Blame, Shame, and Criticism in Your Relationship is Toxic

Criticism, defined as the expression of disapproval or disappointment, can take many forms and can range from constructive feedback to harsh or attacking statements. In this article, criticism is defined as language that blames, shames, or belittles your partner. Regardless of the form it takes, excessive criticism can be harmful to the health of a […]

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Four Marriage Myths That Need to Go Away

Though they might use different words to express it, philosophers, religious figures, and psychologists appear to agree that the perfect is the enemy of the good–that unrealistic expectations are the bane of true satisfaction. The following four myths of marriage serve as examples of ways in which our desire for perfection diminishes our chance for […]

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Making Effective Requests In Your Relationship

“Expectations are agreements we never made.” Unmet expectations are one of the great banes of intimate relationships. Any two people can have such different understandings about what constitutes a request that it’s no wonder the couples counseling business is booming. When I was a management consultant, I once asked a roomful of executives and their […]

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Save Your Relationship in Two Short Phrases

We see things not as they are but as we are. ~ The Talmud Phenomenon vs. story According to the Mirriam-Webster dictionary, a phenomenon is “an observable fact or event,”  “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.”  The dictionary also defines a phenomenon as “an exceptional, unusual, or […]

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Breaking Through Projection and Reactivity in Relationship

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” ― Hermann Hesse I must have heard the above, or something like it, at least 20 times before I got it. I remember my epiphany: I was telling a group of friends […]

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Three Steps To “Hearing” Your Partner

Relationship experts observe that even in long-term relationships described as “successful,” differences and conflicts may exist that are never fully resolved. How is this possible? It’s possible because the failure of relationships lies not so much in the existence of differences and conflicts, which are inevitable but in the ruptured connection between the partners.  In […]

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Trauma Shapes Our Relationships

Trauma 101 Peter Levine, Ph.D., a pioneer in body-oriented psychotherapy, describes an epiphany he had while treating a woman who suffered from excruciating agoraphobia (an extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places) and a host of other symptoms:  …her body learned that in that time of overwhelming threat (a childhood trauma in […]

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Do We Choose Unhappiness?

My experience as a therapist, educator, and self-reflective human being reveals a paradox of people routinely employing unhappiness as a strategy to attain happiness.

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Yin and Yang

Masculine and Feminine Reflecting on the relationships of many of my young clients and even my kids, nieces, and nephews, I think this is an interesting era we’re living in when it comes to human pair-bonding. While us older men are trying to figure out how to hold onto our cherished gender distinctions (because that’s […]

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The Three P’s of Relationship Conflict: Do You Pick, Project, or Provoke?

At the heart of Imago Relationship Therapy is the idea that unresolved wounds of childhood have a way of programming us–patterning us–with an internal blueprint for a partner. The partner who fits this blueprint has the capacity to wound and disappoint us in just the ways we were wounded and disappointed as infants and children. […]

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