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Thriving Beyond Belief with Cheryl Scruggs


Mar 20, 2019

I welcome Debra Fileta to this week's episode of Thriving Beyond Belief!

Debra is a wife, mother of three, and a licensed professional counselor, specifically dealing with relationship-focused issues. She also has written two books, Choosing Marriage, and True Love Dates!

Debra has such insight on working on relationships in a healthy and balanced way. There are so many issues that we discuss in relationships, specifically within the Christian culture. Just because you are a believer in Jesus doesn't mean you will naturally be good at certain relationships. Just like anything in life, we need to put in time and effort and practice to make any relationship work.

For Debra's definition of thriving in relationships, she says that "relationships don't exist for us to just get through them. We are meant to thrive in all of our relationships and let them be testimonies in our lives."
She speaks with such wisdom about what the goal of relationships are. The end goal is not happiness, and Debra dives into this to explain what our focus in relationships should be. We talk about the fact that healthy relationships are made up of healthy individuals and discuss the steps to take for yourself that will in turn help improve your relationships.

Debra brings up an amazing point: we see that Jesus had to go through the lowest of the low to get to the point of resurrection. We need to know that we may have to go through the dark season of exposing all of our issues in a relationship to get to where Jesus can resurrect it. Counseling is such a tool in this area. There is such an importance in counseling and learning to fight the stigma that counseling is for issues that have already arisen. But our culture needs to let counseling be something that helps us maintain health in our lives, whether in relationships or not.

Let's not believe that passivity and selflessness are the same thing. Let conflict be a place to learn and discuss and be vulnerable. Discussing hard things isn't just saying what you think. It is about digging deeper and wondering what the root of the conflict is. That is what leads to true healing.

All of Debra's links

I can't wait for you to tune in and listen today!