Sleeping in the same bed with her partner Damien at night could be ‘heavenly’ or ‘beastly’ for thirty-seven-year-old florist, Annabel. Sometimes she wanted to mold her body around his, but at other times she felt suffocated by his very presence in the bed. At those times turning her back on him was the only way she could doze off.
Imagine your excitement planning the best celebration ever for your spouse on a big occasion. Everything is perfect and you have spent days and tons of money that you saved up for this event. You have been imagining the delight and joy on your partner's face. You looked forward to eternal gratitude, great sex, and your virtues being praised to all the family, friends and colleagues around. But your vision is destroyed when your spouse says thank you a few times and leaves it at that. Your disappointment that your partner is tired and doesn't want to keep celebrating is huge. You get angry that your partner is ungrateful and didn't show enough pleasure and for long enough to make your efforts and kind heart worthwhile. You start to show your resentment and your partner is at a loss as to why you are wanting more. The relationship gets tense, stressful and conflict is now the name of the game. And it's all because you had an unconscious rule about how your spouse should respond to your goodness.
If you have a rule about not being needy in your relationship then you are likely to set up tension, cause arguments and wear the relationship down to the bone. That's what happened to one man who ended up frustrating his wife to such an extent that she avoided being in the same room as him when they were at home. Learn how this one very common rule about pretending not to be needy drove the couple to marriage counseling and finally got discovered, unraveled and discarded for more flexible and joint rules that reunited the couple.
Do you feel that all your efforts to get close to your partner fail because you can't synchronize your times to communicate? If you get mad that your partner isn't ready to share and iron out stuff between you at exactly the same time as you are, you may feel unequal and rejected. But, you may have an unwritten rule that says that relationships are supposed to work both people feel the same way at the same time which leads to massive disappointments and fear that the marriage is going down the drain.
“I want to feel like we are together!” is the most frequent goal I hear from partners when they come for couples therapy. But invariably each person has a totally different view and expectation of what it means to be ‘together.’ By the time they get into my office they are both exhausted, having tried and failed to convince each other that their version of togetherness is the one to aim for. They hoped that relationship counseling would prove one or other of them right and the other wro
Are you bothered when your partner blames you for being unresponsive to something they said or did, yet shuts you down the minute you try to share your feelings? You must be intensely frustrated caught in this catch twenty-two trap. That’s exactly how thirty-two year sales director Ian felt when his twenty-nine year old partner Chantal, an office manager, poked and prodded him about whether he enjoyed the elaborate celebration dinner she had thrown for him when he got his recent job promotion. He had been surprised and touched and thanked her during the party. But she kept on fishing for more, wanting to know every detail of his experience after all the guests had gone and well into the next week. She would bring it up out of nowhere irrespective of what they were doing or talking about. If he didn’t jump up and down with joy and praise her for her thoughtfulness she accused him of not liking the party and just pretending to enjoy himself. If he reassured her that it made him happy she countered with the suggestion that he was just saying it to be polite.
Do you feel that your partner is always putting you down and being superior? Do you want to outdo them at their game? Are you always in competition with one another about who is the more moral, the greater lover, the better at remembering the important things in life? Then your goals may be misaligned, causing stress and risk to your marriage. This video shows you how to detect the motivation behind your goals so that you can evaluate whether your marriage is at risk.
Have you worn yourself out with the stress of trying to persuade your partner to go to counseling for anger issues only to be told that there is no problem? Do you want to just walk out of your relationship when your partner calls you crazy after you reason with them about going to therapy for problems with lying, cheating, gambling or substance abuse? Instead of having a competition for who is crazy and who is nuts, or who has their head screwed on right or wrong, watch this video and learn two ways in which you can get through to your partner about accepting that there is a problem requiring professional therapy.
Have you ever felt energized by setting out to do something nice for a loved one only to have it blow up in your face? Did you feel like your good intentions got turned into dirt that you then had to swallow? Perhaps you wondered how on earth your loved one could be upset and angry over your good hearted words and actions – and then you got angry back. You probably felt misunderstood and defeated, as if your golden heart had been turned into rotting ashes. But do you know why your vision of kindness backfired? Do you know what you left out of the equation that made your loved one treat you like a disingenuous lying fraud?
One of the most common reasons for couples entering therapy is because one or other partner has been caught in a lie that has broken the bonds of trust and intimacy. The sense of betrayal is so huge that the foundations of the relationship crack and are often hard to mend. It doesn’t have to be about some unacceptable behavior like watching internet porn, gambling, drinking or using substances. Those tangible things are easier to deal with compared to the less obvious lies that relate to the feelings your partner has about you or the relationship. Just think how unsettling and anxiety provoking it can be when your partner says they love you but you sense they are lying? It’s the start of a deepening sense of insecurity that leads to suspicion and fear, which is what led Andrew and Sharon to positions of self-defense and protection rather than mutual sharing and care taking.
