real self tagged posts

June 6, 2024,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Stage 4 is for recoupling. The relationship between you is now reaching a critical stage as you learn about holding and nurturing your own individuality while holding and nurturing the individuality of your partner.

The challenge in Stage 4 is to listen to—and hear—your partner’s perspective without judgment while maintaining your own.

The emotional closeness and sexual intimacy between you may wane at times, but there is now something much greater that binds you. It is real intimacy, based on honesty and trust. It goes far beyond sex, and it binds you together now in a very special way that a period of absence between you cannot and does not weaken.

You think more productively about your differences and disagreements instead of automatically responding aggressively or ...

May 8, 2024,  Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

The third relationship stage is about discovering not only who you can be as a couple, but who you can be as an individual within it.

When you can resist the pull back to the stage of exclusive attachment, you can reestablish your own identity, which must exist independently of your relationship if it is to be a healthy one.

Where, Exactly, Do I Begin and End?

Therefore, this stage is about you moving from an undifferentiated “we” back to an individual “me.”

In this stage, the “we” part of you continues to be reassessed, while the balance continues to tip more and more in favor of each partner’s further exploration of their separateness within the relationship...

February 27, 2024,  Counselling, Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

The first stage of a relationship is a time of exclusive attachment. It creates such a strong connection that it seems that the couple cannot survive separately. The honey bee has the same attachment to a flower where both the bee and the flower benefit. For the bee it’s pollen to make honey and for the flower it’s a way of being pollinated by another as the bee hops from flower to flower.

Now you’re not a honey bee but the relationship between two people when they first meet can be similar in that they become so close that all their attention is focused on each other, often to the exclusion of everyone, and everything else.

The first time in your life when you should have experienced this was in your relationship with your mother when you were first born...

September 28, 2023,  Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

The Aggressor

It’s often said that to survive in today’s world we need to be a little more Aggressive. That may be, though I would be more inclined to say we need to be more Assertive.

Aggressor is used here to denote a game position which is never OK. The Aggressor presents in one of two ways: as hostile, or outwardly aggressive, or as manipulative, or passive-aggressive.

A wife’s constant nagging her husband is an example of a hostile Aggressor’s relationship game. This game might be called “You Can Never Do Anything Right.” She ridicules him for everything he does to try to please her. This may extend to insulting him for what he wears or how he looks after the children.

On the other hand, an example of a manipulative Aggressor’s game might be when a wife pul...

May 15, 2023,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

Your script is activated by the chemical response you have when you first meet the person you think will be the love of your life. In other words, you have a neurological response to every thought you have, every feeling you feel, and everything you do.

When one of your nerve cells is stimulated, it releases a flood of chemicals that sets off other neurons, until a whole chain of them goes off. A physiological response to something in the environment demonstrates what happens from stimulus through to the response. If you touch something hot, a chain of nerve cells fires that alerts your brain and your body responds very quickly to remove your hand from the heat source.

Similarly, every time you think, say, feel, or do something, a line of neurons is fired off in a pathway throug...

September 19, 2022,  Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Script  No comments

The question still begs to be asked: “Why does a child make such sweeping and self-limiting choices in the first place to become a Visitor or a Victim instead of a Victor?” Surely we would all choose to be a Victor first.

Visitors and Victims exist simply because survival is the prime concern for the child we all once were. In the story of Alex and Tamara, as well as in the story of Beth and Roger (remember them?), the way they conduct themselves in an adult relationship is determined by how they decided their lives would be when they were still children.

It does not take long for a child to figure out that since he or she cannot take care of him- or herself, the adults nearby must meet all the child’s needs...

July 19, 2022,  Family, Life, Script  No comments

Victims

Then sadly, there is the Victim. This is a person who never makes it in the first place. Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward describe a Victim as “One who fails to respond authentically to those around him.” In this context, “authentically” means genuinely or openly and honestly—as a Victor would.

What if a businessman has a wife with him on vacation? While the businessman is off attempting to enjoy the day fishing, she has decided that there is no joy in that for her and decides to spend the day by the hotel’s pool. Shortly after settling in, she becomes agitated so decides to go shopping. That also doesn’t interest her as the shops don’t really have much to offer. She makes a hair appointment but that has no appeal either...

March 28, 2022,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

Let’s say Aaron, a two year old out shopping with his dad, wanders off in the shopping center. Dad needs Aaron to learn that this is unsafe, so Aaron is told that he or she shouldn’t do it.

Very often, children like Aaron will not understand the information itself, but will grasp something from the parent’s tone of voice, and from the fact that he is made to sit down and listen, that something is wrong.

If Aaron is sufficiently alarmed by his dad’s response, he may get the idea of the message and not reoffend though this may be out of fear of a further reprimand. Alternatively, he may retaliate as a way of testing the limits of permitted behavior.

Whatever the response, i.e...

February 17, 2022,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

There are a couple of other considerations regarding script development that should not be overlooked.

First, I use the word “decision” broadly to describe decisions made both in or outside of conscious awareness, including those made by every child even when too young to put what they are deciding into words.

In fact, despite their preverbal nature, the decisions made during a child’s first years of life are the most persuasive and potentially the most long-lasting decisions of all. This also makes them the most resistant to change.

Nevertheless, all of these decisions can be reviewed and changed as life is lived, though resistance to change is powerful because we usually seek to reconfirm what we already hold to be true. The alternative for many is too uncomfortable...

January 17, 2022,  Family, Life, Script  No comments

From the moment of your conception, you were already making distinct self-interested and self-aware decisions for and about yourself as well as about others.

By the time you were eight years old, you were beginning to make major decisions not only for yourself and about yourself, but also about other people and the world you experienced—the things you saw, heard, touched, tasted and smelled, and about the emotional reactions you had to those experiences.

Depending on the particulars of your earlier life experiences and your reactions to them, the decisions you made included both positive and negative ones—from the sensible and practical to the absolutely absurd and unrealistic—because, as Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward explain in their 1978 book, Born to Win, “Children can...