Six Mistakes Couples Make That Lead to Infidelity

Ignoring partners needs and emotions and turning away from attempts to share or connect! In healthy interdependent relationships couples make constant requests for support, understanding, and connection. Gottman calls these “sliding glass door moments”, referring to the choice we always have to respond positively, or not, to the partner’s attempt to express feelings or a need, or to connect.

12 Ways to Respect Yourself

Self love is an essential element for living a positively present life, and self respect is a vital aspect of self love. The more you respect yourself, the more you are able to love yourself. However, self respect isn't always as easy to come by as you might think. There are a lot of aspects of life that can lure you away from respect. As much as you might want to treat yourself with respect, there are often outside influences that can get in the way of treating yourself honorably.

10 Principles of Success

I have learned from working with and observing hundreds of couples in my office & out in the world:

• You are not solely responsible for your partner's happiness. Everyone wants to be happy, but happiness will come and go. Successful couples learn to intentionally do things that will bring happiness back when life pulls it away.
• Couples discover the value in just showing up. When things get tough and couples don't know what to do, they need to hang in there and be there for their spouse. Time has a way of helping couples work things out by providing opportunities to reduce stress and overcome challenges.
• If you do what you always do, you will get same result. Wise couples have learned that you have to approach problems differently to get different results. Often, minor changes in approach, attitude and actions make the biggest difference in marriage.

How To Set Goals

You set your goals on a number of levels:

• First you create your "big picture" of what you want to do with your life (or over, say, the next 10 years), and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve.
• Then, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your lifetime goals.
• Finally, once you have your plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals.

Women & Body Image

Negative body image of women is a very hot topic these days! The female body image and what a person should or could look like in marketing and advertising in particular is a controversial issue. It is noticeable that the body size of women as portrayed in mass media has been steadily getting smaller. Marketers will often do anything that they can to sell a product and make a profit, and almost anything can be sold if it appeals to our sense of beauty or is considered attractive.

3 Principles of Guided Imagery

First of all, to the body, images created in the mind can be almost as real as actual, external events. The mind doesn't quite get the difference.

Body Image Of Women

Negative body image of women is a very hot topic these days! The female body image and what a person should or could look like in marketing and advertising in particular is a controversial issue. It is noticeable that the body size of women as portrayed in mass media has been steadily getting smaller. Marketers will often do anything that they can to sell a product and make a profit, and almost anything can be sold if it appeals to our sense of beauty or is considered attractive.

STOP THE EMOTIONAL REACTIVITY

Notice what sets you off. Determine if your feelings stem from within you or from external forces. For example, you may become agitated in loud, crowded places resulting in you taking your feelings out on others.

Emotional Reactivity

How wonderful it would be to be totally relaxed and comfortable when the most important person in your life is finding fault with you. How amazing it would be to let the critiques fly by and respond with only graciousness and dignity.

Overcoming Jealousy, and Control in Relationships

Overcoming jealousy is like changing any emotional reaction or behavior. It begins with awareness. Awareness allows you to see that the projected stories in your mind are not true. When you have this clarity you no longer react to the scenarios that your mind imagines.

Understanding Jealousy

First of all, you should be aware of what jealousy is in regards to romantic relationships. This type of jealousy is an emotion that can best be defined as negative thoughts, such as insecurities or anxieties, related to losing something of value. In this case, the “something of value” is a romantic partner. Jealousy can also be defined as an emotional reaction to a perceived threat.

Consciously Uncoupling

If you are in the process of separating, here are four steps to support you in finding the new beginning you and your family deserve.

Letting Your Partner In

As part of his research, Dr. Gottman conducted a study with newlyweds and then followed up with them six years later. Many of the couples had remained together. Many had divorced. The couples that stayed married were much better at one thing – the third level of the Sound Relationship House, Turn Towards Instead of Away.

HOW TO MOVE ON FROM UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

There are moments that you struggle in an unhealthy relationship. Find out and understand how you can avoid and get out of it.

What is a Healthy Relationship?

Communication is a key part to building a healthy relationship. The first step is making sure you both want and expect the same things—being on the same page is very important. The following tips can help you create and maintain a healthy relationship

Codependency Love Drug

It can be helpful to view romantic/sexual obsessions as a form of addiction. As the therapy community in NYC and beyond has learned in recent years, the addictive process is very similar no matter what the drug of choice is:

1. Craving a 'fix' from your drug of choice (person, alcohol, gambling, weed, food, pornography, shopping, etc.)—while feeling somewhat down/depressed or restless/jittery
2. Score the drug of choice and get 'high'
3. Experience the high for a while
4. As you come down from the high, you start feeling down/depressed or restless/jittery which triggers familiar cravings for your drug
5. Back to the beginning and repeat

Can People Change?

Surely there are things about yourself that you don’t like. So you change them, right? Well, not exactly. It’s more likely that you keep on doing them, even though you say you’d like to change them. So is the old adage, “A leopard can’t change his spots,” true? That people can’t change?

No, people can change.

But you can’t just snap your fingers and say goodbye to well-established patterns, even when those patterns result in bad consequences. Sure, you wish it could be easier. You may be impatient with yourself, giving yourself a good scold: “Just stop it already!” Oh, how I hate the word “just” when it pertains to change. We don’t change “just” because someone (even ourselves) wants us to.

What is a Boundary?

• It’s a limit or edge that defines you as separate from others.
• A boundary is a limit that promotes integrity, can preserve life and advance relationship.
• Boundaries are physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual, relational. They can consist of the limits of what we consider safe and appropriate, our unique set of feelings and reactions, individual perceptions, values, goals, concerns, roles we choose to play, etc.
• There are similarities and differences in boundaries across cultures, so it is important to be sensitive to people’s differences.

Self-Soothing

Self-Soothing is something we all learn as infants. When we cry, our caregiver tends to us and soothe us. This pattern teaches us confidence that everything will be alright. After a while, just knowing that our caregiver i there for us gives us the confidence to self-sooth. As we grow older we use our five senses to evoke memories of sooting moments to self-sooth. Some of us didn't always get this consistent nurturing from our caregiver or sometimes we forget as we go through traumas and disappointments, which puts us at risk to use unhealthy quick fixes to sooth. Some of these may include alcohol, drugs, sex, binge eating, and the like. I have comprised a list of healthy self-soothing techniques with the members of one of my groups. It is a good idea to pick couple that work for you and use them on a regular basis so when you really need to self-sooth, you already know what works.

NEW! - Co-Dependency Group

This November I started a new Co-dependency group. Some people think co-dependency means that you are enabling an alcoholic or addict. Research now shows that codependency is a learned behavior from growing up in a dysfunctional family and includes anyone struggling to be emotionally independent. My group deals with such issues as learning to have healthy boundaries, difficulties saying "no", learning assertiveness skills, recognizing and changing behaviors such as reactivity, care-taking, people-pleasing, and problems with intimacy.

3 Keys to Happiness

The 3 keys to happiness run on a continuum. You don’t have to have everything mentioned or be perfect to be happy. You just have to have enough of each of the three areas to feel grateful & proud of your life. As you self-actualize through your life, each of the three areas will be shifting & changing, however over time hopefully improving as your happiness increases.