Thoughts From a Therapist
Relationship Tips
The ‘relationship’ category contains posts concerning how we interact with others.
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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Five Core Tasks of Adolescent Development
The guide highlights adolescent development’s complexities, emphasizing five core capacities: Regulation, Identity, Foresight, Relationship, and Agency. Adults play a crucial role by modeling behaviors…
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Nature, Nurture, and the Rhythm of Our Relationships | When Strengths Become Overused Skills
This content challenges the notion that all relational patterns stem from childhood experiences, emphasizing the importance of both nature and nurture. It highlights how…
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When Compassion Silences Self-Worth
The content emphasizes the importance of balancing compassion for others with self-advocacy. Uncontrolled compassion can lead to self-abandonment and resentment, undermining true empathy. Healthy…
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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,…
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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…
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The Building Blocks of Emotional and Social Intelligence
The blog explores emotional and social intelligence, emphasizing their role in enhancing mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness. It highlights essential capacities like empathy, self-awareness,…
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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…
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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…
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What are triggers?
What are triggers? Learn how cues activate automatic protective responses, why reactions can feel disproportionate, and how therapy creates more choice.
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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…
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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…
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‘not -talked-about’ themes in Human Sexuality – normalizing
Quick summary – the topic of ‘normal’ or ‘day to day’ sex is perhaps not always given as much attention as could be helpful…
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What is empathy? How do I know if I am experiencing empathy?
Quick summary – Empathy is when a person opens up their emotional boundaries and allows another person’s feeling to be cradled and nurtured within…
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Anger and Arguments – Are you defending the topic or your self?
Quick summary: as part of increasing your self-awareness I suggest that you take a look at the topics that really get you ‘heated’ with…
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Who are you? How to stop conforming to expectations and to start presenting the self you would like to present
Quick summary: Most people both consciously and unconsciously and both intentionally and unintentionally present themselves with different characteristics, beliefs, opinions, dispositions, emotionality, and behaviors…
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