Couples Coping with COVID-19 I’ve already heard couples complain: “I can’t believe we’ve only been quarantined for two days and I already can’t stand being with my partner.” “I’m glad that we’re together, but we’ve been so distant for so long that I’m not sure what this is going to be like.” “Either being quarantined…
Befriending the Dragon: Decreasing Relationship Reactivity In attempting to help clients figure out how to decrease relationship reactivity during their relationships, I’ve come up with a metaphor that helps people begin practicing a more confident and peaceful responses. Before I get to that, I’ll describe high reactivity through the same metaphor. Imagine that your partner…
The most common presenting issue I hear is a need for “communication skills,” aka arguments. From my perspective, having done this work for a number of years, is that communication problems are often a result of attachment challenges. That is, the couple is caught in a dance that reflects their individual attachment styles. While there…
Frequently, clients ask for help with their anger. I specialize in relationship and sexual issues, so the context of this request frequently includes anger in a relationship. For that reason, I’ve decided to share a couple of my thoughts about different types of anger in relationships. Before I go into this discussion, I want to…
Breakup Toolkit No one sat you down and taught you how to get over a breakup. At the end of a relationship, the routine of your life and the social circle that you built around the relationship are suddenly disrupted. Your thoughts can rapidly cycle back and forth between blaming your partner for all of…
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…