For years, I’ve been using this analogy to help my clients understand the difference between having unhealed and healed trauma. I will bring this analogy up when I want to respond to a client who states that no amount of healing will eliminate the pain from their biography. Though true, that perspective doesn’t take some…
While equality in a relationship has a high value, sometimes manifesting equality around certain issues or decisions can feel impossible. For example, who gets to decide whether I take this promotion at work or not? The decision might affect everyone in the relationship, but do both really get an equal say about which job one…
Empathy in Couples Therapy One of the most common things that I teach in couples therapy is how to be empathic towards each other. Once I help a couple establish an empathic connection, most of the other challenges are relatively easy to solve because empathy makes solutions much easier to find and put into practice.…
Relationship Empathy I’m going to go into a deeper description about relationship 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 emotions and (2) to demonstrate an emotional response that indicates a caring connection with…
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…
5 Argument Ending Sentences 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 a close relationship start hurting each other in unconscious ways and can’t stop. The efforts they take to stop the pain unwittingly perpetuate 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 Are Good Relationship Boundaries? 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 others with “poor” boundaries take advantage of others. Yet having “good” boundaries doesn’t just mean the opposite of those behaviors.…
Couples have many complaints about their relationship communication. One common one is that their partner is making a mountain out of a molehill. This is usually 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…