"10 Lifesaving Principles for Women in Difficult Marriages"

If you're in a difficult marriage -- or know someone who is -- Karla Downing's 10 Lifesaving Principles for Women in Difficult Marriages -- is a gift from heaven.

Here's a summary of the 10 principles found on Karla's website:

Overwhelmed in their difficult marriages, Christian women often react in ways that make their problems worse and even prevent change out of confusion, misinformation, denial, anger, and fear. They usually find themselves too afraid to apply tough love, even if they are convinced they should. They are often given simplistic advice like “love your husband,” which increases their guilt and isolation. I struggled for twenty years in my difficult marriage until I learned how to apply these lifesaving principles. As a Christian support group leader, speaker, writer, counselor, and mentor, I have shared them with other women and seen their lives and marriages change. My book provides tools that are scriptural and practical to enable women to handle the variety of complex emotions and situations they are faced with.

1. Understand Scriptural Truths. Examines common misconceptions about submission, rights, respect, gentleness, perseverance, forgiveness, keeping the peace, and divorce.
2. Reach Out. Encourages women to reach out for support in a variety of ways, including counseling, support groups, friends, family, and by becoming informed about the problems you are dealing with.
3. Change Yourself, Not Him. Provides ideas for taking the focus off changing their husbands and onto changing themselves.
4. Detach with Love. Explains how women stop enabling while treating their husbands with kindness and compassion and detaching from their anger, moods, threats, arguments, blame, and crises.
5. Nurture Yourself. Suggests ideas for how women can take care of their emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental needs.
6. Face Your Fears. Describes specific fears women in difficult marriages deal with and how to face those fears by trusting God.
7. Speak the Truth in Love. Helps women admit the truth to themselves and then their husbands through loving confrontation.
8. Set Boundaries. Defines boundaries and lists specific considerations for setting boundaries in the areas of money, sex, relationships, addictions, abuse, affairs, separation, and divorce.
9. Make Your Children a Priority. Gives guidelines for meeting their children’s needs and handling discipline disagreements with their husbands.
10. Enter God’s Rest. After doing all they can, women enter God’s rest by letting Him heal, redeem, and restore their lives in His way and time.

Humbly ask God's wisdom and direction for applying His biblical principles to your marriage. He WILL answer!