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The Five Love Languages for Marriage Counseling

By Kevin Leapley, MA, LPC, CSAT on Saturday, November 1st, 2014 in Marriage Counseling. No Comments

Five Love Languages

Our Denver Marriage Counselors will often use the following Five Love Languages for helping clients strengthen their relationship:

The Five Love Languages (by Gary Chapman)

  1. Words of Affirmation
  2. Quality Time
  3. Receiving Gifts
  4. Acts of Service
  5. Physical Touch

Words of Affirmation:  Verbal compliments, or words of appreciation are powerful communicators of love.

  1. Encouraging Words: to inspire courage.
    1. Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse’s perspective.  What is important to your spouse?
  2. Kind Words: The way we speak.
    1. Love does not keep score. Leave failures of the past as history.  If you do, those are not words of love, but of bitterness, resentment and revenge.
  3. Humble Words:  Love makes requests and not demands.
    1. When you make a request of your spouse, you are affirming his or her worth and abilities.
    2. A request creates the possibility for an expression of love, whereas a demand suffocates that possibility.

Each spouse holds the key to changing the emotional climate of the marriage.  That key is to express verbal appreciation for the things you like about the other person and, for the moment, suspending your complaints about things you do not like.

Quality Time:  Giving your spouse undivided attention.

  1. Togetherness:  A central aspect of quality time is togetherness…not proximity.  Togetherness has to do with focused attention.
    1. It means doing something together and that you are giving your full attention to your spouse.
    2. The important thing is not the activity, but that you are spending focused time with each other.
    3. The activity is the vehicle to create a sense of togetherness.
  2. Quality Conversation: Sympathetic dialogue where spouses are sharing their experiences, thoughts, feelings, and desires in a friendly and uninterrupted context.
    1. Quality conversation focuses on what you are hearing.
  1. It means drawing your spouse out by listening sympathetically to what they have to say (validation – active listening).
  2. Maintain eye contact when your spouse is listening.
  • Don’t listen to your spouse and do something else at the same time.
  1. Listen for feelings (validate – paraphrase to ensure understanding).
  2. Observe body language (validate – clarify).
  3. Refuse to interrupt (don’t try and fix or analyze).
  4. Track emotions throughout the day and discuss with spouse.
  5. Based on our thoughts and emotions, we make decisions.
  1. Quality conversation includes not only sympathetic listening but also self-revelation.
  • Establish a daily dialogue about a minimum of three things that have happened during a day and how you thought and feel about them. Then discuss what the most satisfying thing about your relationship was that day.
  1. Quality Activities:  Includes anything in which one or both of you have an interest.
  1. Essential to quality activities is:
    1. At least one of you wants to do it.
    2. The other is willing to do it.
    3. Both of you know why you are doing it-to express love by being together.

 

Receiving Gifts:  Gifts are a symbol of love.

  1. If your spouse’s primary love language is receiving gifts, you can become a proficient gift giver.
    1. Be sensitive to what kind of gifts your spouse gets excited about.
    2. If your spouse has been critical of your gifts in the past, then their primary love language is probably not receiving gifts.  If they comment that you do not give me ___ anymore, than there is a good chance their primary love language is receiving gifts.
  1. Gifts:  Physical gifts.
  2. The gift of self: Physical presence in the time of stress or crisis is the most powerful gift you can give your spouse if their primary love language is receiving gifts.

 

Acts of Service:  Doing things you know your spouse would like you to do.

  1. Make a list of three or four “wishes” that you would really like to have your spouse do which would help you and show love.
  2. These are requests and not demands or criticisms.
    1. Love is a choice and cannot be coerced.
    2. A spouse’s criticism about your behavior is a clear clue to their primary love language.  Spouses tend to criticize most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.

 

Physical Touch:  Physical touch is a powerful vehicle for communicating marital love.

  1. Holding hands, kissing, embracing and sexual intercourse are all ways of communicating emotional love to one’s spouse.
  2. Different kinds of touching are different “dialects” of physical touch love language.
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Kevin Leapley, MA, LPC, CSAT

Sexual Addiction Therapist at Front Range Counseling Center
Kevin Leapley specializes in both marriage counseling and sexual addiction therapy for men. Kevin has received specialized training by Dr. Patrick Carnes and obtained his CSAT (Certified Sexual Addiction Therapist). Kevin has also received extensive training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and is a certified Emotionally Focused Therapist .
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