relationships
Who is paying for dinner on your date? Can you hear the silent thoughts and questions? Will she offer to go dutch? Would I accept it if she did? I wonder if he’s going to pick up the bill or ask me for money? Will I say I have any money with me if he…
Read MoreI’m sure you’ve heard this tired old expression more than once, “be yourself!” It’s the advice we usually give each other when one of us is trying to be something or someone other than who we really are. Unfortunately it is common for a person to try to solve life’s problems by taking on a…
Read MoreThis post is for women who experienced some form of trauma earlier in their lives (emotional, sexual, physical trauma, or some combination) who now have a child and fear bringing a new man into their child’s life. You don’t want anything to happen to your child. You may have avoided dealing with this issue by…
Read MoreSex is fundamentally a biological function. The meaning it is given by people is the result of beliefs about sex, interpretations we’ve learned to apply to it. There are many different forms of interpretation possible for a sexual experience. Our institutions and families of origin teach us to think about sex in certain ways. They…
Read MoreThe biggest problem with love is our tendency to avoid the feeling of vulnerability. The way we (humans) do that is to construct defenses to protect ourselves from the discomfort and expected dangers of vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be open and receptive to what comes from the world and from inside of ourselves.…
Read MoreFor those of you familiar with Freud. Remember he supposedly said, it’s all about ‘love & work.’ Well, let’s modify that a little bit and say in some instances it’s about ‘love vs. work.’ In this world, if you are looking for a way to temporarily avoid something painful in your personal or interpersonal life,…
Read MoreThis is my intro to both this post and its companion post, ‘Loving A Married Woman.’ If you love a married man and you’re in a love relationship with him, read this post. You are engaged in what is commonly thought of as a ‘triangle.’ Triangles are rough on the heart. Fundamentally, they are unstable,…
Read MoreThis post is about the possible effects of a ‘sick mother’ on a daughter’s adult love-life. My female patients often see a connection between the difficulty they are having in their love-lives and the fact of their own mother’s emotional sickness when they were growing up. This state of ‘sickness’ includes either or both physical and…
Read MoreThis post is about the possible effects of an emotionally absent father on a daughter’s adult love life. Many women see a connection between the difficulty they are having in their love lives and the fact of their own father’s absence when they were growing up. The state of ‘absence’ I am talking about includes both…
Read MoreThis post is about the possible effects of an ‘absent father’ on a son’s adult love-life. I meet men who can trace some of the difficulty they are having in their love-lives to the fact of their own father’s emotional and physical absence in their lives. Unfortunately, emotional absence and its close relative ‘neglect’ can…
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