Category: Marriages & Couples
-
Why Can’t I Change Even When I Understand My Patterns?
Why can’t we change patterns we already understand? Analysis can circle a problem endlessly until curiosity, regulation, and connection create an off-ramp.
-
What Makes Your Partner Feel Loved? The Pathways to Importance
People feel loved in very different ways. A therapist’s map of the pathways to importance – from desire and felt safety to being truly seen – and the specific loneliness that grows when each one goes missing.
-
How to Make Your Partner Feel Important: The Attachment Habit Most Couples Miss
The foundation of a secure relationship isn’t better conflict repair – it’s consistently helping your partner feel important. A therapist on the maintenance habit most couples overlook, and how to build it.
-
What Is a Long-Term Relationship For?
Most of us know what we want from a relationship, but few of us stop to examine what a long-term partnership is actually for. From attachment and romance to play, growth, strategy, family, meaning, and community, healthy relationships serve multiple interconnected functions. Understanding how these functions influence one another can help us identify what is…
-
Treading Water / the Addiction to Doing
Some people believe that if they stop kicking, they will drown. They are exhausted, and they also trust the effort more than the water. What happens in a partnership when one person knows how to float and the other cannot yet trust that the water holds — and why naming it can feel, to the…
-
Intellectualization in Relationships | When Insight Replaces Contact
Highly intelligent couples often default to analysis instead of connection. This post explores how intellectualization protects us—and how it can quietly limit intimacy when it replaces emotional contact.
-
How to Listen Empathically | Staying Present When Defensiveness Takes Over
Listening empathically is less about technique and more about staying present with your partner’s experience—especially in the moments when defensiveness begins to reorganize your attention around yourself.
-
Why Do People Get Divorced? | The Myth We Blame and What Is Actually Happening
Most people believe divorce happens because couples fight too much. In reality, conflict is usually a symptom of deeper relational structures. Understanding differentiation, systemic awareness, and developmental growth reveals what actually determines whether a marriage endures.
-
Love, Acceptance, and Growth | What Real Love Actually Asks of Us
Love involves more than blind acceptance; it requires balance between acceptance and growth. Authentic love respects individual uniqueness while also encouraging partners to develop and meet relationship needs. As partners grow, compatibility and understanding enhance, allowing both individuals to fulfill each other’s needs and broaden their experiences together.
-
Double Binds in Co-Parenting After Divorce
The parenting plan is essential post-divorce, as it navigates the emotional conflicts partners face regarding time with their child. It provides a pre-negotiated structure, allowing both parties to recognize their legitimate feelings while preventing endless disputes. By adhering to the plan, empathy and structure coexist, promoting psychological stability for all involved.
-
Emotional and Social Intelligence as a Living Balance | A Map for When You Want to Grow
This content discusses the importance of emotional and social intelligence for personal growth, emphasizing the need for balance in various capacities such as self-awareness, mindfulness, and empathy. It highlights how understanding these dynamics can facilitate psychological development, adaptability to life’s changes, and foster meaningful connections while avoiding extremes.
-
Codependence and the Quiet Agreement Not to Grow
The content explores how comfort can create a codependent environment that stifles personal growth. It highlights that prioritizing stability often leads to enabling behaviors, preventing accountability, and reinforcing stagnation. True love involves embracing discomfort for growth and supporting each other in evolving, rather than retreating into familiar patterns that limit potential.
-
When Intimacy Feels Unsafe: Understanding Fear Responses in Trusting Relationships
We flinch from the very thing we long for. This is one of the most painful paradoxes in human relationships. In moments where trust could deepen—or where emotional closeness is genuinely available—many of us experience not comfort, but contraction. Panic. Withdrawal. Or a conflict that seems to arise out of nowhere. This post explores why…
-
Resilience, Humility, and the Temptation to Be Neurotic
Resilience involves embracing uncomfortable emotions like shame and guilt rather than avoiding them. True resilience is relational, allowing for emotional presence and accountability, particularly after causing harm. A meaningful apology acknowledges impact and fosters connection. By recognizing neurotic defenses, we can practice resilience and strengthen our emotional growth and relationships.
-
Interventions in Relational Counseling
Relational therapy utilizes various acronym-based models to guide therapists. It emphasizes the importance of integrating different theoretical approaches for effective interventions, highlighting key intervention styles, including behavioral, pragmatic, structural, and more. These styles collectively support system needs and adaptability, allowing therapists to fluidly adapt techniques based on clients’ evolving dynamics.
-
Happy Relationship – loving another as yourself – loving we to love me
A relationship is a system… it is a whole with interconnecting parts – and the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its’ parts so lets think about this is a ‘couple’ context – you and your romantic partner (though yes this could apply to any relational system) what are some of the…
-
What is the purpose of Marriage?
In this post I will share some of the variables that can be experienced from a life long commitment or marriage. The purpose is to create somewhat of a road map to help you and your partner to identify the strengths of your bond and those areas that could use some attention. This could also…
-
Feedback loop in a Couples interaction
Quick summary: In a Couples interaction there tend to be dynamics that are reoccurring which spiral out of control and lead to a vicious cycle in which resolution in highly unlikely. I will offer a tool to be used by a therapist to help a couple in isolating and reflecting upon their cycle. Once the…
-
Relationship Help | “My partner says that I don’t listen” | how to meet the emotional needs of your partner
I am going to talk to you about what you should be paying attention to and what you should not be paying attention to while trying to become a better listener in your relationship.
-
Relationship feel stuck? Try pretending that you don’t know everything about your partner
So what is the solution… pretend that you don’t know your partner at all… the more that you can honestly engage in this suggestion the more you will find that you actually don’t know your partner as well as you thought (in a good way).