Blog

You’ve learned that gratitude is a good thing. You make an attempt to find the positives in everyday life. You might keep a gratitude journal. Your mantra is ‘gratitude.’ You’re training your brain to notice the little things and you express your gratitude when you...

A major key to loving someone else well is loving yourself first. When you love yourself enough to be confident in who you are as a person, then you can be open and honest. When you are, then you can admit your vulnerability to yourself and to your partner, and that...

What’s the most important thing in any relationship? Certainly trust ranks high. Try to imagine operating in a partnership devoid of trust. You could never depend on anything at any given time and you’d live your life would be constant uncertainty. Not the best...

Let’s face it. If you’re in a relationship, you’re going to have fights or at least disagreements. That’s because no two people feel identical about every single thing. So you’ll argue or have heated discussions. It happens to the best of us. Your partner forgot to...

We’ve talked about killer behaviors when it comes to your marriage—criticism, contempt, and defensiveness. There’s one more that is a sure sign your marriage is in trouble. Stonewalling. What is stonewalling? That’s when you shut down and withdraw from conversation or...

If your partner has admonished you for being defensive, you may have been so because you perceived you were being attacked, and you were trying to defend yourself. Being defensive is a natural response when your partner criticizes you—including when he criticizes you...

Last week we talked about how criticism can damage your marriage. But there’s something even worse than criticism. It’s contempt. When you feel contempt for your spouse, you believe he is beneath you. That he doesn’t merit being treated with respect. When you speak to...

If you want to have a miserable marriage and a probable divorce, be sure to communicate in destructive ways. There are four particular behaviors that research shows are fatal to good marriages: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. Engage in any one of...

A friend says she feels like her spouse doesn’t love her. “He never tells me he loves me like he used to when we were first dating.” Her spouse, on the other hand, wonders how she can feel unloved. He tells her loves her by the things he does for her. Like he notices...

If you’ve been in a relationship with a narcissist, you know how destructive they can be, leaving you feel powerless and depressed with your self-esteem shattered. Still, your sense of compassion and empathy makes you wonder how the narcissist could treat you so...