Category Relationship

July 16, 2020,  Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

As a child grows and has its physical needs met, there is also a fundamental need to feel safe from harm – bodily and emotionally. As with all of these fundamental needs, this need remains the same throughout life.

“Safety” here means the knowledge that someone—your parents when you were a child, and your partner when you are in an adult relationship—will always be there for you. You need to feel that this person will always be a “soft place” on whom to fall when you need someone the most, but also in good times as well as in times of distress.

For Beth and Roger, it’s about knowing that they are always there for each other, whether as someone offering greetings as the other comes home late from a day’s outing, or someone to be a d...

February 24, 2020,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

I would like to say something about the title of my book Love, Lies, and the Games Couples Play. Put simply, love, and all that it embodies for us, is what each of us seeks in life above all else. It is the main reason we enter into relationships in the first place because it gives us a place to belong and to feel connected to others.

The “lies” in the title refers to the mistaken attitudes and beliefs that we hold about ourselves and about others. These are most likely based on someone else’s thinking which in the first instance were probably our parent’s. And as these beliefs were presented to us at a time when we were not able to make well-considered decisions for ourselves, they are not necessarily reflective of our current subjective truth.

Those beliefs, and the w...

December 23, 2019,  Counselling, Exercise, Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Love – A Never-Ending Story

While I ended this story with “She lived happily ever after,” in truth, the “ever after” has not come to be yet.

The story is really never ending. Every day offers my partner and me new lessons to learn about ourselves and each other and new challenges, which, as we open ourselves to each other in love, provides us with even greater possibilities for ourselves and our relationship into the future.

This is not to say that we never have arguments or disagreements, but because we love and care deeply for each other, we attempt to find a resolution in a way that demonstrates that love and care and which is good for both of us.

Nor does this mean that disagreements are always solved there and then...

November 25, 2019,  Life, Relationship, Relationship Tips, Script  No comments

A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who, wide-eyed and full of dreams, left her hometown by the coast and followed her knight in shining armor to the city.

Their wedding was a spectacular affair befitting a princess and her prince, and they came to live in a castle overlooking the sea.

Years passed, and it seemed that they had everything they could want, including a lavish lifestyle with all the trimmings. They were a young family of standing in their community, with four beautiful children.

But, fourteen years later, this young girl, now grown and much wiser, looked for more from her relationship than it seemed her prince was able to give.

Through much turmoil and heartache, she ended the relationship and created a life as a single mom...

May 27, 2019,  Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

In The Games People Play, Eric Berne defined the process of becoming autonomous (self-determining) as the manifestation of the “release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.”

Let’s take a closer look at the first of Berne’s three capacities for Autonomous living.

Awareness

For Berne, Awareness is the capacity to observe the world through all five of our physical senses, plus intuition, which might otherwise be defined as coming to understand something unconsciously through the combination of all our senses.

However, it needs to be done in one’s own, unique way, and not in the way someone else once taught us.

Berne offers this example: A child hears a bird’s song, but he doesn’t know it comes from a bird...

March 13, 2019,  Counselling, Exercise, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

I use the acronym TOUCH to remember the five ways of funding my love bank.

T is for Time

Relationships aren’t part-time arrangements. And, if your relationship is fed on left-over time (the time you have after everything else has been done), your love bank will very quickly be depleted.

Your relationship must take priority over everything else (other than yourself). You come first, your partner comes second. Your family is third, your work is next, and finally there are your extended family and other friendships beyond that.

This is not to say that you can’t work because you must always be with your family. It just means that you must always keep your family’s needs in mind if you are doing something of lower priority (like working)...

January 24, 2019,  Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Theoretically, the more money you invest, the greater the return. And if you’re a patient investor, you can even double or triple the return. Similarly, the unconditional love you give to your partner is a very wise investment.

And just as you build a money bank by depositing funds you make deposits into your “love bank” when you help meet your partner’s five fundamental needs—physical, safety, feeling, love and belonging, and spiritual—and also when you use the sexual enhancers discussed earlier.

You also make deposits by speaking your partner’s love language at every opportunity.

However, just like a bank, if you fail to make deposits into your love bank, your account is in danger of being depleted by fees and charges...

December 21, 2018,  Exercise, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips, Sex  No comments

An Exercise:

To discover your conditions for great sex:

1.  Get a piece of paper and a pen and set aside half an hour or so. Think back to your best-ever sexual experience or experiences. If you have never had a great sexual experience, just imagine one or go find one of your favorite romantic movies.
2. Now write down all the things that made (or would have made) the experience(s) so good. They could be emotional factors (being in love or happy and relaxed), physical factors (feeling fit, well, and sober), relationship factors (feeling safe or in love with your partner), or situational factors, such as privacy or timing.
3. Next, think of your worst (or your imagined worst) sexual experience...

October 25, 2018,  Counselling, Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Love, Relationship, Sex  No comments

Many couples use the state of their sex life as a barometer for what is going on in the rest of their relationship. I also suggest that the converse works as well: what is going on in your relationship and in each of your personal lives can also affect your sex life.

Libido levels rise and fall with circumstances. Maybe one person is too stressed to make sex good for their partner, let alone for him or herself. Work pressures can distract couples from giving positive sexual attention to each other.

An episode of ill health can affect your sex life. It could be something that directly affects the sex organs like prostate cancer, or just stress, or your diet. Maybe you need to exercise more or you feel overweight. You might need more sleep, or even just more fun.

You should monitor all of t...

September 17, 2018,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Sex  No comments

“How often is normal?” is a perennial question.

There is really no answer, because what is normal for one couple may be quite different for another.

But what is normal for them depends on how they both respond to a whole array of things that reflect the state of the couple at any given moment.

Note, too, that some couples prefer frequent sex, and some do not. In fact, some couples have a very happy relationship without any sex at all. Let me qualify any misconception here by saying that the use of the term “sex” in this discussion refers to the physical act of intercourse. For many though, for whatever reason, intercourse is not possible, but this does not preclude these people’s capacity for closeness in a very intimate or even sexual way by some other definition of the term.

T...