I knew we needed it. I’d even been the one to suggest it over the years when arguments festered for too long and drained us both. But when the day came and we entered our therapist’s office, I questioned if I was truly ready to rip off the bandaids I’d so carefully placed on old…
I think we look at love all wrong! Especially when we get hurt. We blame love. But love doesn’t hurt us. Someone who doesn’t know how to love hurt us, and we get confused between the two. I also think that after we’ve been hurt by something that what wasn’t love we build cages around…
Emotional abandonment is one of the silent killers of relationships. Its anthem is an ice cold, white noise that is ultimately impossible to compartmentalize. Its color is the darkness of a deep hole. Its smell one of a deserted coal mine. A partner can provide money for rent/mortgage, gifts for Valentine’s, put you on their…
Thomas Merton once wrote, “Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life.” We use the word “love” so often these days. In many ways, it has become a tongue-in-cheek expression of endearment rather than a genuine characteristic of a healthy society. This is not the case for every one…
I want to thank you—for all the support and belief you’ve shown me this year. It has meant the world to me and I deeply appreciate you. I am feeling extraordinarily grateful to be able to share my thoughts, fears, successes, confusion and other exciting experiences with you. It’s been a hard year! We’ve seen hearts…
After the initial parabola of passion, infidelity can be a crashing into a particular kind of hell. A roller-coaster ride that burns our heart. Infidelity scalds us with guilt and grief in the after-shock of transcendent bliss. In virtually every marriage code in virtually every society, infidelity is unequivocally prohibited. In a lot of places…
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…
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.…
If you are in a love relationship, prepare for the hard truth: at some point the honeymoon … those “in love” feelings will fade away. This because “Romantic” love usually does not last forever. But creating a conscious relationship can. Love relationships are not indestructible. I know because I’ve killed many. We cannot kill a…
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…