Conversations With Cinthia

If money is the main thing that comes to mind when you think of generosity, you will find this episode refreshing -- and possibly challenging!  Financial generosity is great, but Cinthia looks today at the gifts and fruits of the Spirit.  Are you generous with what God gives you and what He produces in your life?  It's not all about the wallet; it's about our whole walk.  Join Cinthia for a more complete consideration of the kind of generosity God wants.  

At a wedding, couples make commitments to one another -- big commitments.  But sometimes they don't really know what daily behaviors move them toward or away from keeping the big promises.  Cinthia offers practical commitments we can make that support the bigger commitments we make in relationships and in life.  Whether it's differentiating between abuse and dysfunction, practicing forgiveness, being preventive regarding the path to affairs, learning to act like an emotional adult, or dealing with your own emotional baggage instead of focusing on your partner's, we bet you'll find some step you can take to move toward being your own best version today.  While you can't control the other person, you can move toward greater health and healthier relationship behaviors.   Be your own best version, and bring health to your side of your most intimate relationship.  

Sometimes we develop habits in relationships, like snapping at each other, that undermine everything we really want the relationship to be.  Today, Cinthia offers practical steps you can take to change the way you interact in your most intimate human relationship.  Be sure you listen to yesterday's episode to look at your foundation, and then join Cinthia for today's look at practical steps.  You can learn to be the best version of yourself with the ones you love most instead of reserving your best behavior for strangers and acquaintances.  Listen to find out how!

Is your most intimate human relationship a place of safety, warmth, kindness, and healing?  So often, the reality is far from kind and gentle.  Today, Cinthia explains that we have to start with our own thinking patterns, including our self-treatment.  A pattern of being harsh and unkind internally, whether toward ourselves or about our partners, will tend to express itself in our closest relationships and eat away at their foundations.  Cinthia offers several ways to work on this and encourages us to start working on our relationships by working on ourselves.  If you want your home to be happier, don't miss this episode.

Yesterday, Cinthia started looking at the nine biggest issues that sneak into adult relationships and make them even messier than they already are.  Today, she reviews the concept of ego strength (a good thing when used correctly!) and continues looking at the nine biggest issues that can sneakily harm our marriages and dating relationships.  Today's look includes issues like empathy, struggle, sustaining attention, and what it does to relationships (and to children!) when we make kids more important than the person who helped us get them.  These aren't easy, black-and-white issues, but they are crucial for healthy relationships and families.  Make sure you listen to yesterday's episode, too!

Contrary to what you may have heard, communication is NOT the primary problem for most couples.  In fact, she says, communication tends to get blamed for lots of underlying problems that really cause all the drama.  So what are the real problems that tend to come out in couples' communication?  Today, Cinthia begins an exploration of nine problems that mess up marriages and pulverize pairs.  In the process, she discusses the difference between trustworthiness and perfection, the reality that couples get to share their loneliness but not obliterate it for each other, and the need to address shame instead of hoping that a partner's love will simply make you forget to experience it.  This episode will give you powerful tools for moving toward healthier relationships; don't miss it!

Hagar called God "the God Who sees me."  She encountered Him in the desert while fleeing a terrible situation, and the experience of being seen, understood, heard, validated, and loved was enough to enable her to go back and face the situation.  We need to be seen -- not just viewed, but seen for who we are and fully loved and accepted at the same time.  We need this from God and from each other.  Today Cinthia discusses concepts from attachment research and looks at what Hagar's encounter with God meant to her.  She also looks at what it meant to Jesus to have the Father turn away from Him during the crucifixion and how, once this was finished, the power of sin to separate us from God was destroyed.  If you've ever felt less than affectionately seen, less than desperately loved, less than fully known and accepted at the same time, join Cinthia to explore what it means to be seen by God, as well as to see the world (including our loved ones, enemies, and strangers) through His eyes.  

Do you ever think that you just don't have enough time to deal with the drama of interacting with other people?  The pace of our world is rapid these days, and this hugely impacts our relationships at so many levels.  When we are constantly trying to move on to the next thing, we can respond to everything that happens as if it's an emergency, and this includes our responses to people with whom we have relationships.  This isn't always best for the conversation, the relationship, the long-term love between human beings.  But how do we learn to calmly respond to our loved ones when we approach our whole lives in a survival or productivity mindset?  Join Cinthia to learn how to relax a little in relationship so that things don't quickly escalate to become so much bigger than they have to be.

Sometimes people aren't being as ridiculous as we think they are; they're just being themselves in ways that make perfect sense from inside their own frameworks. The better we understand one another, the better we can relate.  Yesterday, Cinthia talked about differences in gender and in temperament; today she's tackling personality.  (Personality is more structural than temperament; make sure you listen to yesterday's podcast to gain a fuller understanding of the two.)  Learn more about yourself and the people around you so you can stop judging or fighting traits in yourself or others that may not need to change.

Difference is not the same as dysfunction.  Does that sound obvious in theory?  The fact is that, in our day-to-day lives, we often think another person is wrong when, in fact, that person is just different than we are.  Today Cinthia looks at gender, including the deepest needs felt by men and by women, and at temperament, for which she uses Meyers-Briggs concepts.  Join Cinthia for an exploration of two major pieces of what makes each of us the unique beings we are, and come back tomorrow to look at personality.

The way Jesus did relationships changed the world forever.  So shouldn't we as Christians have healthy relational styles that are part of our witness?  Unfortunately, our relationships, which are inherently complex, can very quickly become complicated.  Today, Cinthia discusses the importance of having expectations in relationships despite lots of relationship advice out there that would encourage you to eliminate them.  The truth is that we all have expectations; we wouldn't engage in relationships without them and can't have intimacy without their protection.  The key is to make those expectations healthy, realistic, gracious, and helpful.  The good news is that people don't have to be perfect to be safe for emotional closeness.  Join Cinthia to look at specific expectations that serve healthy relationships between actual human beings.

"Our relationships," says Cinthia in this episode, "are intended to either tighten us up or lighten us up, and that's how we become very balanced people."  Cinthia has been coaching us in how to discuss issues effectively instead of in ways that make them worse.  Yesterday, she left off talking about couples and housework.  Today, Cinthia picks up with strategies for addressing this issue in ways that communicate efforts toward fairness.  (This isn't because fairness is really the focal point in a healthy marriage but because making those efforts communicates respect for each other).  Next, she discusses how to talk about different needs regarding time, communication, and practically prioritizing the relationship, as well as how to manage our thoughts about these issues.  After that, she addresses how to talk about our conflicts, especially when we've gotten into "toxic routines" in which the same painful fights recur like nightmares.  This episode is extra-practical and intensely useful for anyone trying to

Have your words ever caused pain in a relationship?  All of us have experienced the pain that words can cause, whether those words are ours or are spoken by someone else.  We can study communication and learn all kinds of helpful techniques, but, at some point, most of us have to work on controlling our tongues if we're going to improve our relationships.  Today Cinthia discusses the biblical concept of speaking the truth in love and gives specific, practical tips for doing this.  The more something matters, the more it matters how we discuss it, and this includes issues that are sometimes difficult -- for example, sex, money, and housework, all of which Cinthia specifically addresses today.  Join her to discuss ways of saying what needs saying without causing unnecessary harm or disconnection.  

Have you ever had someone try to answer you without waiting to fully hear your question?  Have you ever done that to someone else?  Hearing others is vitally important, and it sounds simple.  It's not easy, though, and we're rarely trained in it.  Today Cinthia offers some of that training we're missing and helps us learn to slow down and understand the people with whom we have relationships.  If you want to be a better listener (or the people around you want you to be a better listener), don't miss this episode.  

This may be the last of a series, but today Cinthia is covering the top sex and relationship killer of all: selfishness. Sometimes we're more selfish than we know, especially since Cinthia includes refusal to take care of ourselves under the heading of selfishness since, sooner or later, it tends to reduce what we have to give and force others to take care of us. So what is selfishness? Cinthia explores definitions that are likely to hit home with all of us at some level. She also talks about specific ways we can begin to address our own selfishness to give our relationships a chance. This is an essential topic for anyone who wants to make a relationship work, ever. Ironically, we can't be our own best versions when we are overly focused on ourselves. Join Cinthia to look at what to do with our own selfishness.

Have you ever thought of your own basic self-care as a way to love other people, or of the way refusing to address past emotional baggage affects those around you?  What is it like for the people who love you when you don't take care of yourself in basic ways, address the issues that impact you most deeply, forgive people in your past, or learn how to communicate effectively, invest time in relationships, or function as an emotional adult?  Cinthia explores the importance of dealing with ourselves honestly so that people in relationship with us don't have to do our parts of relationships as well as their own.  

If we want to know how to make something great, it helps to know what helps and hurts it.  Cinthia started yesterday talking about things that can threaten our relationships, and she continues today by looking at relationship factors, hormonal changes that can come with aging, infidelity and pornography, etc.  She explains that many sexual challenges can be overcome in a strong relationship but that things that kill the relationship tend to take sex down with them eventually.  Because of this, she continues with a look at things that can harm relationships in general; these include things like being controlling, trying to fix the other person, having unrealistic expectations, disrespecting differences in gender, personality, and temperament, and several more.  Join Cinthia to increase your awareness of the things that can challenge and even threaten your relationship, and join us again for the last episode in this series!

Today Cinthia finishes one series and begins a related one.  First, she finishes talking about the kinds of relationship rules that increase emotional health.  Today she addresses recognizing the difference between when others are being truly dysfunctional toward us and when they are just being different than we are, often due to gender, temperament, or personality.  She also covers being likeable (as opposed to just insisting that people should like you) and several important guidelines and hints for making relationships work.  Next she discusses the way relationships and sex are supposed to work together and moves into things that can destroy both.  This is the end of one great series and the start of another, so make sure you listen to all the episodes in both directions!

Yesterday, Cinthia introduced the case for having healthy relationship rules in families, intimate relationships, and other relationships.  Today, she reviews why some of us have a harder time with rules than others, then goes on to discuss how to begin observing healthier relationship rules.  She also discusses where to start if you realize the lack of health in your relationships goes beyond your own behavior (i.e. if a relationship has had unhealthy rules and another person is still operating by them in their interactions with you).   Join Cinthia to look at how and when this might apply.

Do we really need relationship rules?  Are they only the stuff of pop psychology and magazines, or are they necessary for healthy families, intimate relationships, and general human interaction?  Cinthia makes a case for relationship rules today, and it's a good one.  She then goes on to discuss dysfunctional rules that tend to exist in families and other relationship systems before outlining some basic healthy rules that encourage healthy relationships and interactions.  What relationship rules did you learn growing up?  What rules do you have now?  What rules do you want to use in the future?  Join Cinthia to explore the role rules can play, for good or for ill, and to consider the rules by which you want to live in relationship.