You are Gold
A human being is an amazing creature. Regardless of whether you were made by the hand of God, or you are the product of a 4.6 billion year-long science experiment, you are amazing. Either way you get to be an amazing creature that knows that it is awake. Cosmology says that there is probably less than a 1 in 100 million chance that you would exist from a raw physics point of view. Theologians say you are a child of God. One says you are incredibly rare, the other says you are divine. My metaphor is Gold. You exist; you are sitting there...
read moreTelling or Understanding
Communication is always the primary way for expressing and improving the troubles in a relationship. “Telling” is when one person tells the other what is wrong: anger, pain, disappointment, etc. “Understanding” is seeing things from the other person’s point of view. If your intention is telling then the other person is not really being considered and so they feel “told” and get defensive. This style of communication never really works in personal relationships. Instead, you might try communicating from an...
read morePurple Giraffe Principle
If I say, don’t think of an elephant, what comes to your mind? An elephant, right? Thoughts, sometimes very disturbing thoughts, seem to just pop into your head. Sometimes you can have a thought that will just not go away. Well, it would be nice to have a tool, an intellectual tool, to help get rid of those thoughts – elephants. 20 years ago I was helping a 5 year old little girl who had been traumatized by a bad experience. She could not get the bad thoughts about it out of her head. So I asked her, what is your favorite stuffed...
read moreLove is a Lab
There will never be a better laboratory for improving yourself as a human being than to be in an intimate relationship. If you want to grow up, if you want to become the most powerful human being you can be then get into a relationship with a person who wants something of the same thing and begin the struggle to live your lives together. Two things help you become powerful: learn how to explain as clearly as possible, with some depth, what you really want and then also to learn how to truly come to understand what is in the heart of another...
read more51+25+23.5+.5
In Oklahoma 51% of couples decide to divorce. About 25% of couples who continue their relationships stay married because of what are called secondary-gains. That means they don’t really love each other anymore but they stay together because of reasons like kids, money, religion, etc. The next 23.5% or so of couples are happy and in love to varying degrees. Many of these couples are very happy and would say that they would marry their partner again. However, some of these couples would say they are happy but might choose someone...
read moreGardner>Flower
The relationship between you and anyone that you love (partner, mate, child or friend) can be described as the relationship between a gardener and his/her flower. What flowers need depends on the flower not what the gardener thinks. If the flower is to bloom as brilliantly as the flower can, then the gardener must learn to meet the needs of the flower that he/she is trying to enjoy. Some gardeners may be just lucky, and what they do and what the flower needs just happen to match. But with flowers that have more brilliant and delicate...
read moreSex – what is it
There are very few topics in therapy that are more complicated than the sexual relationship between two people. The idea of sex includes all of each person’s beliefs and personal history. It includes male and female role stereotypes, your parent’s role-model, movies and other media experiences. Also, a typical sexual experience includes hormones that control aspects of your body’s experience that are both physical and psychological. To believe that sex is “just doing it” is a serious miscalculation of how human beings operate. ...
read moreThoughts>Feelings>Behaviors
Cognitive-Behavioral therapists operate from the understanding that your thoughts drive most everything you feel and do. When you think about something, a rat let’s say, it creates a reaction in your body – disgust, maybe. Your body actually gets involved in the idea of disgust about a rat. You cannot prevent your body from having this reaction (if you believe rats are disgusting), it just happens on its own, against your will. Now it is a fact that a person’s body is biochemical; meaning that chemicals (like hormones) get dumped...
read moreFeeling vs Principles
Feelings are real, fresh, sometimes raw, and constantly changing. Feelings may cause you to behave in ways that the people that you love may not find very endearing; you may or may not notice how destructive those emotion-driven behaviors can be. Principles, by contrast, tend to be deeper, philosophical and more permanent. Principles tend to be things you believe you should stand by no matter what the circumstances are. One of the things I regularly ask people to consider is to begin acting act out of their principles rather than...
read moreLove and Respect
Respect is the bottom line in any love relationship (or for that matter any human relationship). If there isn’t a feeling of being respected then everything else that happens in the relationship feels fake and manipulative. Respect can be something that you can ask for, or you can even demand respect; however, true respect is given freely or it is simply the prickly interaction over barbed-wire fences. Those stiff boundaries can be called respect but in a love or intimate relationship respect is something that looks more like courtesy,...
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