September 5, 2024,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

The ultimate goal for every relationship is “happily ever after.” When you are at this stage, you just know in your heart that it is exactly where you should be. It really is about forever and knowing in your heart that it will never be any other way.

This stage is about being independent of and interdependent with your partner at the same time. It is where the two of you, your separate “me’s,” exist side by side and the “we” becomes the concrete that binds you. It is the place where the two of you have the capacity to achieve even more together than separately.

A study done with sled dogs symbolizes the unbelievable power of couples in this stage of their relationship...

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...

March 29, 2024,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

The second relationship stage that normal, healthy couples pass through is one of rediscovering their differences and managing the uneasiness that comes with it. Despite what you believed in Stage 1, there really are differences between you. These deserve to be recognized and celebrated.

Eventually, as each of you begins to reemerge from the couple bubble that first encapsulated you, differences between you begin to surface and expose themselves more clearly.

Parts of you or your partner that may have been quiet or unrecognized begin to emerge. The three D’s—disenchantment, disillusionment, and disappointment, arise as you now become more aware of each other’s imperfections—maybe even for the first time.

And as the Honeymoon concludes and replaced with some disillusion...

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...

January 30, 2024,  Counselling, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

This is why rebound relationships generally do not work. When a relationship ends, you need time to grieve. Even if you were the one who decided to separate, you still need time to heal and to learn your lessons. The lessons are not just about relationships, either, but about yourself. You don’t want to duplicate the mistakes you made that shattered the previous relationship.

I also repeatedly hear stories of couples separating because one partner or the other has “found someone else.” That the new relationship could possibly work out is a fantasy. First, the new relationship is created within a context where one of the former partners (and most often, the new third party as well) is still in a relationship...

December 19, 2023,  Counselling, Family, Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

🙶 Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathless, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being ‘in love’ which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.🙷

Louis d...

November 13, 2023,  Games People Play, Life, Relationship, Script  No comments

Aggressors are not OK, and for them, no one else can be OK either. They need someone Helpless to persecute. The Aggressors hope in putting someone else down is as a vain attempt to feel a little better about themselves. And as this is only ever for just a moment, generally their harassment becomes more frequent and intense.

However, at some level within themselves they really do know the truth: that this momentary boost is usually only acquired through someone else’s fear of what might happen if they don’t give in to the Aggressor.

The Helpless is also not OK. The have to believe that the world is always mistreating them...

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...

July 12, 2023,  Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

The life that you ultimately come to live, and all that you think, feel, say, and do in it, is for the most part lived out subconsciously through the psychological games you play, and which are especially evident in your relationships.

Eric Berne, the same person who developed script theory, proposed that we play these psychological games for one reason only: as a way to find confirmation or validation for our deeply held values and beliefs about ourselves and about others: our life script.

To clarify this further, let’s refer back to the life positions Victor, Vi...