Midtown Family Therapy

You are Gold

Nick — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:09:38 +0000

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 reading this. It has to be one, the other or both. So, it is reality, hard scientific, spiritual truth – you are Gold. Now, of course, there are three problems: believing it, living up to it and treating others like they are too. All hard, almost impossible; start with believing.

Telling or Understanding

Nick — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:17:56 +0000

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 intentional-trying-to-understanding perspective. There is a much greater chance of real communication happening this way. You are smart, you don’t need to be thinking about how you will respond; you need to think about how you can help your loved-one tell their story so that they feel understood. If they do feel understood then they will give you a chance to express your point of view. Understanding is more important than telling. Telling is just blurting out your feelings, bullying in a way. Understanding is helping your loved-one say what they are trying to say to you and then you need to make sure that they (and you) actually do understand. Now, of course this MUST work both ways. Both partners need to focus on understanding each other. There is plenty of time for telling, almost no time given to understanding.

Purple Giraffe Principle

Nick — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:26:07 +0000

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 animal – she said it was a purple giraffe (so, the name – the Purple Giraffe Principle). When you have “an elephant” in your head and it will just not go away, think about how much you love and care about your purple giraffe, imagine yourself holding it, squeezing it; breath in your love for it and let it be all over you. Of course, you do not have to only think of a purple giraffe, but you get the idea. So, when you have a bad thought think of a sunrise, your child’s face, the last time you were at the ocean – anything besides the “elephant.” For most people it seems to help to create the same positive thought over and over. With practice this tool becomes more and more effective. The PGP is a tool, imperfect maybe, but a tool to begin to gain some control over the disturbing thoughts that can often plague your mind.

Love is a Lab

Nick — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:28:28 +0000

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 human being. These two skills will not only grow you as a person but they also grow your love relationship as well. Also, these two skills are transferable to almost most everything in life in a powerful and productive way. Imagine what you would learn about yourself and another person if you were literally tied together with a 5 foot rope for a day, month or a year. If you could learn to be respectful, kind, patient, assertive, modest and passionate in that situation then you would become a powerful person in your own right. Let your love relationship become your lab for becoming a great human being.

51+25+23.5+.5

Nick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:10:34 +0000

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 different next time for various reason (some valid, some not). The top .5% of couples are married to their soul-mate. These couples seldom disagree, let alone fight. They don’t argue, they have enjoyable conversations about difficult topics. They would say they have been deeply in love for their entire relationship. As enviable as such relationships may be soul-mates are not findable. You accidently bump them in some way in your life (it can be devastating for a couple who is in an otherwise good marriage for one of them to meet a person they believe is their opposite sex soul-mate). The vast majority of people never have a relationship like this with anyone in their entire life. Needless to say, it is foolish to leave a marriage expecting to find your soul-mate. A better strategy is to get help moving your relationship into that 75% and above category and then work at moving it to 85% or 90%

Gardner>Flower

Nick — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:43:35 +0000

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 blooms it often takes some study and even research to be able to give the flower what it really needs. Human beings are flowers often with radiant but delicate blooms. Without the right stuff they may not bloom at all. If you love someone it is your job to understand, really understand your flower, and give them what they need. This takes work that you cannot be lazy about if you want to enjoy and have the satisfaction that comes from a great blooming love relationship. Of course, the reverse is also true; you are likely someone’s flower. The job then is to assist your gardener to understand what you need. This too can be a pretty daunting task. Sometimes it helps to get some coaching from a master-gardener. If either of you, gardener or flower, are not getting what you need to have an enjoyable and fun love relationship then you might consider seeking out some help.

Sex – what is it

Nick — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:19:03 +0000

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. There are essentially three kinds of sex. Lust is just getting it on without really needing to know who you are doing it with. Lovemaking is the slow, involved, friendly sharing of your body with someone that you love (or really like). Sex is the regular and routine physical intimacy that has the purpose of meeting your own and your partner’s needs. Lust, lovemaking and sex are all important. All three should be a part of a caring long-term sexual relationship.

Thoughts>Feelings>Behaviors

Nick — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:45:31 +0000

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 into your blood stream, also against your will. So, some emotions occur that do not have an immediately apparent thought that went before. However, many of us believe that there likely was a thought before, you just were not consciously aware of it. From this understanding then therapist often have you evaluate your thinking about what you are feeling and doing. If your feelings or actions are a problem in your life then probably your thinking is actually the problem. Gain control of your thinking, or change your thinking, and you change, or gain control over, your feelings or actions. Sometimes people can benefit from the assistance of a trained professional to assist them in this process. However, if you simply become more self-reflecting, more self-analyzing, you can discover a lot on your own. When you are doing something or feeling something that you are not proud of or don’t like, then ask yourself, “What am I really thinking about this?” “Why do I think it?” “Where did that thought come from?” “What can I begin to think that might be a better (more positive) thought about it?”

Feeling vs Principles

Nick — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:32:48 +0000

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 their feelings. For many people this is an entirely new idea and new way of being. Feelings are things that people often believe should be expressed just the way they are, as though they possessed some sort of “Truth.” Well, it is “true” that you are having the feelings that you are having, but a feeling does not tell you what you should do or how you should behave. A feeling does not tell you the right or “principled” thing to. The things you do that you are proud of, that other people admire you for, tend to be things that display some deep, philosophical value, or principle, like – love. You can do what love tells you to do in spite of how we feel at the time. You can act better than you feel. What is the right or loving thing to do? Whatever that is, it is more likely to make things turn out well, as opposed to doing what you feel at any particular moment. There is nothing wrong with feelings. But feelings are just feelings not truth to be obeyed. Principles are the deeply considered, highly valued ideas that lead to the best results in life and love relationships. Let your principles, not your feelings, guide your behavior.

Love and Respect

Nick — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:33:12 +0000

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, consideration or kindness. I make it very clear to the relationships that I work with that any progress from the pain that brought them to my office begins with respect. Then I ask, “What in your opinion does it mean for you to give your partner respect?” and “What does it mean to receive respect from your partner?” This conversation can begin to surface the pain that has been lying there corroding a love relationship for a long time. The erosion of respect looks like a lot of things: lying, lack of punctuality (especially without notification), lack of tenderness in greetings at the end of the day, raising your voice (which is bullying), etc. The best way to begin to inject respect into a relationship is to make up your mind that your partner (or child, or whoever) will never experience you as disrespectful every again and then to do everything possible to make them feel respected. As respectfully and caringly as possible you need to begin to talk about when you have felt disrespected in the relationship and to be strong enough to participate in a conversation about respect when you are talked to about it.