15 Fun Date Night Ideas For Couples In Oklahoma City or Tulsa
Here at Marriage Solutions we’re always on the lookout for fun local activities to do for fun date nights. Fun is crucial for a love to last. We need to laugh together and go on adventures both great and small.
You know a life full of stress without stopping for fun can cause any great couple to end up in a marriage counselor’s office.
So to inspire you, we have assembled 15 great date ideas for couples to do in Oklahoma City or for our couples in Tulsa to take a quick trip south.
How Long Should I Try To Work On The Marriage If My Partner Is Unwilling To Try?
Maybe you’ve been unhappy in your relationship for a while but your partner seems unwilling to do anything to improve the situation. It can be so hard to know what to do. You can feel so incredibly stuck.
I can be even worse if you’ve experienced a significant hurt. Maybe they don’t know know how to be there for you emotionally or physically when you need them most.
Maybe there’s been betrayal like an affair. Maybe you’ve considered looking outside the marriage for comfort. If you have then READ THIS.
But the question we get quite often in our marriage counseling private practices is, “how long should I try to work on things before it’s a hopeless case?” Other questions we get are…”am I crazy for wanting to work on things?” Or “Is my partner a Narcissist just trying to hurt me?”
In our years of experience counseling couples we’ve identified several types of people, and situations couples find themselves in, when they have to decide if they should leave their spouse or not.
Sexual Intimacy A Struggle?
If only it were as simple as putting on a sensual song and slipping into something “more comfortable” to feel “in the mood” as a woman.
If you come to us for counseling you have learned all about emotional intimacy and have probably experienced a deepening of your relationship bond in a short amount of time. But sometimes couples still struggle sexually.
Sometimes it’s a biological struggle, sometimes its dietary, and yet sometimes it’s just simply a matter of preparing the mind for an encounter with our spouse....
Healing Trauma & Depression As A Couple
In this post we talked about how research has shown that couples therapy is becoming more and more effective in helping individual issues. The reason is because everyone needs a support system and everyone needs to feel connected to others, especially to our significant other, emotionally. This need for connection to others is known as the Attachment Theory in psychology.
We also talked about if an individual has experienced trauma, if they have a significant other walk with them through their healing process, then they are more likely to heal and heal quicker than if they had to go at it alone.
Part II will discuss why couples counseling is effective in helping individuals overcome trauma. Susan Johnson, a highly respected couple’s therapist, said, “Isolation and a lack of secure connection to others undermine a person’s ability to deal with traumatic experience. Conversely, secure emotional connections with significant others offer a powerful antidote to traumatic experience (Johnson, in press).”
How does a secure relationship help us heal and deal with trauma? Well, to simplify it, a traumatic experience turns our world upside down and a good relationship with our significant other can turn our world around by soothing us, offering safety, promoting confidence and trust, and helping us to feel comfortable in taking risks and learning new coping mechanisms to name a few.
On the other hand if your relationship is not good then that in-and-of-itself is a traumatic experience. If you have experienced war, past sexual abuse, a life altering accident, or any other sort of trauma, a poor connection with your spouse can actually worsen the trauma from the past.
“A significant portion of clients identified as having borderline personality disorders, most of whom are survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), improve substantially in later life if they find a positive attachment relationship with an understanding other (Stone, 1990).”
Brad uses the Attachment Theory as a foundation when working with couples. He works with couples to feel and become closer to each other by helping individuals feel comfortable being honest and forthright talking about issues. He also helps each spouse rise to the occasion and teaches them how to become that caring support system their spouse so desperately needs.
So here are the 10 central tenants of attachment theory as described by Susan Johnson in her book Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy with Trauma Survivors (some of this is copied directly from her book and some is my own interpretation in order to best explain attachment):
- Attachment is an innate motivating force. We all desire to be close. It is imbedded in our genetic make up. It isn’t simply an infantile need but is what we all need in order to survive.
- Secure dependence complements autonomy. “There is no such thing as complete independence from others or overdependence (Bretherton & Munholland, 1999). There is only effective or ineffective dependance.” Surprisingly, the more securely dependent we are the more autonomous and separate we can confidently be.
- Attachment offers a safe haven. Even back in the stone age people lived together, worked together, fought together and without one another there surely would be no procreation and death of a population was insured. As a survival mechanism, people need to be securely bonded to one another for safety. If this is not possible stress and uncertainty is the outcome.
- Attachment offers a secure base. It is a spring board for people and a foundation they can refer to. When you know you have a secure place to return to you feel more confident and encouraged to explore the world and take necessary risk, to learn, and continually reinvent yourself.
- Accessibility and responsiveness build bonds. The building blocks of secure bonds are emotional accessibility and responsiveness. It is emotional engagement that is crucial. In attachment terms, any response (even anger) is better than none. If there is no engagement, no emotional responsiveness, the message from the attachment figure is “Your signals don’t matter, and there is no connection between us.”
- Fear and uncertainty activate attachment needs. When an individual is threatened (by traumatic events, the negative aspects of everyday life such as illness, or an assault on the security of the attachment bond itself) emotions arise and the need for comfort and connection become very obvious. People begin to ask “Where am I in proximity to my spouse?” or “Where do we stand?” or “What does my partner think of me?” or “Do they love me?” or “Can I depend on you when I need you?”.
- The promise of separation distress is predictable. When someone reaches out to the spouse for connection but the spouse fails to comfort them and respond to their efforts then the normal response is angry protest, clingy behavior, depression, and despair. Ultimately, this leads to detachment. Depression is a very natural response to a lack of connection in your relationships.
- A finite number of insecure forms of engagement can be identified. There are only so many ways a person can respond to negative answers to the plea for connection. Our responses fit into two different categories: anxiety and avoidance. When the attachment or connection between an irreplaceable other like your spouse, a parent, or a child anxious behavior may increase. You may become more clingy, pursue harder, and even become quite aggressive. Or you may become more detached or avoid the situation or conversations out of fear. These are strategies people use to protect themselves from further pain.
- Attachment involves working models of the self and the other. This is how you view yourself and how you view others. If you view yourself as lovable and worthy of care and as confident and competent this is a secure attachment and can determine your responses to situations. Securely attached relationships can help us grow and become a person who views ourself that way because we look to others to validate our opinions naturally. Securely attached people, who believe others will be responsive when needed, tend to have working models of others as dependable and worthy of trust. These outlooks are formed by thousands of interactions and become expectations and biases carried forward into new relationships. The way we relate to ourselves and our significant other is infused with emotion.
- Isolation and loss are inherently traumatizing. When someone has experienced trauma in their past and the isolation that follows, their personality formation and their ability to deal with other stresses in life is greatly altered.
How to Reduce Stress & Anger to Lengthen Your Life & the Life of Your Marriage
“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”
- Thomas Jefferson
While anger is a habitual choice that we make it is one of the hardest habits to kick. How we react to stress is something that we learn from our environment at a very early age. Sometimes we get upset and we don’t even understand why. Things that don’t even phase other people cause us to obsess and/or explode.
Last time we talk about how anger is a secondary emotion. We said that underneath the anger there is usually another pain or hurt of some kind. Anger is often a cover up and can be an easier emotion to express than anything deeper. We must deal with the underlying hurts and when we do sometimes the anger still lingers because we have learned to react to issues that way. In this blog I will talk about how anger and stress go hand in hand and how you can take control of it...
Overcoming Angry Habits that Wreak Our Health and Our Marriages
Anger Gives Power Away Sometimes it helps to realize that problem anger does not gain us the power, control, respect, or the love we want. It only makes us more powerless by placing our peace in the hands of someone or something else. It drives people away. In short, we put ourselves in the powerless victim role. We give the power away when we get angry...
Crazy Anger, Where Does It Come From?
“Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.”
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
What is Anger?
Anger is the easiest secondary emotion we can feel. It is tons easier than accepting responsibility, crying, showing fear, hurt, or letting people see any other vulnerability that actually precedes anger.
In fact, when you look up anger in the dictionary you will find it described as “an unpleasant and uncomfortable feeling resulting from injury, mistreatment, or opposition and usually showing itself in a desire to fight back at the supposed cause of the feeling.”
How the Internet Affair Virus is Spreading
The painful feelings are still very similar whether your spouse is having sex with someone or they are just having an “internet fling”. We often hear from people that say even though their spouse hasn’t slept with anyone it still feels like they have cheated. Your heart still feels ripped out. Yet many can’t fully understand why. That is what this series of blog posts aims to sort out for you.