The 30-something licensed professional counselor noticed a trend: people with marriage problems were flooding her practice. Debra Fileta, M.A., L.P.C., found she enjoyed the dynamics of working with couples, which led her to begin writing articles for Christians about some common relationship issues she sees. Her website, truelovedates.com, started to gain momentum as she addressed topics like toxic relationships that had been previously overlooked.

“It took off like I would never have imagined,” she said. “We had hundreds of thousands of views in a couple of months. People were hungry for information, practical truth rooted in God’s word, to help relationships be better.” True love dates offers blog posts, podcasts, downloadables, and streaming videos full of relationship advice for being single, dating, and marriage.

She notes that at least 50% of her blog audience is male, a fact she attributes to her inclusion of scientific research, statisics and polls. “Men are looking for information about relationships, too. People resonate with a message coming from a licensed counselor,” Debra said.

She shares the information she teaches couples in her office in her 2018 book, Choosing Marriage, Why It Has to Start with We > Me, which unpacks choices someone can make today to impact their marriage tomorrow. Choosing Marriage has also been formatted into into a free online study available on Right Now Media. Download questions to jumpstart conversations here.

“Our marriage is the most important ministry we have. What are we learning to stay connected and in touch? What are we lacking?” She recommends two important weekly habits couples practice: opportunity for fun, and time for work, which sets the stage for fun. She models the process in her own personal life with her husband as they juggle busy work schedules while raising four young children.

“My husband’s phone alarm goes off every Sunday night, and we sit down to check in on what we need to talk about, our anxiety, stress, struggles, sins. It’s a business meeting.”

Love in Every Season

In another book, Love in Every Season: Understanding the Four Stages of Every Healthy Relationship, Debra references nature’s seasons to describe how to cultivate a fruitful relationship in each season of marriage. She believes the principles apply to anyone, as the content guides people through the strengths and pitfalls of each stage.

In Spring, attraction is high, things are blossoming, and people are planting the seeds of faith and friendship, she said.

Things heat up in summer. As you shed your layers and become more intimate, you reveal more of who you are emotionally, spiritually, and physically. This season is the time to build healthy emotional and spiritual intimacy, she said.

Autumn is the season where true colors start to shine through, leaves start to fall, and there’s nowhere left to hide. Now that people realize who the other really is and recognize things they don’t like, it’s the season of conflict. Debra addresses communication and ways to navigate conflict in a healthy way in this section.

The infatuation of spring cools down in winter. It can be a beautiful season of comfort and familiarity, but beware the frost of apathy, which Debra counts as “the number one danger plaguing marriages.” Frost becomes threatening when we ignore it. People begin to put their marriage on cruise control and not invest much into it.The relationship can freeze over, grow cold and numb.

Just because a couple has been married for a while does not mean they are stuck in a winter marriage. Debra envisions the process as cyclical, with opportunities to return to the spring of new growth and excitement.

“When you use the winter to plant the right seeds, you can cycle through to spring again. You can pick up new skills and qualities,” Debra said. “I have seen some couples in their 70s in the heat of summer again.”

The important thing is to do the work in each season so your reward will be the fruit of a healthy relationship – not just to enjoy for yourself, but to reflect God to the world.

The natural trajectory of marriage is to drift apart as our lives get busy with schedules, kids, and ministry, Debra says. If we are not intentional to stay connected, we’re going to drift. People tend to be passive about their relationships.

“If we took this approach into our work, we would be jobless!” she said. “You don’t go to the Olympics and compete for the first time – you train. If marriage is the main event, what do we do to practice and train and grow?” she asked.

Debra pointed out the amount of training it takes to earn a counseling or even a driver’s license. “Marriage licenses are given out with zero training, zero knowledge. Somehow we think we are just going to be good at it because we’re Christians.”

The key is instead to be intentional and deliberate. A healthy marriage is something you build and create.

Debra has found in her counseling practice and interaction with those who visit truelovedates.com that doing the work of relationships also involves addressing deeper issues with which people struggle personally.

“If a couple is having problems, we can approach it with superficial tactics – communication, skills to help with intimacy. But if there are roots that run deeper — insecurities, anxiety, past problems, deeper issues most of us have, the superficial work is going to act as a Band-Aid for a while, then we’ll default right back to unhealthy patterns. I think the first step is to back up and find out where the responses and reactions are rooted,” Debra said.

She remembers a couple who came to her practice for help with the husband’s anger problem that was said to be triggered by his wife’s nagging. In their pattern, even a seemingly small comment would cause him to explode verbally. Debra asked the husband to identify the emotional response he felt when his wife would “nag” him. He said it made him feel like nothing he ever did was good enough. As Debra probed more deeply, he mentioned how his father, whom he hadn’t seen since he was 16 years old, always made him feel wrong and insignificant growing up. This big, muscular, tattooed, bald man began to weep in her office.

“His wife was shocked. Her ‘nagging’ pressed up against a sore spot she didn’t even know he had. Once they addressed the roots of his problem, they were able to make significant progress,” Debra said.

People need to assess how they are doing mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually to heal those wounds so they don’t keep coming up in their marriages, and to recognize when they do something inappropriate and take responsibility for their words and actions. Debra works to help people live in a healthy way instead of emotionally exploding and ransacking relationships.

Balanced emotional health is especially important now, as many people have experienced increased stress levels and trauma over the past 18 months.

Are You OK?

In May, Debra launched her fourth book: Are You Really Ok?: Getting Real About Who You Are, How You’re Doing, and Why It Matters.

She notes this title has been the most popular of all.

“If I had to recommend one book other than the Bible, this would be the one. The message is for everyone,” she said. “Just because you are a Christian doesn’t mean you are healthy. Coming to Jesus saves our souls, it doesn’t change how we do relationships. We come to Jesus and think that all our past trauma disappears. That’s not how it works.”

Social media has conditioned us to look perfect and “be good,” Debra said. “Jesus said, ‘I didn’t come for the healthy, I came for the sick.’ Not many of us want to acknowledge we are not the healthy.”

When people are healthy, they will engage in healthy relationships. Are You Really Ok? helps people take an audit of their personal emotional, spiritual, mental and physical health. It was not designed to be read in one sitting. The book takes people through an interactive process, with homework and exercises. Readers will create a timeline of significant events from childhood, take a stress inventory and rank stressors on a diagnostic scale, complete a psychological assessment, catalogue relationships to identify a core support group, and create a genogram listing family patterns from the past. Each chapter includes a short concluding check-up to quantify emotional response to the material.

Debra remarked on the number of clients she sees, “who are amazing people who are not really ok. So many are on a journey of depression, trauma, anxiety and loss.” She understands licensed counselors themselves aren’t immune to emotional and mental health struggles. “So often in the church we focus on spiritual health and miss emotional and mental health. Jesus says to ‘love with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.’ That encompasses emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health.”

She’s been impressed with millennials and the work they’re willing to put in to take ownership of getting healthy. “One group of people will read the title, Are You Really Okay?, and think, ‘I’m not sure. I need to dig deeper.’ The other response is,‘Yeah I’m good, I’m fine.’ The first response is more healthy,” she said. “If you are not working on something, you are moving backward without even realizing it.”

To decrease the stigma around these types of conversations, Debra launched a series of Are You Really Ok? podcasts featuring well-known Christian leaders and teachers like Matt Chandler, Jeremy Camp and Natalie Grant. “We wanted to give people permission to talk about how they are really doing and find steps to get better,” Debra said.

They turned out to be “live therapy on air. I had some amazing men and women step up. Each one took a different focus — grief, depression, suicidal thoughts. Each person had some area of struggle.” Matt Chandler talked about ignored wounds from childhood. Jeremy Camp opened up about panic attacks.

Sometimes people in the church think they have to be so toxically optimistic and always look on the bright side so much they don’t give themselves space to breathe and process, Debra said. “Jesus felt and expressed 39 emotions in the Bible. It is not spiritual to pretend that everything is always ok.

“If we don’t deal with stress and pressures in a healthy way, the emotional response will find a path of least resistance to explode outward. This evidences itself in addiction, emotional affairs, depression, anxiety. We need to learn how to interact out of health.”

Debra felt the Lord impressed a message on her heart that if she wanted to make a dent in the divorce rate, she needed to start getting singles healthy. “Singles don’t stay single,” she said. “They come to the ministry for relationship advice, then start dating, get engaged and married.”

Debra took the lessons in Are You Really OK? and applied them to dating relationships in her digital course, 21 Days to Jumpstart Your Love Life. The course helps singles begin to get healthy from the inside out, unpack their baggage and assess what they bring to a relationship.

She’s found people tend to take relationships so seriously they become paralyzed and unable to make decisions, even to invite someone for coffee. “They engage with fear when it comes to relationships. There’s fear of mistakes, fear of rejection, fear of choosing the wrong person,” she said. One of the homework assignments in Are You Really Ok? is to ask someone out on a date. Another is to invite marriage mentors into their lives. She noticed so many singles are active in their careers but passive in their love lives. “They put so much work, effort and prayer into ministry, education and career. Your relationship is one of the most significant things that will impact your life. I’m challenging singles to put effort into that work and become an active participant in their love lives.”

She describes the course as a “21-day program that has the power to change hearts, lives, and relationships.” Each morning, participants receive one devotional-style lesson in their inbox and a daily prayer focus. A 50-page downloadable workbook guides in the process of reflection, setting practical goals, and taking next steps. Also included on day 21, a 30-minute podcast of Debra and her husband’s personal story, as well as access to a private Facebook page where singles taking the course can connect and encourage each other and interact with Debra.

Lessons from the 21 Days include topics such as:

• The Top Relationship Mistakes

• Dealing with Your Past

• The Person You Never Thought You Would Date

• A Vision for Your Future

• Wait on God, or Date?

• Implementing Healthy Boundaries

• How to Know What You Want in a Relationship

• The Best Lovers Start as Friends

• How to Actually Get a Date

• Got History? An Analysis of Your Past Relationships

• The Ultimate First Date

• To Date (Online) or Not to Date (Online)

Next up for Debra, she’s co-authored a book called Married Sex with Gary Thomas addressing intimacy for married couples. She believes she and Gary will bring unique strengths and expertise to the curriculum. She’s a female in her 30s, he’s a male in his 50s. She’s a licensed counselor, he’s a pastor, but both have extensive experience helping couples with relationships.

People can’t just Google the topic when they are struggling, she said. “This will be a remarkable, extensive resource on all things sex and intimacy in marriage that combines theology and psychology.” The two also will collaborate in October 2021 with a corresponding Married Sex online conference.

Find more inspiration and resources including testimonies from couples and trusted professionals, marriage events, date night suggestions, and more.