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…
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 am swinging to the other side of the relationship pendulum in this article because I think it’s important to talk about how we are being seduced into believing that our holy dance is a dance of Fear. Well, it’s not. However, there are impulses and evil forces in contemporary society promoting separations rather than…
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…
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…
My husband walked out on me and our children six months ago. He sad he loved me but he was not in love with me, no passion, no spark, and no click. He said he was unhappy and felt I was too controlling. He also said he felt like he had a chain around his…
Merry Christmas Friends! Many times the way forward is to look back, to read and study the wisdom of prophetic leaders whose brilliance opens us to the limitless possibilities and potentialties that reside within and between us. On Christmas day nearly a half-century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before his congregation at Ebenezer…
A lot of heterosexual relationships go off the deep end because partners are engaging in vicious interpersonal battles out of a mystification with love, co-creating a relational atmosphere of sadomasochistic intimate terrorism … instead of real love. One of the dangers of patriarchy for men and women is blind obedience, i.e., never questioning what is…