How many times have you gone to bed thinking that you hate your partner, fantasizing how you would live on your own? Your thoughts snag on difficulties like how to tell your kids, your family, and the neighbors, and how much it would cost to live in two households. If you’ve had such thoughts, you […]
Standing Behind the Waterfall: Learning to Change Distorted Thinking with Mindfulness
Thoughts are not facts. When we’re upset, our thoughts seem valid—yet it’s exactly when our emotions get stirred up that our thinking can easily become distorted. Conclusions based on distorted thinking can’t be trusted. When my friend Sharon returned from a business trip, she was feeling disturbed and uncomfortable. As she described her experience, she […]
Building and Keeping a Strong Relationship After Having Kids
Marital conflict is bad for kids. While every marriage has conflict, especially after the first baby, persistent difficulties in the marital relationship expose children to increased chance of depression, poor communication skills, and conduct disorder later in life. Cindy and Max came to see me after their daughter Sophie started pre-school and teachers called […]
The Effect of Having Kids on a Marriage
Marriage is Strained After Having Children Being a parent is hard. But being a parent is really hard on a marriage. New parents report eight times more arguments than non-parents. Studies show that relationship quality plummets by nearly 70% after the birth of the first child, when couples experience more conflict, less intimacy, and growing […]
Meditations on Humpback Whales: Mindfulness of Sights and Sounds
On a recent trip to Africa, I climb the bluff from which, I’d been told, I could see whales breaching. I have the strand to myself; September in Tofo, Mozambique, is not the season for beach-goers. I stand like a sentry as I gaze out at the Indian Ocean. I’m familiar with the Pacific, but […]
