Category Family

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...

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...

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...

January 23, 2023,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Relationship, Script  No comments

The answer may be not just in what Vanessa and Mark observed in their families of origin but also in how they were treated. Once we began working together what came to light was two very important points. For Vanessa being shielded from arguments, as well as criticism of any type, in her family also meant that she had not learnt any skills for managing conflicts now as an adult in her most important relationships. Consequently, any raised voices or criticism was felt as a personal insult leaving Vanessa feeling constantly bruised and battered.

For Mark, on the other hand, his unrelenting exposure to conflict in his family also left him feeling bruised and battered as he was constantly made the victim of his parents and siblings’ tirades...

December 23, 2022,  Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

The Theories behind Choosing Your Partner

Several theories aim to explain why we are attracted to some people and not to others. Some say that attraction is usually based on an interest in complementary qualities or characteristics—those we feel we may not have ourselves but subconsciously would like to have.

Subconsciously, you might even believe that if you do not have certain characteristics, then maybe you can somehow live them vicariously through someone else, just like when you get really excited about something your kids have achieved. So excited even that it can bring you to tears.

You may be genuinely excited, but you might be so involved in your children’s lives and successes that you almost feel as if you yourself are performing and getting the credit.

Other...