“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living […]
Tag Archives | Love
Can I recover from child abuse?
I left a small child—my child—over 30 years ago because I was afraid to be a mother. I made sure he was in good hands and then I ran away. For years we have pretended that what I did was acceptable because of my own pain and my terrifying childhood. Can my son recover from […]
Four Mistakes That Couples Make
I spend several hours every week watching smart people make terrible mistakes in how they treat their lovers/partners. What follows is a list of the four major mistakes I see couples make. If I do nothing more than commit myself to avoiding these four mistakes, I radically improve the quality of my partnership. 1. Comparing […]
Running for my Emotional Life
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 […]
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 […]
How To Die Well
I’ll tell you a short story about a friend of mine who showed me how to die—and how to die well. Ken was a flawed person—like all of us. And he used his flaws to fuel his personal growth. This wasn’t natural to him. With a degree in engineering and an MBA from Harvard, he […]
How To Love
It can be easy I want to share with you part of a recent therapy session I conducted. The work I did is counter-intuitive in many ways. It connects to a previous article I wrote, Love or Fear. So much of therapy is based on minimizing people’s fears, and although at times this is necessary […]
Happier World
Can You Redo Yourself? This morning while driving our grandson to school, his mother called him on his iPhone. (I don’t think 12-year-olds should have iPhones, but his father bought it for him and his parents are divorced—and well—you can imagine the rest.) At least he uses the speaker phone so not to expose his […]
After the Honeymoon
Maintaining a loving relationship is an exciting new category for us to explore. In our recent retreats we’ve had more young people participating and we realize the remarkable opportunity that they have by learning these skills early in life. Learning how to communicate in a healthy way is one of the primary reasons that a […]
Being Kind
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” Dali Lama A patient recently shared with me the difficulties he was having relating with his mother. There were parts of her—certain behaviors and attitudes of hers—that he was having difficulty accepting. He recognized that those qualities in her were not going to change. She […]