What Healthy Couples Know That You Don't

When you are trapped together it can be easy to get stuck in obsessing about all the negatives that annoy you. Our brains love to hang onto negativity. Sometimes people miss that heady excitement of being in love which is different from actually living with love. Living with love means the work of acceptance. Acceptance of the annoyances because you are well aware of how annoying you are as well.

  Relationships so easily end up in feeling critical of your partner or annoyed, that’s because living together exposes us to the other person’s dark side. Our brains encourage us to indulge our negativity. Add to that any resentments that have silently piled up which will feed stinginess. The resentments lie waiting in the dark to whack your partner off at the knees. 

Marriage is work because it’s a very tricky business for a marriage to get things right for BOTH people. That’s why marriage is hard work. The movie A Marriage Story gets a lot of things right. You watch how both Charlie & Nicole have responsibility for the demise of the marriage. Charlie is someone who takes up most of the space & Nicole allows it to happen.

Safety is a way we lie to ourselves about what will work to have a better life & better relationships. We clutch at believing it is safer to avoid talking about problems with our partners. Choices made for safety are always choices made out of fear. Safety is about the false comfort that false beliefs offer.

Babies arriving home, don’t have to erase relationships. We all love babies, they are so great and they're so wonderful. They're also tiny bloodsuckers that demand enormous time and energy from parents. My guest today is Joni Parthemer who is going to share her ideas of how to prevent the parents' relationship from disappearing.   

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.

Relationship and sex expert Stephen Snyder discusses the importance of restoring vitality in your sex life. They explore the rules of desire, gender differences, mindfulness, and improving intimacy through emotional connection and living in the present moment.

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.