Will AI Hurt or Improve Communication in Relationships?A Couples Therapist Reflects I am a therapist with 15 years of experience providing couples therapy to couples in Silicon Valley. In engineering terms, I’m an expert at human-to-human user interface: communication. Because I’ve been centered in Silicon Valley my whole career, I’m also familiar with how one…
Eight Ways to Avoid Holiday Arguments and Keep the Peace Every holiday, all over social media, I see snarky posts about the yearly tradition of holiday arguments. Maybe it is no surprise then that right after New Year’s Day, couples therapist offices like mine are flooded with new clients seeking help for issues that came…
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…
How to Get Over Resentments Resentments can poison a relationship slowly over time. For that reason it is very important to remove past resentments and to stop the process that is creating new ones. Maybe it will come as no surprise that dealing with resentments is a common problem that I help with in couples…
How to Thank Your Partner Increasing expressions of appreciation in a relationship can help them repair old hurts and to create new connections. But especially in long-term relationships, a simple thank-you can sometimes fall flat. This post describes a simple way of expressing appreciation and three ways to deepen the practice. Appreciation for Behavior “Thank…
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…