Are you in a constant state of anxiety about not being good enough for your partner? Do you find yourself alert to everything and anything that may make your partner upset and then try and fix it right away? Then your unconscious rule about relationships being based on rescuing your partner from every tiny negative feeling or experience will sour the connections.
Do you often wonder if your partner finds you exciting enough or good enough? Are you constantly worrying about proving your love, commitment and loyalty? Are you living with the fear that they will find someone better and then going overboard to try and make yourself indispensable? Then you are probably insecure and have an unconscious rule about how to feel more secure. That rule may be that you have to fulfill all your partner's needs so that they become dependent on you, and that way they will never leave. Unfortunately it is a fear based rule which only adds stress and conflict to the relationship, making it more likely to end. You are probably experiencing a never ending cycle of fighting and making up and then fighting again.
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.
If you date a lot but still come up short in meeting the right one for you, it's not because all the good ones are taken or that you are just picky! You are probably imposing a ton of strict one-sided rules about how you and a prospective date should behave. Your protocols strangle the natural flow of chemistry between you and you end up feeling like you have done your bit, but come up empty handed once again. Your clock is ticking out, and you are getting more and more desperate. Fear no more. Just watch this video and discover how one woman's constricting rules made sure that she would never be picked by someone who she was attracted to, and how she would never want to respond to a guy who seemed interested in her.
“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
Do you wish you had a crystal ball that you could look into and find out why you repeatedly go for the wrong person no matter how hard you try to avoid the same mistake? You may not realize it, but you do - deep inside you there is a shiny crystal ball that your unconscious peers at and it gets very excited when it finds three elements that make it go crazy with desire. You are not in control of these three forces, but you can be, by tuning into this, the third in the series of videos that gives you the low down on what the pull that these magnets have on you. Once you become aware of the three magnetic forces that act in unison ( which is why they are so difficult to eradicate) you will have a chance to pause and bring your healthy self to protect you from these strong and powerful magnets that attract you to the 'same person' even though they may look and sound different at first.
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.
Bursting with energy and excitement thirty-three year old Evelyn closed up her jewelry design studio and took Greg her thirty-four year old boyfriend to his second interview for the position of assistant chef at the hottest restaurant in town! As usual he was broke and couldn’t afford to put gas in his car. But when she got there he was irritable and snapped at her no matter how much she tried to boost his confidence. By the time they reached the restaurant she was already regretting helping him out, vowing never to bother again! Ever since she saw the job advertised online she had encouraged him to go for it, hoping that he would make something of himself. She wanted a partner on her level of the social and career ladder and if that meant she had to yank him up to be her equal, then that is what she resolved to do. After years of debating grappling with the question, "how do you find a good guy?" she had finally found one, but he needed polishing and shaping up to be even better.
