What Healthy Couples Know That You Don't: Relationship Advice and Respect

Divorce is letting the obstacles pile up to create a grand canyon of distance. Nobody lives in a paradise of love & agreement. If they do it's still the beginnings or it's a false reality where one person is swallowing too much or withholding who they really are. Loving enjoyment of each other combined with disagreement or conflict are both natural, ordinary patterns of being together.

Attachment theory is important because it's going to help you to understand your own relationships. Information is power and recognizing yourself in one of these attachment styles could really improve your future. If your parenting was unpredictable in childhood you might develop into an anxious attacher or also called angry & ambivalent; a clutching to get what you want. If you were ignored early in life you become an avoider or distancer because they learned they have to depend on themselves. The best attachers are secure, and so they don't react so impulsively. Interview with Annie Chen.

Ross Rosenberg is important because he gave us a new way to think about codependency as self love deficient. He also explains why so many codependent people are addicted to being with the wrong partner, are afraid to be alone & often hook up with narcissists. He offers observe/ don't absorb as a technique to change & grow.

When you are trapped together it can be easy to get stuck in obsessing about all the negatives that annoy you. Our brains love to hang onto negativity. Sometimes people miss that heady excitement of being in love which is different from actually living with love. Living with love means the work of acceptance. Acceptance of the annoyances because you are well aware of how annoying you are as well.

Relationships so easily end up in feeling critical of your partner or annoyed, that's because living together exposes us to the other person's dark side. Our brains encourage us to indulge our negativity. Add to that any resentments that have silently piled up which will feed stinginess. The resentments lie waiting in the dark to whack your partner off at the knees.

Marriage is work because it's a very tricky business for a marriage to get things right for BOTH people. That's why marriage is hard work. The movie A Marriage Story gets a lot of things right. You watch how both Charlie & Nicole have responsibility for the demise of the marriage. Charlie is someone who takes up most of the space & Nicole allows it to happen.

Safety is a way we lie to ourselves about what will work to have a better life & better relationships. We clutch at believing it is safer to avoid talking about problems with our partners. Choices made for safety are always choices made out of fear. Safety is about the false comfort that false beliefs offer.

Babies arriving home, don't have to erase relationships. We all love babies, they are so great and they're so wonderful. They're also tiny bloodsuckers that demand enormous time and energy from parents. My guest today is Joni Parthemer who is going to share her ideas of how to prevent the parents' relationship from disappearing.

Choices define our lives & our relationships. Many of the choices we make are done without thinking or awareness because they are habits. What makes you more mentally healthy is being aware of having choices and making them. Listen & learn what choices will improve your relationship.

Addiction recovery is too often only focused on the individual. There is an 8 year study that confirms greater recovery success when the relationship is intact & strong. The relationship needs to grow & do the opposite of Claudia Black's active addiction pattern "Don't Talk, Don't Trust, Don't Feel". Couples can learn to practice expressing thoughts & feelings with each other.

Sex life Boost is something everybody can benefit from. It's too easy to let desire fade away. Listen to learn how to restore vitality. Novelty doesn't work. This interview with Stephen Snyder is really important to finding the energy to make your sex life matter.

Disappointment can be dangerous to relationships. We, as human beings can be very irrational when it comes to disappointment. We nurse our disappointments & they grow to take up too much real estate inside of us. Feelings are important to know who you are & how you are unique. Feelings are also often exaggerated & most often selfish. Learning to balance your feelings by thinking things through is a great goal to improve relationships.

Communication can be almost impossible with a partner if we only want to steer the story in our favor. Communication requires an openness to the validity of someone else's story even if you don't like it. Communication gets unstuck & we can communicate better when you are able to let two opposite things be true at the same time and let them sit quietly next to each other instead of trying to get one to win and erase the other.

Anger can be a huge problem in relationships. This episode asks what's important about anger management for relationships? Anger can be incredibly self absorbed & ugly. It's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of "I'm right" & needing to win. We all want the power to control & be the Top Dog. So listen to this episode to learn how to reign it in. Interview with Matthew Plotner.

Infidelity is complicated & difficult to heal from. Dr Spring wrote the first book that defines infidelity as a loss of trust & a shattering of the self. The person who has been betrayed struggles to recapture their sense of themselves. The partner who had the affair needs to listen non-defensively, without interruption to the profound level of hurt. Quick apologies are not going to solve this for the person who is hurt & feels their life has blown up. Listen to learn what does work.

Date to learn more about yourself. Don't stay in the safety of passivity, watching who they are. Dates can be practice to grow. Think of "every intimate partnership as a classroom in which I can learn again and again about myself, about commitment, about integrity, about authenticity, forgiveness & about apology." Quote & Interview with Dr.Solomon

Misery can so easily build in any relationship. Misery zaps your energy to think & it's easy to indulge your sad feelings. The two of you as a couple can fall to the bottom of your priority list. The misery usually spills over into bickering & fighting with each other because we don't kick the neighbor's dog, we kick each other.

Learn how fights can be turned into recovery and intimate conversations. In your fighting there are clues to what you are really suffering from that you have not been able to confide in your partner. Interview with Dan Wile who says "The heart of a couple relationship is saying what you need to say & feeling that it has gotten across. It is having conversations that work out."

There are many lopsided relationships where one person is catered to & the other partner is what I call overly generous. Partners like to be the nice one but getting stuck in the niceness can evolve into a giant hidden pile of resentments. There is a price to be paid for too much kindness, you can lose track of who you are because you are so busy pleasing others.

Sexuality can be a complicated business, very different from how easy it is on television. Interview with Emily Nagoski the author of Come As You Are. Find out what to do about low desire. Most problems with orgasm occur because frustration does not add fuel to the accelerator. In fact, Frustration hits the brakes in sex. Learn here how to improve your context to improve desire.

Love matters so much to people, how it goes wrong & how to put it right. Emotionally Focused Therapy is based on thousands of studies on human attachment, it basically gives us a way of understanding love. It's scary to reach for your partner and expose your softer feelings, because we're all scared of rejection and that's not because we're wimps or immature. It's because we're bonding mammals and our brains are wired to see cues of abandonment and rejection from the people we care about as danger cues, which makes it really difficult for people to be authentic in relationships.

Codependency is a murky business. Codependency is always a part of the beginnings of every love affair. The beginnings are so enchanting for all of us. Your partner can do no wrong, they are absolutely brilliant. Codependency is a part of love & yet it can swallow love whole & make it disappear. Emotional dependency can be a healthy activity & a part of a healthy relationship as long as both partners are still individuals.

Partnerships & Marriage really require a lot from both people. Partnership demands that both people share their points of view & that we must reshape our own personal reality to be more accurate. This is truly very hard work because part of being human is favoring our own point of view. Yet, deep inside we know a single narrative cannot contain anything as complex as the truth.

A Top Dog relationship means you participate in a hierarchy of power by either swallowing & ignoring your more authentic self or by enjoying the role of being manipulatively in charge with your demands being met. The narrative of every couple must be written by two people, not one to have authenticity.

It's so easy to start taking each other for granted. We develop habits of how we see each other & we make assumptions instead of being curious. When we don't feel seen it's really a big deal & we end up hungry. This definitely happens as the years pass & it's your job to freshen things up. It is beyond foolish to imagine you will never be disappointed in your partner because they are so wonderful & you miss being saturated in romantic love. We all have ideas of who we want to be & who we expect our loved ones to be. But that's just it; they are only ideas, mostly built on fantasies & illusions.

Couples stuck in ambivalence are secretly in love with maintaining the status quo. Not being wholehearted about either improvement or leaving, erases so many missed opportunities. Living with a constant level of unhappiness and resentments is like living with malaria. You can do the work to repair & restore vitality to your relationship. Listen for 11 things you can do.

Power struggles in relationships are totally ordinary & daily. Things can work in a couple where power is somewhat lopsided, but it will be boring & predictable if one person has all the power to make decisions most of the time. Sharing power is a dance in the messiness that is worth it to reduce arguments & fighting.

Too many relationships have an over developed sense of the critic, was pointed out in this interview with Dr. Joseph Melnick. It's easy to blame & tell people what they're doing wrong. Instead of telling each other about what's wrong, we need to restore trust with a curiosity about each other. He describes what he calls "cardboard relationships" that are like paintings you don't look at any more. In the beginnings of relationships it's so easy to be open & experimental. Then couples seem to lose interest in each other because routines can be deadening. Staying together requires work & learning new skills, to understand how you stop being interested in your partner.

Being insecure is something everybody struggles with. Insecurities are easily fed by fears when we believe we are misunderstood. Being insecure tests even the best of us. Insecurities can keep people trapped in emotionally masochistic relationships. Facing how we are unlovable can help us grow & change.

We arrive in this world with very few skills to help us navigate relationships. It takes a few decades just to understand ourselves much less anybody else. I think long term loving requires that we give each other the benefit of the doubt. We all begin a bit too stingy & full of self interest.

As we live our lives, we all experience loss, change and transition. While we all know the grief associated with change, each grief looks and feels a little different. And, everyone grieves differently. As you work through the losses, changes and transitions in your life you'll find it's helpful to be patient and gentle with yourself, because it's not easy and it takes time. The face of hope may change as you grieve. Hold it in your heart; keep it alive because you won't always feel as bad as you do when your grief is fresh.

Interview with Dr. Patricia Papernow, in her fourth decade working with blended families. Blended families are complicated, where adults may be thrilled to find a new love, children may experience that as a turning away from them. Loyalty Binds can create problems, which may work out better with a slower pace.

Pornography Addiction has become a problem for many couples. It sets up unrealistic expectations that real life can't compete with. Porn addiction often becomes a powerful problem because it's easier than dealing with the messiness of human beings. Our brains love the pursuit of novelty which is available so immediately on the internet.

In relationships we take the easy way out a lot. We lie & tell people what they want to hear instead of truth. We silently stash resentments & get divorced. We decide sex is a chore we don't want to be bothered with. We dump our insecurities on each other to fix instead of fixing them ourselves. We let our anxieties run rampant & spill all over our partners instead of trying to learn how to self soothe. We tolerate disrespect & sometimes contempt instead of asking our partner to course correct. These are all negative patterns that lead to disconnection.

Personality Disorders are difficult in relationships because they have massive power through manipulation. So if you are in a relationship with a personality disorder, You must figure out how you give up your own power. You must learn how you participate in the dysfunction. It doesn't happen alone, it happens with you.

Boring relationships sneak upon us. It's easy to make excuses, we're too tired after work or busy with the kids. Relationships require work to keep them fresh. You have to be committed to trying new things out. The opposite of boring is being creative.The brain loves novelty so it's really important to explore & experience something new.

Trust means we give up our inclination to exaggerate our wounds out of self interest. We can be very self righteous which creates a distorted picture of what happened. We harden ourselves & adore our own expectations of how things should be in a relationship. The opposite of all this disconnecting energy is to soften and imagine the value of your partner's point of view.

Interview with Marcia Turbiner Ph.D who describes the need to have a relationship with yourself in order to make relationships work. She offers a way to think about what is NOT ME and what is ME. You have to begin to understand how to take care of yourself to develop a solid sense of self. When you see yourself as an individual you will see the other more clearly.

Learn how to think about your relationship in 3 parts, why blame is immature and why being a separate individual keeps a partnership more solid. Consider how sacrifice, respect, going to bed angry and not playing games is crucial for relationship longevity.

Too many people live with contempt in their relationships. Contempt is a power play that leads to loneliness. When ugliness layers & layers over time it becomes ordinary. When contempt is an ordinary activity instead of an unusual one, that's a BIG problem. Contempt is a tango for two.

If you are too lopsided in people-pleasing it will lead you to erase too much of who you are and what you want, this will begin the silent path of stock piling resentments. It's important to the health of the relationship to tell the truth to each other.

Relationships all begin with fantasy & illusions. We have absolutely no idea who somebody else really is but we make it up because we are in love. Fantasy is a flimsy beginning & contentment can be hard to achieve.

Anger soaked in alcohol or contempt can easily destroy relationships. Anger management is a tough skill to learn instead of the ease of blame. Learn here how to interrupt anger to have a healthy relationship.

Relationships require a lot of growing up, a lot of facing your own dark side. Facing hard realities helps relationships. I believe real love is about deciding to do the work of being a better person, to risk change. It is not possible to grow & be comfortable at the same time. If you embrace change you have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

0000007F 0000007E 00001AEB 00001B10 000011A7 000011A7 00007DAE 00007E62 00003697 00003697 Everyone arrives at couples therapy talking about Communication Problems?? What lies beneath communication problems in relationships? Listen here to learn more.

Dating is often painful because the person who loves the least has the most power. Are you overly generous? Listen to learn about relationships that are too lopsided.

Relationship survival is something people should be able to learn more about in College. It's one of the best parts of life, yet it is a mystery to most people. Listen to learn the primary secret to success!

Couples have to evolve over time. Evolving as a Team means that the two of you together solve the puzzle of your strengths & weaknesses & how they can work together. Of all the Couples you know, how many are actually a team?

What can help with the annoyances over differences when love & idealization wear off? You have to learn to respect the differences which is work, instead of pretending things aren’t that bad. Read more at: therapy ideas.net

Drama is about manipulation. Manipulation is about winning, not truth. The brilliance of O.J’s lawyers was all about flipping him from the persecutor into the blameless victim & asking the jury to rescue him which is illustrated in the fine FX show.