I am a runner. Not a marathon runner, not a jogger, but an emotional runner. When I find myself in a challenging situation my instinct is to run—others may have the instinct to fight, others will freeze. It’s part of our primitive nature and how we respond to what we perceive as dangerous. In the […]
Tag Archives | Intimacy
The Keys To Aging Well
The first key to aging well—start now! Is this important to you? Do you want to age well? You should—because aging poorly is a real drag. And unnecessary. In this article I’ll share with you some results found in The Study of Adult Development. This is a unique study because it looks at the lives […]
How to be a better man
Do you want to be a better man? Do you remember that line from the movie, As Good As It Gets—Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt—”You make me want to be a better man.” And she says, “That’s maybe the best compliment of my life.” In the past few weeks I’ve been counseling several couples. […]
Dating Relating Mating
A Map For Romantic Relationships Walk, run, rest. Hop, skip, jump. Birth, life, death. Everything has a rhythm—an order. This is true for romantic relationships but most people don’t know or pay attention to the order. It goes like this: Dating, Relating, Mating. And when I use the term “mating,” what I mean is entering […]
A Conversation of Love
Life is a conversation Actually many conversations, but they all share one thing in common. Every conversation is either based in fear or love. This is true for the conversations we have with other people, and this is true for the conversations we have with ourselves—inside our own heads. When we change our conversations from […]
How to Create Healthy Relationships–Healthy Boundaries
There are many ingredients that go into creating healthy relationships: Respect Adoration Reciprocity Shared values Great chemistry Compatible styles But maybe nothing is more important than having healthy emotional boundaries. If so, then the questions we ask are, “what are healthy emotional boundaries?” and “how do we create them?” Emotional Boundaries Emotional boundaries are rules […]
How To Love — another perspective
Learning To Love Better. How can we learn to love better? How do we make our intimate relationships feel like havens, be deeper and more meaningful? To a great degree, we can do this by learning to speak to each other in a different way. If we can truly begin to communicate with our loved […]
How To Eliminate Suffering
What lives between the onset of emotional pain and the resolution of that pain is suffering. I am learning to radically reduce the time between the onset of emotional pain and the resolution of that pain—thereby reducing or eliminating suffering. I don’t know if it’s possible to live without pain—I don’t think so—but I’ve come […]
One Thing You Can Do To Find A Healthy Romantic Partner
A patient recently came in complaining that she cannot find a healthy romantic partner. She said she keeps choosing men who just don’t know how to be happy. Regardless of how well their life is going, they complain about something. And nothing she ever does seems good enough to make up for their unhappiness. I […]
The Key To Happiness
The Grant Study began in 1938, tracking a group of 268 students at Harvard University, and these students have now been observed and interviewed over nine decades. The results are quite revealing and inspiring. Dr. George Vaillant is the storyteller of the study and the “curator” of these men’s lives. What he shares about his […]