Breakup Toolkit 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 their faults to blaming yourself. You may come to wonder what your future will…
Do I Want to be in This Relationship? Part II In my last blog entry I talked about how to use your vision for your future as modified by the reality of a prospective partner to discern whether you would like to choose to continue a relationship. In this entry I will take a more…
Do I want to be in this relationship? Part I When to get into or whether to stay in a relationship or leave can be one of the biggest decisions in life. I have two discernment conversations that I often have with clients when this conversation arises in therapy. The first, and the topic of…
From “one true love” to “happily ever after” we are inundated with images and storylines about love that don’t quite fit our experiences. Those stories can sometimes create expectations which cause us to be confused or dissatisfied with the reality of our relationships even when the reality is positive. Self-help books, family advice, and people…
Two years after I bought my car it started exhibiting some eccentricities. Sometimes, when stopped, the RPMs will spike above 2000. To stop this, with on foot on the brake, I put the car into gear and gently let out the clutch until the gears engage just enough to temper the RPMs back down to…
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…
One of the most common things that I teach members of my couples 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. As a therapist…
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…
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…