Category: Communication
Every Monday morning, the staff of the Imago Center gathers to share our professional successes, concerns, and questions. Yesterday, I brought a question to the group: I’m currently working with a couple who do not share the same language of origin. They sometimes struggle to communicate because they ascribe a different meaning to different words. […]
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I Am a Proponent of Connection I have always been more of an observer than a talker, yet I have been having some difficult conversations lately on the topic of COVID-19 and vaccinations, with the people I care about, because I need my relationships now more than ever with friends, family, and colleagues. If I […]
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Would you like to get a cup of coffee? That moment when he first walked over to me, my heart was pounding. I can still see myself all of these years later. I think I may have blushed. He leaned forward and asked if I would like to get a cup of coffee. We had […]
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Just mean or “no filter?” Has someone ever said something incredibly insulting to you and when you became offended, they (or someone else), said that person was either “blunt,” “a straight shooter,” or “tells it like it is”? While there are people that seemingly have what is referred to as “no filter,” there is also […]
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“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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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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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 […]
READ ARTICLEWe 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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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 […]
READ ARTICLEWhat 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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