Episode 143— Marty Witzel— Personal Growth, No Regrets.

Stacked Keys Podcast

We talk relationships, life, fostering healthy families and how complicated that life can be on the day to day. See things from a different lens and navigate through the bumps.Meet Marty Witzel. She’s spiritually led and someone who cares deeply about the relationships around her. Deciding to be really intentional in relationships and her job as a therapist is a natural mix. Her background was teaching in education and as a military family, they moved a good bit. She launched back into her education and found herself in the field of counseling.Marty says that she and Joel were always really intentional about their marriage and so from the beginning they established kids or no kids, that they were a family, and that having a really strong marriage was key to even having a family and then raising children.She wishes she had known more. “Oh, I just think there's lots of areas where mothering and parenting is so hard and so challenging, which is okay, because there are moments in my practice where I'm able to just say, hey, I didn't get it. All right? I really didn't. I missed the mark in some areas, which, yeah, probably just communication or sexuality and talking to my kids about sex probably could have done that better. Way better. Yeah, just navigating sort of the teenage years wasn't horrible, but it was hard. And I think to be in this season, too, now of adult parenting, which is its own unique part of the journey that I didn't anticipate. It's just really unique because we're all adults now, and so still being a mom and still caring for my kids, but they're in their own committed relationships.”We talk in this episode about work and life and how you find some balance. We discuss how therapy should not be the last resort. “The statistic is that couples don't come into therapy until, like, six years after their problem. Marty’s encouragement would be this — “that you don't have to be in a place kind of in crisis by the time you're in crisis. What happens is that patterns are so instilled in how we're communicating, where we're trying to resolve conflict and then hurts build up. And then the more hurts that I have to help process through and undo makes my work really complicated.” This isn't a quick this isn't going to be a quick fix. Like, I guess my advice would be, man, if you find yourself at all uncertain and you are either asking people around you or you've read a book or about communicating and you're still in some of that, like, we're not really still quite resolving it. My encouragement would be to see somebody, because then it could be just maybe we do four or five sessions together and we're able to fix it when it's a much smaller problem than years of hurt and people get pushed away and then betrayal.”This conversation has many elements that you will find hitting at different levels because of life experiences. We talk about peace and how to navigate that and at the end of the day you have to lay your head down at night. We talk about the hard stories and compassion fatigue and managing the tenderness and not taking too much emotionally on. Marty talks about her perfect day—what is your perfect day?Tune in!!!Marty can be reached at North Family Counseling, Colorado Springs, Colorado.Music used by permission from artist Donica Knight Holdman and Jim Huff

Music "STOMP" used by permission of artist Donica Knight Holdman and Jim Huff