship Through Every Season of Life – I

Narrator (Male): Is your marriage struggling, communication breaking down, trust fading, conflict that never seems to resolve? There is still hope. Hope Restored marriage intensives by Focus on the Family help couples step away from daily life and focus fully on rebuilding their relationship. And right now, through the Marriage Investment Initiative, Hope Restored is investing $1,000 toward marriage intensives. Visit hoperestored.com/invest.
Narrator (Female): This program is sponsored by Focus on the Family, a listener-supported ministry helping families thrive in Christ.
John Fuller: This is John Fuller and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs on a podcast, app, or website.
Deborah Fileta: You start to really reveal who you actually are and connecting with people emotionally and spiritually. This is not—I'm not who I think you want me to be, this is who I actually am and learning to just become more authentic and vulnerable in a relationship.
John Fuller: Well, which season of relationship are you in? Is it spring or summer or fall or perhaps maybe a little more like winter? We're talking today with counselor Deborah Fileta on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly about ways that we can navigate every season of our relationships. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller.
Jim Daly: I'm excited about today's program, John, because it really will illuminate where couples are at. I remember Jean and I, when we were first dating—we started, I proposed, we started to do our pre-marital counseling—we were on the cloud. I mean, I couldn't breathe without being around Jean. I lived in San Diego at the time. I remember driving her dinner to Orange County, 90 minutes each way. She worked at a vet clinic and I knew she liked this Thai meal at this Thai restaurant and I'd go get it and bring it to her and then just sit there and eat with her during her break and then drive 90 minutes back to San Diego. That was the best time of my life. You just want to maintain that. It's hard to maintain that attitude because of that infatuation. But I think today we're going to help you with staying engaged, hopefully, and enjoying the warmth of those seasons of relationship. Bring in summer—it's a great place to live, but all of them have things we can learn from.
John Fuller: They're part of the human experience and I'm so glad Deborah Fileta is here. She's a listener and viewer favorite and she's a wife, mom of four, married to John, and a licensed professional counselor. We're talking about some of the concepts in her newest book, *Relationship Skills: The Four Seasons That Will Make or Break Your Love Life*. We've got details about Deborah and this resource on our website.
Jim Daly: Deborah, welcome back. So good to have you here. Let me paint a picture from the research that we've read. Greg Smalley, who runs our marriage area—he and his wife, Erin—they are aware of research, which you are too, probably, that 24% of couples in the church are in a marital crisis. There's some conflict that is putting them in a bad place. That's a quarter of the couples. On the one hand, I appreciate that vulnerability that they answered the survey that way. It should also be a wake-up call for pastors and the rest of us in the church. If we're in that place, we need to get help. If others are in that place, we need to be talking about the difficulties in marriage and the idea that it's okay to hurt. We want to get to a better place because of our witness for Christ, right? We should be showing the world that we can have happy, good, solid, joyful marriages.
Deborah Fileta: Amen. Relationships are the great revealer, aren't they? They reveal what's going on inside of us and they often reveal what God wants to heal. When all of these things come up, including a point of marital crisis, it is an opportunity to go deeper with our healing.
Jim Daly: What do you see in those couples that make it possible to get to a better place?
Deborah Fileta: If I had to give you the number one word, it would be ownership. Owning my weaknesses, sins, struggles, owning what I bring to the table and starting to do it differently. When I'm just focused on the other person and what they're needing to do differently and what they're doing wrong, I stay stuck. But when I can own, God moves me forward. When I can find my role, I now have some sort of control and I can actually begin to do things differently.
Jim Daly: That's really good. And that's what the book is about.
Deborah Fileta: It's interesting because as I've been working with couples now for almost two decades, I have seen that just like in nature, as nature walks through these four particular seasons, so do we in relationships. We walk through spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each season has a purpose, each season comes with its own obstacles and its own opportunities. If we lean in and learn from these seasons, we can actually become better as individuals and have healthier relationships.
Jim Daly: Let's describe them: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Give us the definition.
Deborah Fileta: Brief overview: the season of spring is the season of growth. It's the season of new beginnings, it's the season of attraction and connection, and you see life through a rose-colored lens, right? You know what it's like to have the flowers blooming and blossoming. Then we move into the season of summer, where things get hot. Summer is the season of intimacy and deeper connection emotionally, spiritually, physically. But you can also get stuck in the heat of summer if you're not careful. You can get burned by summer. We move into the season of fall, which is the season of conflict and communication. Fall is where your true colors start to shine through and you start really seeing that person for who they are, but that can come with conflict. And then we move into the season of winter, which I always say is the season of turning inward. It's a season of hibernation. But not only that, winter, I have learned, is also a season of disinfecting. God uses winter to disinfect the ground and get it ready for the season of spring. So even when you're in a season of winter that feels cool, that feels apathetic, that feels frozen, there is hope that spring can come again.
Jim Daly: That's such a good analogy. It just fits. I think when we get to heaven, one of the things, if we know in full, like Paul writes, rather than looking through the glass dimly, I think it's going to be the cycles that God put into the universe—all of it.
Deborah Fileta: That we didn't know about.
Jim Daly: Yes, that we didn't know the importance of. And that's even where Paul writes about nature. When you look at nature, you can see God in nature. I think that rhythm that you've identified in relationship, just like the Earth going around the Sun, there's something there that God wanted us to see and made it that plain. You can see it in yourself. Let's get into spring and we'll go through all of the seasons, but I think John and I share this commonality that when I met Jean and you met John, you two—you and Jean—did not have that love-at-first-sight, unlike John and I had in looking at the two of you. What was going on there for you and John?
Deborah Fileta: My first thought when I met my husband, before I knew he was going to be my husband, was, "He's really tall, and who wears long-sleeve dress shirts with shorts?"
Jim Daly: Did you ever get an answer to that question? Because I'm with you.
Deborah Fileta: No. But you know what he tells me now? He says, "Hey, I didn't try to trick you. I was never a fashionable guy."
John Fuller: Well, or he could have said it worked, didn't it?
Deborah Fileta: It worked, it got you in the end. It made you think about him. But it's funny because you have this idea of what it's supposed to be like when you meet the person that you're going to marry—that there's going to be writing in the sky or God's going to just say, "That's the one," and you're going to know. Even though John looked at me and thought, "I think I'm going to marry this woman one day," and I looked at him and thought, "What kind of fashion statement is that?" we both had to navigate through the four seasons of the relationship. We both needed to see what was really here. Each season reveals what you need to know in order to know whether or not this person is going to actually be a good fit. It doesn't really matter what you feel at the start of the relationship, what matters is what's revealed through the seasons of the relationship.
Jim Daly: That's so, so good. You mention in the book that attraction certainly is powerful and I think many psychologists have listed how that works. You see somebody you're attracted to and then it goes to holding hands and so on and so forth until full emotional and physical intimacy, which for the Christian community, that's where we want to see that in the context of marriage, right? Not just one-night flings, obviously. But that is how God has set up that attraction scale. You can see it—it's very predictable to where psychologists, counselors, you know the path and the pattern that usually happens. In that context, you said you and John described your own rose-tinted glasses when it came to your pre-marital counseling. What did that look like?
Deborah Fileta: You know, when we first got engaged—and I will note that as we went through these seasons, my attraction toward him grew. There's different levels of attraction: physical attraction, emotional, spiritual attraction—all these things start to grow to the height of the point where we were engaged and I remember going through pre-marital work and doing this assessment with our counselor. And he looked at me and he's like, "Deborah, you rated everything off the charts. This guy has no flaw. You really are seeing this relationship through a rose-colored lens." I was. The reality of the hardships of a relationship had not yet hit. I was in full-blown spring seeing everything through that lens of growth and attraction and blossoming and blooming. But reality is spring is just one season of a relationship—it's just one fraction of the relationship—and all of the other seasons actually add depth and meaning to the relationship, and we hadn't gone through those quite yet.
Jim Daly: It's such a—again—great framework to understand human relationship. It's just a good way to look at it and it gives you insight into perhaps where you're at and where you want to move from there to a better place or stay where you're at if you're in that spring-summer area. Healthy give-and-take in relationships is essential. It's a learned skill set, I think. I don't know that we come into marriage with that ability. We probably have a modicum of it and then we get better, hopefully. And I think the fallout, like our Hope Restored, which is where couples are struggling significantly, and that's okay—come as you are, just don't stay that way—and that's where we can do so much work to help couples get to a better place. I know that's what you do in your counseling. But you illustrate this beautifully with your experience of gardening. So what's going on there?
Deborah Fileta: I'm a plant killer, unfortunately. I have not really mastered it yet. It's funny because typically I forget to water my plants. I just forget, move on with life, and then they die because they did not get enough water. John got me these succulents and he's like, "Listen, Deb, you hardly have to water these. It'll be fine."
Jim Daly: It's called a cactus.
Deborah Fileta: It'll be fine. Just once a week, put a couple drops in. But I forgot if I did or if I hadn't, and what I ended up doing was over-watering the plant, and then they also died. So as I'm going through this planting and the analogies are flowing in my mind, I realize that relationships are like a plant. You can kill a plant by giving it too little water, but you can also kill a plant by giving it too much water. And I think that's something we don't talk about enough in relationships, when you're doing above and beyond in your relationships because you're accustomed to giving too much, making excuses for the other person, enabling unhealthy behaviors. So just like in nature, we've got to learn that healthy balance of give-and-take in order for the relationship to grow as strong as it possibly can.
Jim Daly: Regardless of what season a marriage is in, it's critical for us to identify those unhealthy patterns. I think you list a number of unhealthy patterns that I think for the Christian, we might see some spiritual benefit in there—that we think this is the right spiritual tone to be giving, to be caring, to be concerned—but there's an unhealthy edge to that. Describe that.
Deborah Fileta: You know, one of the personality types I talk about of people who give too much is the rescuer. Maybe the rescuer deep down, they believe that their goal, their role is to fix this person, to make them better, to rescue them from their sin and struggles. Some of the reason you become a rescuer is because maybe you come from a family where you were put in that position of rescuing. You learned to fix the problems, you learned to bring peace to the chaos because you had to. Interestingly enough, when we come to Jesus, that leaning does not go away. Those coping skills that served us in one season sabotage us in another season if we don't face them and address them and bring them into alignment with who God wants us to be. God doesn't want us to be the rescuer because He is the ultimate rescuer. He is the Savior, not us. So we don't want to bring that mindset into relationships because our relationships will quickly become unbalanced if we come in as the rescuer.
John Fuller: This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and our guest today is Deborah Fileta and we're talking about some of the concepts in her book *Relationship Skills: The Four Seasons That Will Make or Break Your Love Life*. There is so much here to apply in your own marriage regardless of where you're at. Get a copy of it from us today at the ministry—our number is 800, the letter A, and the word family—or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.
Jim Daly: Under that category of those who give too much, it even sounds funny because it feels like the Christian life is about giving, always giving. But you mentioned the rescuer, you also have the pleaser and the insecure. Describe those two.
Deborah Fileta: People pleasers: when our goal is to please man more than it is to please God. And we get in a role where we're so focused on the needs of everybody else, but we neglect our own. And then the insecure are those who are looking for their value and worth to come from relationships, so they don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to upset you, they don't want to even speak truth sometimes because they want to feel loved and liked by you. Those are personality types that can quickly bring a lack of balance to a healthy relationship.
Jim Daly: The pleaser's skill one is pretty pervasive. I mean, I can tend to do that too. I want to be liked. I think most human beings want to be liked. And then the question is where do we get unhealthy with that attribute? And then at the core of it with the pleaser, what am I gleaning from it versus my motive, my good motive for doing it—like it makes me feel better to please you.
Deborah Fileta: This is where it gets unhealthy, is that motive part, where my goal isn't to actually serve you, my goal is to get you to like me. So I'm going to do whatever it takes for you to like me because I need you to like me to feel valuable about myself.
Jim Daly: Which at its core is manipulative, but we wouldn't even necessarily know that.
Deborah Fileta: You're right. At its core, it's actually selfish. It's like, "I'm doing this so that I can get something from you," rather than, "My goal is to please God." Because if my goal is to please God, sometimes I'm not going to be able to please you at the same time. I'm going to have to tell you a truth that you might not like, but God is the measuring stick, not your approval of me.
Jim Daly: In that insecure person—under, again, that category of people who give too much—I would think with social media, that is at its all-time high, that insecurity. I think young people feel that—there's a lack of understanding identity, "who am I?" And that insecurity that is driven by all the social media—that I don't look as good as that person, I'm not as well-educated as that person, whatever social media is portraying as the standard. It's kind of like the old days of airbrush: "I can't be that person in the magazine."
Deborah Fileta: Right. And sadly, in relationships, you will live up or down to the level that you believe you deserve. And if you don't believe you deserve anything because you're not walking in your identity in Christ, you're going to settle for a low-level relationship, an unhealthy relationship. Whereas if you believe God made me for healthy relationships, I am His heir, you're going to expect and require different standards in your relationship. This is why our identity really does shape the type of person we engage with and how we engage with the people that we're in relationship with.
Jim Daly: I think that idea of knowing your identity in Christ is becoming so critical for everybody, but especially young people. Because I think if there's an assignment for the parents, that's job one: help your child, teen, 20-something understand their identity in Christ. Because that's the foundation on which these antidotes occur against these things that we face, right?
Deborah Fileta: Absolutely. You attract people on your level of health, on your level of worth, on your level of value. So if you think about it that way, we're magnetic to certain people. When we go out into the world not feeling good about ourselves, not having confidence in who God has made us to be, we're going to attract people on that level as well. So this is why it's important as parents for us to instill that true identity in our kids, not because of what they do, but because of who they are.
Jim Daly: Let's hit those others: those that give too little. Because, again, this is really the out-of-balance human experience. So you've mentioned too much, now too little: the cynic, the wounded, the empty. Describe each of those.
Deborah Fileta: We'll start with the empty because I think a lot of people can relate to that—people who are feeling on E. They've got nothing left, no fuel. Life has taken it out of them. They're stressed, they're maxed out, they have few boundaries. And then when they come home, they feel like they've got nothing left to give. And I think that is a lot of people today, where they give their leftovers to their relationships—not because they want to, but because they're truly not filling up in the proper ways. When you go into a relationship and you're on empty, you're going to make a bad partner because you've got nothing left to give in your relationship.
Jim Daly: Well, talk about that in the context of marriage, that you're giving everything outside the walls of your home and then you have nothing inside.
Deborah Fileta: Right. And God calls us to be filled. God calls us to live abundantly. Jesus modeled to us boundaries and protecting what matters, staying filled and fueled in many different ways and practicing soul care so that when we walk home, when we're home with our family and our marriage, which is our primary ministry, that we have something to give in a significant way.
Jim Daly: Let's hit the cynic.
Deborah Fileta: The cynic is the type of person who has been hurt in relationships. They don't really trust you. They either don't trust you because you haven't proven yourself—they don't know you—or they don't trust you because they know you and you haven't proven yourself. No matter who you are, they're not going to trust you. Usually it's people who have been hurt in the past, and so they sort of put this wall up in relationships for protection. It's like, "I don't know, you might hurt me. I'm not sure if I can fully trust you because I've been hurt in the past so many times, so I'm going to keep you at a distance and I'm not going to give as much as I could."
Jim Daly: And finally, that third one, the wounded.
Deborah Fileta: The wounded is the person that's been hurt, somebody who carries triggers and wounds that they haven't healed. They stay away from relationships so that those wounds don't get pressed upon. They don't want to feel pain, and so they avoid the intimacy that comes with a relationship, they avoid the vulnerability, and they kind of seem withdrawn in a relationship. When you think about those personality types, you realize that you can give too much and destroy a relationship, but you can also give too little and keep a relationship from ever really taking root and growing.