Here’s the Key to Helping Your Kids Develop a Mature Faith

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Diana, a mom in Columbus, Ohio, thought that she was doing everything right to raise her kids in the faith. They went to Mass regularly, prayed before meals, and sent them to the parish school.

But then her 12-year-old daughter made a comment that made her completely rethink her approach.

“Last week, my 12-year-old told me she thinks God is ‘more like a rule-maker than someone who loves us.’ And it knocked the wind out of me, because I realized she must have learned that from us,” Diana told Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak during a recent episode of the More2Life radio show that they co-host.

Her family had been so focused on practicing the faith as an act of obedience, she said, that they had not done as good a job helping their daughter actually experience God’s love.

A Critical Step for Developing Mature Faith

The Popcaks hear versions of Diana’s story regularly, and they are quick to affirm that the spiritual practices she described — Mass, Catholic education, family prayer — are genuinely good. But as Dr. Popcak pointed out, all the trappings of faith are nothing without love (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).

Lisa Popcak was able to relate to Diana’s concern. As a girl, she was riding home from school with a friend’s mother when a stunning sunset lit up the sky. Without preamble, the mom said from the front seat: “Oh Lord, thank you for blessing us so much with this beautiful sunset. You are such a wonderful artist. You love us so much to give us so much beauty in the world.”

“Nobody had ever acknowledged God as a giver, as somebody who loves us enough to give us beautiful sunsets,” Lisa said. “It cut right through me.”

That moment was a significant milestone in her faith life. And as Dr. Popcak pointed out, it is a critical step necessary for anyone to develop a durable, mature faith life. Instead of seeing God as “the great and powerful Oz behind the curtain,” kids need to encounter him as the one who, first and foremost, loves them in a personal way.

Diana understood this instinctively but didn’t know how to move forward. “I hear people talk about having a more personal relationship with God,” she said, “but that feels strange to me.”

How could she help her kids encounter the God of love?

How to Introduce Kids to the God Who Loves Them

The Popcaks’ answer to Diana’s question was straightforward: instead of talking about God, show kids how to talk to God…and how to notice his presence and influence in their everyday lives.

“We begin by just really bringing our family to God every day and saying, ‘Okay, Lord, teach us how to love each other the way you want us to love each other, not just with the broken human love that we’ve got, but really the love that comes from your heart,’” Dr. Popcak explained.

This can happen at the same time every day, possibly during dinner or family prayer time. After praying together in this way, talk about what “loving one another with God’s love” might mean for the coming day.

“Practically speaking, what would it mean for us to love each other with that thing that’s going on this afternoon with the family or that stressful thing that mom has to deal with or that test that you’ve got coming up?” Dr. Popcak continued.

At the end of the day, take stock of how the day went and thank God for the ways he helped you love one another throughout the day.

“And what you’re doing there is you’re building this sense that God cares about you and wants to help you build those relationships with each other and with him,” Dr. Popcak said. 

Over time, children begin to see that God isn’t watching to catch them doing something wrong; he’s present, generous, and paying attention.

Two Simple Practices to Try

While the Popcaks have written numerous books on how to raise faith-filled kids, they encouraged Diana to begin with two simple practices.

The first is what they call “noticing God’s gifts aloud” — the informal, spontaneous habit of thanking God for small blessings as they happen throughout the day. Lisa’s story about her friend’s mother spontaneously thanking God for the sunset is one example, but you don’t need to wait for something extraordinary: you can thank God for a morning filled with more laughter than tears, or for a chance encounter with friends, or getting through a doctor’s visit. These small acknowledgments, said aloud, teach the whole family to see God as an active presence in ordinary life rather than a distant judge keeping score.

The second practice is an end-of-day conversation called “thorns and roses.” At dinner or before bed, each family member names a rose — a blessing from the day, a moment where they saw God’s goodness — and a thorn, something they struggled with or worried about. The roses train the family’s attention toward gratitude. The thorns become an opportunity for a brief, natural family prayer: Lord, come into this. Help us to be here for each other. Help us to know your love even through the hard things.

Neither of these practices requires adding a single minute of formal prayer to an already-packed day. They ask only that God be part of the conversation that’s already happening.

Toward a Mature Faith

Diana was right to want more for her kids. Her family’s various faith practices are important. But research consistently shows that for kids to develop a mature faith that endures into adulthood, it is crucial that they experience how their Christian faith makes a positive difference in their daily lives.

In other words, they need to awaken to God working in their lives, helping them to navigate the difficult moments and helping them to become more fully alive.

For more help building a faith-filled home life, explore the resources and coaching at the CatholicHŌM app, where Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak and their team of pastoral counselors walk families through exactly this kind of growth. And for personalized one-on-one support, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

The One Little Habit That Keeps Marriages Strong

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They say, “Go big or go home.” But when it comes to keeping a marriage strong, that’s not always the best approach. In fact, sometimes it’s not even possible.

Take Marianne and Christopher. He is dealing with his second bout of cancer after suffering two strokes in the past year. Meanwhile, Marianne is working long days to support their family, including several children at home. At the end of the day, both of them are exhausted.

Marianne called in to a recent episode of More2Life to ask hosts Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak about how she and Christopher could stay connected as a couple, given their stressful circumstances.

Their situation is dramatic, but it’s not uncommon. Between full-time jobs and other family responsibilities, many couples face a similar dilemma: How do you stay close when all your time and energy is going to other responsibilities?

The Popcaks didn’t hand Marianne a grand plan; in fact, their advice was the very opposite of “go big.”

Why Small Gestures Matter

People often think that it’s the grand gestures that keep romance alive in a marriage: gifts, going out, romantic gestures. But relationship research has found that it’s the small, everyday turns toward each other, not the grand gestures, that most reliably predict which marriages last.

It’s not that the grand gestures don’t matter, but they are not as important as those small, everyday acts. Small and frequent beats big and rare, which is good news for tired couples.

Start by Reaching Out to God

Whatever challenge or stressful situation you might be facing in your marriage, the Popcaks recommend that you bring it to God before doing anything else.

“God has a plan for how he wants us to get through these things,” Dr. Greg told Marianne. “We can’t figure it out just by waking up in the morning and pointing ourselves at the day and trying our best. We have to start by saying, ‘Okay, Lord, teach us what to do. How do we show up for each other in this?’”

God wants to support you in your vocation to marriage, and pausing to pray opens the door for his grace to work more effectively in your situation.

The Popcaks offered a simple prayer template that couples can modify as needed: “Lord, help us get through this in a way that draws us closer to each other and to you. Help us be our best selves, and grow closer to one another and to you.”

Trade the Blueprint for a Simple Question

Prayer comes first. But couples still need something concrete for tired days.

Rather than a grand blueprint or strategy, the Popcaks suggest one question, asked daily: “What’s one small thing we could do to show up for each other today?”

In other words, what little things can you do for one another that are going to make you feel supported and connected? That small question does a lot to keep relationships strong, even on the hardest days.

“It can feel kind of like a big question at first,” Dr. Greg said, noting that sometimes it leaves couples stumped. Don’t settle for “I don’t know”! Take some time to really think about the little gestures that, in the past, have made you or your spouse feel supported and loved.

“I’m talking about tiny things,” Dr. Greg said: getting each other a cup of coffee, cleaning something up, putting something away.

Some couples even keep a running list of these small acts that make a big difference; that’s the idea behind the Love Lists exercise pastoral counselor Rachael Isaac often recommends.

It is also important that the question be asked and answered reciprocally. It could be tempting for Marianne to simply ask Christopher, since he’s the one who’s struggling more. But strong marriages are grounded in mutual self-giving, meaning that it’s important for each person to reach out to the other (with plenty of grace for someone’s limitations).

This simple daily practice may seem trivial, but the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com have seen it transform relationships.

“It gives you that thing to really work toward and hold onto,” Lisa said, “knowing that even in that one small way, you’re serving each other in your marriage.”

A Stronger Marriage, One Small Step at a Time

Before ending the call, the Popcaks prayed over Marianne and Christopher by name, asking the Lord for Christopher’s healing and the intercession of St. Peregrine, patron of cancer patients.

But Marianne and Christopher aren’t waiting for their circumstances to improve before they reconnect. And you don’t need to wait, either, for a lighter schedule or an easier year; you can begin working on a stronger marriage now. You just need one small thing today, and the willingness to ask again tomorrow.

For more faith-filled tools for building a stronger marriage, check out Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak’s book For Better…FOREVER! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage or How To Heal Your Marriage (and Nurture Lasting Love) which is also now available on Audible! 

And if exhaustion has made it hard to feel close to your spouse, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Helping a Loved One with Difficult Problems? Ask These 3 Questions First

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When a loved one is going off the rails, how do you love them without enabling their self-destructive behavior?

That’s the question Kim brought to Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak on a recent episode of their More2Life radio show.

When her 25-year-old daughter moved back home after a suicide crisis, Kim and her husband took her in, paid off her debts, covered residential treatment and three months of intensive outpatient therapy, and handed over the keys to one of their cars.

“We’ve been very supportive,” Kim told the Popcaks. “But now she seems to be going off the rails…we’re just kind of not sure where to go from here.”

Where’s the line between supporting a loved one and enabling their harmful behavior? It’s one of the hardest questions in family life. Fortunately, the Popcaks have spent decades helping families work through this dilemma.

When ‘Helping’ Isn’t Authentically Loving

Human beings are hardwired to want to relieve others’ suffering, especially the people closest to us. Usually that works out, but sometimes the way we offer support backfires.

“Love isn’t just about doing what makes people feel better in the moment,” Lisa Popcak said. “It’s a commitment to doing whatever we reasonably can to help someone be their best. And that sounds simple, but it can get so complicated when someone we care about is really hurting, because we tend to focus more on what we need to do to reduce the tension in the moment rather than working for their ultimate good.”

We shift into fix-it mode, taking the responsibility for their decisions off their shoulders and saying yes when we probably should say no.

“We don’t do it because we’re selfish or weak, but because we can’t stand watching someone we love suffer,” Dr. Popcak said. “The clinical word for that is enabling, but what it really means is that we confuse making someone comfortable with actually loving them.”

What inevitably happens next? Our loved one stays stuck and we burn out, which makes the situation worse.

Authentic love means working for the other person’s ultimate good, not just relief in the moment. This is where things get complicated. How do we figure out what authentic love looks like in a particular situation?

An Examination of Conscience for Helpers

Jacob Popcak, a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com, offers a simple starting point: a three-question “helper’s examination of conscience” that cuts through the confusion by getting honest about our motivations and our goals.

1. Am I doing this for them, or to feel better about myself?

Sometimes we convince ourselves that we are doing something for the good of the other person, but in reality, we are more motivated by our own self-interest. That’s why it’s important to explicitly examine our motivations.

Let’s say, for instance, that you really don’t want to stand up to your loved one about their irresponsible or self-destructive behavior. As a Christian, you might tell yourself that you are being loving — carrying your cross, so to speak. But if your real motivation is to avoid the person getting angry at you, then your actions aren’t really oriented towards the other person’s well-being.

“You might be doing it to feel better about you,” Jacob said, “because you don’t want to feel the feelings you associate with someone being angry at you.”

Self-interest takes other forms too — protecting your reputation, advancing your own agenda, or simply nursing the quiet satisfaction of being the person who swoops in and saves the day. None of that is the same as working for someone’s good.

If you really want to help your loved one, stay focused on the question: What do I need to do to help this person to heal and become their best self?

2. What does success look like?

This question helps us reframe our expectations. The truth is, when we stop supporting someone’s harmful behavior and start helping them get to a better place — well, most people on the receiving end of that kind of help aren’t thrilled about it.

“That question helps me to adjust my expectations so that my goal becomes my own virtue, not just getting a positive reaction from the person,” Popcak said.

Depending on the situation, success might look like remaining calm in the face of the other person’s angry reaction. Or if I know I tend to come off as condescending and preachy, success might look like delivering a tough message in a more neutral way.

Reframing your definition of success is all about recognizing what you can control and what you can’t. You can control your own behavior; you can’t control what the other person does.

It also means the intervention doesn’t fail just because the other person gets angry, refuses to cooperate, or walks away from the conversation. If you showed up with integrity — calm, honest, respectful — you did your job. Their reaction is theirs to own.

3. Am I speaking with the love due to a child of God?

Examining your motives and freeing yourself from the need for a positive reaction doesn’t give you permission to be cold, blunt, or self-righteous. The person you’re confronting is a child of God, and they deserve to be treated as one, regardless of what they’ve done or how they’ve responded to your efforts.

As Jacob Popcak puts it: “The first two questions are not a carte blanche license to speak however I want to and say, ‘Well, if they’re mad at me, it’s just because they can’t handle the truth.’ I am, as a Christian, still obliged to ask myself this third question.”

Help That Actually Helps

Kim and her husband had already done so much. The question wasn’t whether they loved their daughter, but whether their love was being directed well. Asking yourself these three questions not just once, but as you continue to accompany your loved one, will make the journey easier for both of you in the long run.

“The best way to make sure that we’re loving responsibly is to keep asking God, how do you want me to work for their good, given everything that I’m seeing?” Dr. Gregory Popcak said. “Let the answer to that prayer, not our guilt or sentiment or panic or fear, guide what to do next.”

For more on loving the difficult people in your life well, see Dr. Popcak’s book God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts!. For personalized, faith-filled support, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com. 

What Does the Theology of the Body Have to Do with Mental Health?

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Which is more important to your health, your mind or your body? How you or your health care provider answers that question has real implications for your well-being.

Most of us treat the body and mind as two separate entities, reaching for a pill for physical pain and going to therapy for emotional struggles. Inevitably, this divide leaves us feeling fragmented and poorly served by modern medicine.

But the Catholic Church has long insisted that body and mind are not competing entities, but are profoundly united. Spirit and matter “are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (Catechism #365).

It’s a radically countercultural doctrine. For centuries, influential thinkers have pulled this unity apart. On one side, Plato and René Descartes treated the body as a sort of prison for the mind; early pioneers of psychology like Freud and Skinner followed suit by largely ignoring the body’s role in mental health. On the other side, materialist philosophers claimed that the human being is nothing more than a complex biological machine—a view that resurfaced when the discovery of psychiatric medications led many modern experts to reduce mental health to “chemical imbalances” in the brain.

In recent decades, modern science has come to recognize that mind and body are a single, deeply connected system. The Catholic Church has known this for centuries, and in the writings of Pope John Paul II, now known as the Theology of the Body, that ancient truth has been developed into a comprehensive framework for understanding the human person.

The Theology of the Body is foundational to the way the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com approach pastoral therapy. Here’s what it teaches and why it matters for your mental health.

A Roadmap for Human Wellness

When St. John Paul II became pope in 1978, he brought with him a manuscript he had been developing for years on what it means to be a human person. His starting point, as Dr. Popcak describes on the More2Life radio show, was this: if we took everything God has given us—creation, Scripture, salvation history, all of it—what universal principles could we discover about living a more abundant life and having healthier, holier relationships?

The answer became a comprehensive vision of the human person: what it means to be human, how we are wired for mental and emotional flourishing, and how we relate to one another. This vision became known as the Theology of the Body, and several of its insights speak directly to mental health.

Your Body is Speaking. Are You Listening?

One of TOB’s central claims is that our bodies are part of how God communicates his design for us. As Lisa Popcak explains on the show, drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, God speaks to us through every cell of our bodies. Aquinas called this the Book of Nature—the idea that how God designed us, body, mind, and spirit, reveals his plan for how we are meant to live and relate to one another.

“Theology of the Body reminds us that biology is theology,” Dr. Popcak explains. “By prayerfully reflecting on the way God built our bodies and brains, we can discern important insights about what it takes to live a healthy, holy life.”

The human body offers numerous examples of this principle at work.

  • The face. The human face has roughly 43 muscles dedicated almost entirely to emotional expression—far more than almost any other animal. Humans are also unique among primates in having visible whites of the eyes, which allows others to track exactly where we are looking and what we are paying attention to. We are, literally, built to be
     “read” and to “read” others. The body reveals that we are made for mutual knowing.
  • Mirror neurons. God wired the human brain with mirror neurons—cells that fire when we observe another person’s emotional state, producing a similar feeling in ourselves. This is the neurological basis for empathy. We are designed not merely to observe others’ inner lives, but to share them.
  • Touch. Physical touch—a hand on a shoulder, a long hug from someone you trust—triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone that reduces cortisol, lowers heart rate, and builds a sense of safety and trust. Research shows that holding someone’s hand during a stressful situation measurably reduces their physiological stress response. The body is designed to give and receive comfort through physical presence—another form of self-donation.
  • Secure attachment. When people feel securely connected to God and others, their nervous system operates in a calmer, more integrated state. The body’s social engagement system is literally activated by felt safety in relationship. Isolation, by contrast, keeps the nervous system in a low-grade state of vigilance and threat. This is why withdrawal from God and others doesn’t just feel painful—it physiologically disrupts our capacity to function well.
  • Anxiety. Brain science tells us that anxiety is not primarily a response to external problems, but acts as a warning signal that something is wrong in our connections to God and others. “Rather than being a direct response to problems,” Lisa Popcak explains, “anxiety is actually a sign that we feel disconnected from people—the people that God has placed in our life to support us. The key to regaining our peace is working to restore that sense of communion and connection.” When we feel anxious, the body is sending a message: go find safe, healthy people.

Physical symptoms like panic attacks, chronic tension, and persistent exhaustion follow the same logic. They are often the body making visible some dysfunction in the mind or spirit. Medication may help manage those symptoms, but lasting healing requires attending to the whole person.

We Are Wired for Communion

These five examples point toward one of TOB’s most practically important teachings: we are made for communion. Not just in the sense that other people are nice to have around, but in the deeper sense that we are literally strongest when connected to God and to one another—physically, neurologically, and spiritually designed to give and receive love.

As Dr. Popcak puts it, isolation doesn’t just leave us running low; it actively drains us. When problems cause us to withdraw from God and the people we love, our brains change in ways that make us feel powerless, overwhelmed, and alone.

This understanding that we are made for relationship shapes the Popcaks’ approach to specific problems. When a caller struggles with anxiety, for example, the conversation might move toward examining what connections in their life feel threatened or broken. Other times, when someone lacks the confidence to tackle a tough problem, the Popcaks urge the practice of receptivity, which Lisa explains as “the ability to listen to God in the moment so we’re not just relying on our own strength or our own instincts or even our own fears to guide us.”

Suffering is Not the End of the Story

Perhaps the deepest gift the Theology of the Body offers to people in pain is a way to understand their suffering.

As the Popcaks explain, every human story follows the pattern of the larger biblical story of God’s relationship with humanity.

  1. Chapter one is original man—who God created us to be before sin: “secure, whole, capable of loving and being loved totally without fear.”
  2. Chapter two is historical man—the wounded people we are now, “living in a fallen world, carrying the scars of sins committed against us and the sins and mistakes that we’ve made.”
  3. Chapter three is eschatological man—the people we are becoming, day by day, through God’s healing grace. Ultimately, we are destined to be fully restored and glorified in Christ.

The paschal mystery—Christ’s suffering, death, and Resurrection—blazed a path for us from chapter two to chapter three. Because Christ took on a human body, he did not suffer abstractly. He suffered physically and emotionally (body and mind): exhaustion, grief, betrayal, abandonment, and death. Human suffering does not have to be meaningless: God himself has walked this territory, and because he has, he can lead us through it.

“Even in the middle of difficult times,” Lisa says, “God wants to show us how to respond to what we’re going through in a way that helps us to become the people he created us to be, and to work for the good of those around us.”

It is tempting to think that our wounds, our struggles, and our bad habits define who we are. But the Theology of the Body insists otherwise.

“Our past may explain some things about us,” Dr. Popcak says, “but it’s grace that defines us.”

Body, Mind, and Spirit Working Together

Pastoral counseling rooted in the Theology of the Body doesn’t treat the body, mind, and spirit as separate departments. It understands them as interlocking dimensions of a single human experience. Tackling relational or personal problems means taking all three into account, and the Theology of the Body offers a framework for doing exactly that.

If you’d like to explore what that kind of integrated healing might look like in your own life, reach out to any of the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

5 Common Blocks to Real Forgiveness (and How to Overcome Them)

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A major new study confirms that forgiveness is good for your mental health.

That’s not exactly a shocker for Christians, who have been hearing about the spiritual benefits of forgiveness from Scripture and the saints for two thousand years. But before we yawn and move on, consider how those spiritual benefits cascade into every aspect of our lives.

Led by researchers at Harvard and published in ​npj Mental Health Research, the study tracked more than 200,000 people in 23 countries and found that the real benefits come not from isolated acts of forgiveness, but from what researchers call “dispositional forgivingness” — forgiveness practiced as a habitual way of moving through life. People who forgive that way tend to report meaningfully better well-being across a range of measures, especially in psychological health: happiness, sense of meaning, and reduced depression.

Okay, so just like Jesus said, forgiveness is the way to go. Most Christians get that. Where we run into problems, though, is actually forgiving…much less making forgiveness a life habit.

When we run into roadblocks, how do we overcome them to find real forgiveness?

Forgiveness Roadblocks…and How to Overcome Them

Rachael Isaac is a pastoral counselor at the Pastoral Solutions Institute who regularly helps clients work through their difficulty forgiving others. She identifies five common roadblocks that often get in the way…and the strategies that help people overcome them.

1. When You Believe Forgiving Means Forgetting

By far the most common roadblock to forgiveness, she says, is the widespread belief that forgiveness means moving on as if nothing happened.

“A lot of people think that forgiving someone means forgetting everything that they did — being in a relationship and acting like everything’s fine,” she says.

But there’s a real difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness, she says, “doesn’t mean that I’m forgetting everything that they did and I’m relinquishing all of my boundaries and we’re in relationship again. But it does mean I’m not allowing the hurt, the anger, the resentment to dictate my choices anymore.”

In other words, forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. Forgiveness is about getting to a place where you can genuinely wish the other person well — even when you don’t feel like it. Reconciliation, on the other hand, means that the person who hurt you has done the work necessary to be safe around and build a relationship with.

We’ve covered the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation before; you can learn more in our blog archives.

2. When you feel like you need their permission

One of the most subtle and persistent blocks Isaac encounters is what she describes as a felt need for permission — specifically, the sense that you need something from the person who hurt you before you can forgive them. That “something” might be remorse, an apology, or a change of behavior.

“It comes from this place of powerlessness — like, I don’t feel like I have the power to do this on my own,” Isaac says. “I need permission from this other person.”

But when we delay forgiveness until the other person says the right thing or shows the right remorse, we’re really empowering them to control our interior life.

“I’m basing my choices for myself off of my resentment or anger or hurt,” Isaac explains. “I’m letting that other person decide for me rather than me deciding for myself.”

The path forward is recognizing that forgiveness is a choice that belongs entirely to you. Waiting for their “permission” makes you a hostage, emotionally yanked one way or another by the other person’s behavior. Forgiveness, on the other hand, frees you from the emotional control of the other person.

3. When anger feels like you’re doing something

A second block is the unconscious belief that holding on to resentment and anger is getting you somewhere.

“We hold onto anger and resentment because it feels like we’re punishing the other person,” Isaac says. “But really, we’re just punishing ourselves.” Even if the other person is aware of your anger, it almost certainly doesn’t affect them as much as it does you.

And the effect it has on you isn’t good. The Harvard study cited above found that unforgiveness results in higher rates of depression, anxiety, and the negative physical effects of a sustained stress response.

Isaac’s practical tool for cutting through this is a simple self-check: “Is this helping me, or is this hurting me?”

For people who still have difficulty letting go of anger and resentment, she sometimes recommends a “poison pen” exercise — writing a letter to the person who hurt you, saying everything you would want to say, and then destroying it.

“It allows you to process your thoughts and open the drain a little bit on the anger and resentment that’s building up,” she says.

4. When forgiveness feels like surrender

Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding Isaac encounters is the belief that to forgive is to forget — to lower your guard, drop your limits, and silently signal that what happened was somehow acceptable.

It isn’t. And God himself doesn’t model it that way.

“God doesn’t call us to forgive and forget,” she says. “Yes, he calls us to forgiveness — but so that we get unstuck and can move towards meaningfulness and intimacy and virtue.”

This circles back to our earlier discussion of the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is about freeing yourself from your desire to hurt the person who hurt you. That desire for retribution is replaced by a desire for the other person’s well-being.

But here’s the key: wanting the other person to be well doesn’t mean letting them off the hook. Instead, it means helping them, when possible, to take accountability for their actions. That’s the only way they will find healing and wholeness.

5. When the hurt keeps happening

In Matthew 18:21-22, Jesus tells Peter to forgive others not just seven times, but “seventy times seven” (or seventy-seven times, depending on the translation).

This can be misinterpreted, though. Jesus isn’t asking us to give the other person permission to keep hurting us over and over. Remember, forgiveness only requires us to let go of our impulse to hurt the other person back.

“Forgiveness is not wishing that person ill,” Isaac says. “But I’m also not going to let you keep treating me that way.”

That might mean requiring certain conditions for the relationship to continue, significantly reducing contact, or in some cases ending the relationship altogether.

These actions could be retaliatory if your reason for taking them is to punish or hurt the other person. But healthy boundaries are sometimes necessary not only for your own well-being but for the other person’s as well. Placing limits on a relationship in order to prevent the other person from sinning against you is entirely consistent with forgiveness.

Isaac recalls working with a client whose husband was so persistently and intentionally harmful that no amount of good faith or effort on her part could change the dynamic.

“You can’t do anything with that, because he’s not willing to do the work it takes to be in a healthy relationship,” she says. “It’s not on her for walking away from that situation. That’s on him.”

Through all of it, Isaac encourages clients to bring God into the ongoing work of forgiveness — actively, not passively. She suggests praying along these lines: “Lord, what’s going to give me clarity? What’s going to help me move towards the healing that you want for me?”

Getting unstuck

Isaac’s clinical experience backs up the findings of the Harvard research on the benefits of forgiveness. When her clients stop giving resentment power over their choices, she says, real change tends to follow.

“Forgiveness opens that door to healthier relationship,” she says. “Forgiving and saying I’m not going to let this person have power over me and my actions definitely leads towards increased mental health.”

For more help working through the practical and spiritual dimensions of forgiveness, check out Dr. Greg Popcak’s God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts! and Rachael Isaac’s digital journal Not Me First, But Me Too — a simple system for honoring your own needs without guilt. And for one-on-one support, reach out to Rachael Isaac or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Marriage Is About So Much More Than “Who’s the Boss?”

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Mary Beth’s husband is, by most measures, a good man: hardworking, generous, and devoted to his family.

“But there’s another side of him that I’m struggling with,” she wrote in an email to the More2Life radio show hosted by Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak. “Whenever I or one of the kids tries to raise a concern or if I gently suggest that he could have handled a situation differently, he explodes. He accuses me of disrespecting him, of trying to take over, of not honoring him as the head of the family. The conversation stops being about whatever the actual issue was and becomes about defending himself.”

Friends in her Bible study suggested that she stop criticizing him. “I don’t want to criticize him,” her letter continued. “I want to connect with him. But I’m starting to shut down emotionally and I don’t know how to reach him without setting him off. Is there a loving way forward here, or am I the problem?”

‘Be Subject to One Another’

The problem isn’t with Mary Beth, but with some common misunderstandings about what it means to be “head of the family” — and what true love really looks like.

A recent study found that 31 percent of Gen Z men — double the rate of boomers — believe wives should obey their husbands in all things. The trend may be connected with the wider movement to get back to more “traditional” values.

Among Christians, the belief that wives should submit to their husbands in all things often has its roots in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.  Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior” (5:21-23).

But the way that passage is sometimes interpreted is more idolatrous than Christian, the Popcaks said in their response to Mary Beth.

“Headship is not about bossing your wife and kids around,” Dr. Popcak said. “It’s about setting the tone for service and spirituality in the home.”

To understand what genuine headship looks like, Dr. Popcak suggests looking to the role of the priest at Mass. The priest doesn’t dictate to the congregation — he presides in a way that makes the ordinary holy and draws everyone into a deeper relationship with God.

“The pagan vision of headship is autocratic and top-down: do what I say,” Dr. Popcak said. “The Christian vision is really liturgical. It’s about facilitating encounters with Christ in my home, making the faith the source of the warmth in my home, and being the servant leader who shows my family what it means to live sacrificial love.”

This isn’t a new idea. St. John Paul II offers a similar understanding in Familiaris Consortio: “Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: ‘You are not her master,’ writes St. Ambrose, ‘but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave, but your wife…. Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love’” (#25).

And the pope was even more direct in his Theology of the Body catechesis on Ephesians 5:21-23: “The mutual relations of husband and wife should flow from their common relationship with Christ,” the pope said. “Love excludes every kind of subjection whereby the wife might become a servant or a slave of the husband, an object of unilateral domination.”

Real Love Works for the Good of the Other

What does this mean for someone like Mary Beth? When Dr. and Lisa Popcak addressed her question on air, they affirmed her desire for a “loving way forward,” but with some important clarifications.

First, Dr. Popcak explained that as much as her husband may mean well, he “learned growing up that it wasn’t okay to ever be wrong.” As a result, rather than using spiritual resources for the good of the family, he used them to defend himself.

Second, the Popcaks pointed out that accommodating his woundedness wasn’t really loving him. Real love means working for the good of the other, and in this case, that means inviting him to grow in wholeness and holiness.

Dr. Popcak suggested a basic script for that message: “I love you and I realize you’re trying to do your best. I’m not the enemy here, and neither are the kids. But you’re treating us like we are. And I love you too much to let that go on any longer…. So either we can work this out, you and I, or we can work this out with a counselor, but we’re going to work it out because I love you too much to let this continue any longer because it’s poisoning the family.”

That’s not necessarily an easy or comfortable conversation. Dr. Popcak said that many of his clients veer away from such a direct, honest call to conversion. But that’s a mistake.

As Lisa Popcak put it: “Saying ‘I just wish you’d stop’ is not prophetic. It doesn’t lead to anything. It doesn’t come from a place of godly strength.”

The message has to be clear—and it has to come from love, not fear.

What True Headship Looks Like

The sort of headship that demands “submission in all things” is more akin to idolatry than genuine fidelity to the Gospel. For husbands genuinely trying to lead their families well, Dr. Popcak offers the following advice.

  •  Lead toward Christ, not toward yourself. Your role is to draw your wife and children into a deeper relationship with God. When you position yourself as the one everyone must tiptoe around, you’ve made yourself the center rather than Christ.
  •  Facilitate, don’t dictate. “If you’re the chairman of the board, you don’t dictate the agenda,” Dr. Popcak said. “You facilitate the conversation by which decisions happen together.”
  • Take point in the spiritual life of the home. Initiate family prayer, lead conversations of depth, and model sacrificial service — don’t wait for your wife to carry the spiritual weight of the household.
  •  Welcome correction. A man secure in his identity as a beloved son of God doesn’t need to be right all the time. When his wife or children say that something hurt them, his first response is humility — not defense.

The Catholic vision of the family roots the relationship between the spouses in their mutual obedience to Christ. Fulfilling that vision doesn’t diminish either spouse’s authority, but roots it in Christ. When both spouses understand that they are called to mutual submission, mutual service, and mutual love, their marriage can become what it was always meant to be: a living sign of Christ’s love for his Church.

For more on leading your family with sacrificial love, check out Dr. Greg Popcak’s book The Be-DAD-itudes: 8 Ways to Be an Awesome Dad. And for one-on-one support with difficult marriage dynamics, reach out to the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.