What Healthy Couples Know That You Don't

Choices define our lives & our relationships. Many of the choices we make are done without thinking or awareness because they are habits. What makes you more mentally healthy is being aware of having choices and making them. Listen & learn what choices will improve your relationship. 

Addiction recovery is too often only focused on the individual. There is an 8 year study that confirms greater recovery success when the relationship is intact & strong. The relationship needs to grow & do the opposite of Claudia Black's active addiction pattern "Don't Talk, Don't Trust, Don't Feel". Couples can learn to practice expressing thoughts & feelings with each other.

Sex life Boost is something everybody can benefit from. It's too easy to let desire fade away. Listen to learn how to restore vitality. Novelty doesn't work. This interview with Stephen Snyder is really important to finding the energy to make your sex life matter.

Disappointment can be dangerous to relationships. We, as human beings can be very irrational when it comes to disappointment. We nurse our disappointments & they grow to take up too much real estate inside of us. Feelings are important to know who you are & how you are unique. Feelings are also often exaggerated & most often selfish. Learning to balance your feelings by thinking things through is a great goal to improve relationships. 

Communication can be almost impossible with a partner if we only want to steer the story in our favor. Communication requires an openness to the validity of someone else’s story even if you don’t like it. Communication gets unstuck & we can communicate better when you are able to let two opposite things be true at the same time and let them sit quietly next to each other instead of trying to get one to win and erase the other. 

Anger can be a huge problem in relationships. This episode asks what's important about anger management for relationships? Anger can be incredibly self absorbed & ugly. It's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of "I'm right" & needing to win. We all want the power to control & be the Top Dog. So listen to this episode to learn how to reign it in. Interview with Matthew Plotner.

Infidelity is complicated & difficult to heal from. Dr Spring wrote the first book that defines infidelity as a loss of trust & a shattering of the self. The person who has been betrayed struggles to recapture their sense of themselves. The partner who had the affair needs to listen non-defensively, without interruption to the profound level of hurt. Quick apologies are not going to solve this for the person who is hurt & feels their life has blown up. Listen to learn what does work.

Date to learn more about yourself. Don't stay in the safety of passivity, watching who they are. Dates can be practice to grow. Think of "every intimate partnership as a classroom in which I can learn again and again about myself, about commitment, about integrity, about authenticity, forgiveness & about apology." Quote & Interview with Dr.Solomon

Misery can so easily build in any relationship. Misery zaps your energy to think & it's easy to indulge your sad feelings. The two of you as a couple can fall to the bottom of your priority list. The misery usually spills over into bickering & fighting with each other because we don’t kick the neighbor’s dog, we kick each other.

Learn how fights can be turned into recovery and intimate conversations. In your fighting there are clues to what you are really suffering from that you have not been able to confide in your partner. Interview with Dan Wile who says "The heart of a couple relationship is saying what you need to say & feeling that it has gotten across. It is having conversations that work out."

There are many lopsided relationships where one person is catered to & the other partner is what I call overly generous. Partners like to be the nice one but getting stuck in the niceness can evolve into a giant hidden pile of resentments. There is a price to be paid for too much kindness, you can lose track of who you are because you are so busy pleasing others.

Sexuality can be a complicated business, very different from how easy it is on television. Interview with Emily Nagoski the author of Come As You Are. Find out what to do about low desire. Most problems with orgasm occur because frustration does not add fuel to the accelerator. In fact, Frustration hits the brakes in sex. Learn here how to improve your context to improve desire.

Love matters so much to people, how it goes wrong & how to put it right. Emotionally Focused Therapy  is based on thousands of studies on human attachment, it basically gives us a way of understanding love. It's scary to reach for your partner and expose your softer feelings, because we're all scared of rejection and that's not because we're wimps or immature. It's because we're bonding mammals and our brains are wired to see cues of abandonment and rejection from the people we care about as danger cues, which makes it really difficult for people to be authentic in relationships.

Codependency is a murky business. Codependency is always a part of the beginnings of every love affair. The beginnings are so enchanting for all of us. Your partner can do no wrong, they are absolutely brilliant. Codependency is a part of love & yet it can swallow love whole & make it disappear. Emotional dependency can be a healthy activity & a part of a healthy relationship as long as both partners are still individuals.

Partnerships & Marriage really require a lot from both people. Partnership demands that both people share their points of view & that we must reshape our own personal reality to be more accurate. This is truly very hard work because part of being human is favoring our own point of view. Yet, deep inside we know a single narrative cannot contain anything as complex as the truth.        

A Top Dog relationship means you participate in a hierarchy of power by either swallowing & ignoring your more authentic self or by enjoying the role of being manipulatively in charge with your demands being met. The narrative of every couple must be written by two people, not one to have authenticity.   

It’s so easy to start taking each other for granted. We develop habits of how we see each other & we make assumptions instead of being curious. When we don’t feel seen it’s really a big deal & we end up hungry. This definitely happens as the years pass & it’s your job to  freshen things up.  It is beyond foolish to imagine you will never be disappointed in your partner because they are so wonderful & you miss being saturated in romantic love. We all have ideas of who we want to be & who we expect our loved ones to be. But that’s just it; they are only ideas, mostly built on fantasies & illusions.  

Couples stuck in ambivalence are secretly in love with maintaining the status quo. Not being wholehearted about either improvement or leaving, erases so many missed opportunities. Living with a constant level of unhappiness and resentments is like living with malaria. You can do the work to repair & restore vitality to your relationship. Listen for 11 things you can do.

Power struggles in relationships are totally ordinary & daily. Things can work in a couple where power is somewhat lopsided, but it will be boring & predictable if one person has all the power to make decisions most of the time. Sharing power is a dance in the messiness that is worth it to reduce arguments & fighting.  

Too many relationships have an over developed sense of the critic, was pointed out in this interview with Dr. Joseph Melnick. It’s easy to blame & tell people what they’re doing wrong. Instead of telling each other about what’s wrong, we need to restore trust with a curiosity about each other. He describes what he calls “cardboard relationships” that are like paintings you don’t look at any more. In the beginnings of relationships it’s so easy to be open & experimental. Then couples seem to lose interest in each other because routines can be deadening. Staying together requires work & learning new skills, to understand how you stop being interested in your partner.