Emotional Relationships Need Empathy I’m going to go into a deeper description about empathy in a subsequent post but for now I’m going to identify that the keys to expressing empathy are (1) to demonstrate acceptance of the other person’s experience and (2) to demonstrate an emotional response that indicates a caring connection with the…
In my last blog post I presented 6 Essential Facts about emotions. These were intended to set the stage for this more advanced review of the role of emotions in relationships and how understanding emotions can help a relationship improve. Emotions are created by our perceptions and interpretations Most of our emotional reactions are significantly…
People have emotions. Yet we receive very little education about our emotions, how they work, or how to manage them in this culture. So, as I work with clients I’m often conducting a certain about of education about the nature of emotions. This is especially true when I’m working with a couple because the currency…
Many of the negative emotional and communication cycles that I see when couples come to me can be summed up very simply. Two people who come into close relationship, start hurting each other in unconscious ways, and can’t stop. The efforts they take to stop the pain unwittingly perpetuate the pain cycle, and so the…
As a therapist, I often find that questions are a more powerful tool than statements because questions allow us to discover what we don’t yet know. So, questions help clients learn more than me telling them things. In this blog entry I’m going to present and briefly describe some of the most common and powerful…
What Does “Good Boundaries” Mean Anyway? It is almost cliché to say that mature people have “good boundaries”. But what does that even mean? Some people with “poor” boundaries let others take advantage of them, while other “poor” boundaried people take advantage of others. Yet having “good” boundaries doesn’t just mean the opposite of those…
Sometimes I hear from one member of a couple that their partner is making a mountain out of a mole hill. This usually is said dismissively. A justification is then given to cast the partner as unreasonable. I’m going to review some of those reasons in brief, refute each of them, and end with a…
When prior couples therapy failed and I am the next therapist, it is a different situation than when someone comes to me for individual therapy after prior individual therapy failed. While many therapists helping individuals have a specific therapeutic orientation (e.g., CBT or psychodynamic), there are few couples therapists who work exclusively in one model.…
I have enjoyed celebrating successful completion of treatment with several clients who had been in therapy previously but who had not found success in that therapy. In this post, I’m going to describe what I do differently when a client comes to me for treatment after prior therapy has not been successful. I’m dividing this…
Though the lament of the challenge of work-life balance is heard throughout the United States at this time, I feel that Silicon Valley has a particularly intense case of this affliction. Where start-ups are rampant and two or three year old companies are bought for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the number of…