Are the Masks Ready to Come Off Yet?
Do you feel unseen by your partner? Read this article to hear more about it…
Why Invest in Relationship Skills Before Finding Love?
No one wants to live with a feeling that disaster can strike at any time. However, we all take precautions to make sure that in the event that something bad does happen, we’re covered for major, albeit unlikely or seldom occurrences. Invest time in learning about who we are and what makes some partners more right for you than others is essential.
Many of us take precautions to make sure that we can live with peace of mind. Those of us with valuables have home and contents insurance, in the event a thief invades our home and takes off with our precious belongings.
Prevention
Those of us who have a car take it in for a regular service so that it’ll drive more smoothly, so that we feel safe and protected when we’re on the road.
We don’t wait for our teeth to go rotten before seeing a dentist. Therefore, we visit a dental hygienist from time to time.
For some reason, when it comes to general health, even though we may have health insurance, many of us tend to utilize it only once disaster has struck as opposed to taking advantages of its preventative services to keep us as healthy as possible.
Similarly, when it comes to our relationships, many simply rely on fate. They think they should just suffer and face the music when the time comes. For now we love each other, and they hope and pray things will carry on that way.
Given the divorce rate is very nearly 50%, it seems like throwing caution to the wind may be a dangerous way to run our lives. To just hope for the best, rather than take actual preventative measures to ensure our marriage runs as smoothly as possible doesn’t sound like much of an insurance policy.
One of the reasons many people don’t avail themselves of preventative relationship services is a lack of awareness. There are several health prevention programs around, yet still most marriage therapists focus on helping marriages in crises. Few are trained in preventative approaches.
Many read self-help books about how to keep their relationships healthy and think that alone will ward off all gloom and doom in their marriage.
While self-help books can help a lot with encouraging healthy behavior patterns, they do little to help a couple who have, for example, experienced challenging relationships in the past. Moreover, people can have all the information at their fingertips about what they need to do to create a more loving relationship, but applying the information in real time when faced with a partner that looks and sounds like a wild dragon spewing fire out of its nostrils, is another story entirely.
Dr Sue Johnson, an acclaimed expert on love and relationships, says that when we feel triggered by something our partner does, even if their intentions are good, this can make us feel like they are against us. When we feel threatened and our sensors are down and we’re not expecting it, we react badly.
Self-help books don’t give couples awareness about their past and knowledge about how this may influence their future relationship dynamics.
Awareness is Key
The more aware we are of what we bring into a relationship the better able we will be to choose a partner who will trigger us less and with whom we can be our most real and vulnerable selves.
Furthermore, the more aware we are of our past relationship wounds, the more we can heal these and become more reflective as opposed to reactive, the better able we will be to withstand relationship challenges.
Click here to read more:
https://gethelpisrael.com/why-invest-in-your-relationship-skills-before-you-even-find-love/
Book Review: Marry Him: Case for Settling…
Does the idea of Settling for love petrify you? Lori Gottleib knows all too well, as she is a 45 year old single Mom at the time of writing this book. She thoroughly researches what makes women run away from a potentially good man…She makes an excellent case to Marry Mr. Good Enough.
A soundtrack to #MeToo – ‘Toy’ by Netta
While Toy, the female empowerment song is great for helping women feeling stronger. It begs the question, where do men fit in?
Top Tips on How to Consciously Create Love
By consciously coupling and considering carefully how you want to connect with your partner, you can create a lifelong loving relationship.
How to Get Matchmakers to do the Best Job for You?
The more clear you are about what you need from a relationship, the better able you’ll be to express this to a matchmaker who will then be in a better position to set you up.
Book Review for Hold Me Tight, by Dr. Sue Johnson
When most couples first get married, they believe that their job is done. The hard part is behind them. They have met the love of their life and now they can happily breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that they have found the ONE.
Of course, the bubble usually pops at some point, usually after the marriage. Couples realize new things about their partners that they never noticed before. Raw spots get triggered. Often painful and lonely moments creep in. Feelings of hurt and abandonment arise as our dream partner says or does the wrong thing, hits a raw nerve, behaves less than perfectly.
In Sue Johnson’s seminal book, Hold Me Tight, she describes these painful moments as she vividly describes couples who were just about ready to throw in the towel thinking they must have married the WRONG ONE! She vividly illustrates how our early childhood attachment wounds (a theory developed by 1950’s psychologist John Bowlby) remain with us as we choose partners in hopes of healing those wounds. Yet instead despite all of our best efforts, we reach for partners who trigger those same wounds, for the simple reason that we are attracted to that which we know.
http://amzn.to/2tI6hb1
Hold Me Tight is an attempt to offer couples a window into a better understanding about how our connection with our partners can sometimes go awry. She also explains how our demon dialogues – those pesky conversations we replay time and again with the love of our life – can be transformed to Hold Me Tight moments.
In this book, Sue Johnson uses seven primary examples of where most couples will go wrong. She eloquently demonstrates how rewriting these pain inducing conversations, by hearing one another’s deepest fears and seeing our partner in a new light using the attachment goggles, can help bring couples together as they gain a better understanding and appreciation for the other’s wounds.
Hold Me Tight and the theory that underpins the book, “Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy” (EFT), represents a groundbreaking approach to couples therapy. EFT has 20 years of research to back it up. While most schools of couples therapy yields results as low as 35%, EFT touts results as high as 75%.
The EFT approach is so groundbreaking that creators of other well-known programs including John Gottman (the Gottman Method) and Harville Hendrix (Imago Therapy) support the use of this technique for first line treatment in order to heal the couple’s wounds.
Click here to purchase a copy of the book.
Top Tips to Ensure Relationship Differences Don’t Tear You Apart!
My husband and I got engaged over July 4th weekend 17 years ago. As we were living in New York at the time, the date was chosen more out of convenience, as we had a long holiday/vacation weekend.
While English is our mother tongue, he being British and me being American we occasionally found that we used to butt heads when it came to cultural comforts. For him, watching the cricket is sacrosanct. It’s tantamount to attending Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur…You just don’t miss it!!!
Obviously for me, watching cricket wasn’t even nearly on my radar. I occasionally watched baseball and my family enjoys it here and there, but it’s not massively high on our list of priorities. This is something that varies from family to family as well.
Reconcilable Differences, by Dr. Jim A. Talley
The major differences between Brits and American’s I’ve discovered over the years is in our use of language. For example Brits use the loo instead of the bathroom. Getting pissed in the UK means your massively wasted, whereas in America it means you’re furious. Biscuits in the UK are cookies in the US. If something gets nicked from a Brit, it’s been stolen. If something is nicked to an American it means an object needs a touch up. There are some obvious pronunciation differences: Tomato, has a hard A sound to an American, and a soft A to a Brit.
The greatest difference my husband and I encountered when we first got together was our attention to politeness. Sadly to say, we Yanks just don’t give a toss (to coin an English term) when it comes to manners half as much as our English counterparts (obviously this varies from family to family as well). This was something that drove my husband crazy when we first got together. He’s all about walking house guests to the door when they’re about to leave. He makes sure to say the word please, even when it seems superfluous, and thanks people profusely, even when they piss him off (American usage).
The one that used to drive me the most insane early on in our marriage was his constantly apologizing for things that he did even if it didn’t bother me or seem to warrant an apology. As in “I’m sorry to say, but I disagree with your opinion about x,y,z…” In my head I’d be screaming, “Stop f#$%ing apologizing all the bloody (to coin a British phrase) time.”
Yep, lots of couple’s encounter differences between them. You don’t have to be from different cultures to be challenged by your differences…Even couples from the same town, who share the same religious ideology and have similar education levels will find they have differences about how things should be that can piss (American usage here) the hell out of each other.
Things like attention to cleanliness. I remember a while back working with a couple who had different ideas about levels of cleanliness. The husband was very particular about always capping the toothpaste and making sure you couldn’t find a speck of dust. She was also clean and tidy, in fact this was something she loved about him. She just didn’t take it to his level.
Her attention to detail was slightly less, and caused great friction between them.
After working together a short while, we discovered that the real issue for him was the way he was raised. Being the son of poor immigrants he was taught to value everything, not to take anything for granted. He took this level of meaning very seriously and applied it to everything…For him waste was second to committing a horrible sin. She also was raised to care about her things and not squander, just not to the same degree.
By understanding where each was coming from and the attachment to objects that each was encouraged to have, they were better able to appreciate and understand where each was coming from. He was able to calm down a bit and she was able to appreciate things slightly more.
Here is a tip list that may help you if you find that you and your bf/gf or partner have differences that feel hard to reconcile:
- Understand how this issue is triggering you?
- Work through where you learned to feel so strongly about that issue.
- Share feelings that come up for you in relation to your difference.
- Respond to your partner with empathy when they are the ones sharing their feelings
- If you find it too difficult to feel empathetic, find out why (is it because you so strongly disagree?)
- Try to find a happy medium between your different ideas. If it doesn’t exist, take turns doing things different ways, until you choose one way or the other or create a new way altogether.
Know that lots of couples have differences between them. Far too many get scared off by their feelings and think they have to run away or attack their partner. When strong feelings come up for you about your differences it doesn’t mean you made a mistake. It’s normal for all couples to have differences…but you do need to tend to them, lest they fester and cause even more gaps between you.
For more information about how to deal with your differences, check out my video on dealing with differences between men and women: http://snip.ly/zzdsb
The Torah of Commitment to your Relationship!
The more we take a leap of faith and believe in ourselves, the better able we will be to commit to someone else.