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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Can You Say I’m Sorry?

Do you know how to apologize meaningfully when you have made a mistake or hurt someone — intentionally or unintentionally? Most of us growing up did not see good models of healthy apologies to repair ruptures and restore relational trust and safety. Some of us were forced to say we were sorry when we weren’t. […]

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5 Keys for Surviving Isolation With Your Teen

2020 has been a challenging year for all of us, but I have particular sympathy for teens and their parents. I remember very well when my three kids were teenagers, and I can’t imagine having them all in the house with us 24/7 for ten months.  We all thrived due to the physical separation that […]

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Gratitude: A Recipe for Happiness

We are in the worst time of this pandemic, and the holidays are upon us.  It may be a tough time for some of us to feel grateful, and it can also be a time when we find gratitude for things we may have taken for granted before. In the Greater Good Magazine, Psychologist Nathan Greene […]

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Long-distance Relationships During COVID-19

One of the issues often brought into therapy sessions nowadays is “How to navigate the landscape of long-distance intimate relationships when there are so many travel restrictions for months?”. In the age of an increasing digitalized world, many relationships are started online and before partners decide to know each other physically, they communicate virtually. Pew Research reports […]

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Stop Automating your Partner!

What I learned from a quality espresso machine. A sticky coffee situation “Give me room to grow!” I found myself asking my husband when we recently got stuck in a triggering conversation about spending money, being on the same team, and assuming we could predict each other’s feelings, intentions, and reactions. A little background: he […]

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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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Expressing empathy feels particularly hard right now!

“In order to empathize with your experience, I must be willing to believe you as you see your experience and not how I imagine your experience to be.” Brené Brown All my survival instincts are on high alert and every possible transgression, thoughtless action or selfish choice kicks me into a level of outrage that […]

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10 Ways for People of Color to Deal with Racial Stress

“You have experienced a critical incident and have gone through a lot! Please take care of yourself.” This is something I often say when I travel to regions of the world as a responder to critical incidents. Here are some resilience-building strategies you can employ. Unfortunately, today I cannot say to African Americans “take care […]

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How to stay together when you’re never apart: Surviving couplehood during the coronavirus

In the past eight weeks of quarantine, my husband and I have regularly commented that we are not sure how we would have survived a lockdown if our now-grown four children had been toddlers or elementary school kids or even high schoolers, desperately negotiating to be with their friends…We have deep respect and appreciation for […]

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