We live in a culture that is skeptical and talks cynically about love relationships as if it can be compartmentalized into a neat and unchanging … static life. Best-selling books with titles like, “Getting the Love You Want,” mirror a fast-food culture where love and relationships are commodities that can be ordered, gotten, or kept. We use…
I believe your relationship can thrive! I believe your relationship can be what you want it to be. Fifty percent of our challenges in relationships are simply due to a lack of skills. This is especially true if we’ve never seen a competent, successful relationship. Have you? Most of us probably didn’t learn those skills in…
Infidelity happens for plenty of reasons. None of them good. It happens because there’s a moment when the opportunity is wide open and full of aliveness and temptation, it’s exciting, it’s there and it acts like it can keep a secret; and as though it won’t do any damage at all. One small, stupid, opportunistic…
Dear Paula, It seems that I can do nothing to please my love. I love this man tremendously, and I know that he loves me very much too. We would like to get married next year and start a family, but this pattern is beginning to scare me. When we argue, he so easily flies…
Imago relationship therapy (Imago is the Latin word for Image) is a cutting edge, transformational, relational model that helps couples restore connection, rediscover aliveness and joy and amplify the positive rather than the difficulties. Imago also teaches couples how to be empathetic and vulnerable. Oh … no, the “V” word. Unfortunately culture misguides us into thinking…
We adults reenact traumatic episodes from our past just like children reenact them in play therapy. Instead of using dolls and sand trays to re-create the family dramas that harmed us, we use ourselves, our partners/spouses, and our children. The reenactment dramas that we create are unconscious efforts to communicate our hurts, and express buried grief.…
Many adult survivors of incest/sexual abuse have undergone therapy, perhaps joined support groups and even confronted the perpetrator(s). No matter how much healing we do, it seems that we are never truly healed and the effects of what happened are so deeply embedded in us that they become a part of our core identity. We…
“I think it is better to lose your pride with someone you love, rather than to lose that someone you love with useless pride.” ~John Ruskin When reflecting back, I have seen how often I evoked painful emotions as I sought comfort and solitude in the strange reward of self satisfaction and selfishness, born out…
Many of us struggle with Validation and/or Validating others because we have a “Fear of Difference.” The fear comes from: The belief that there is a RIGHT way of seeing, describing, understanding, and valuing everything – i.e what is going on. The limited capacity to be aware that others are different, or to respect, appreciate, or…