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 […]
Falling in Love Again with Your Partner: Love Maps, Friendship, and Staying Connected
When love is new, we ask questions to get to know our partner well. As Mandy Len Catron wrote for The New York Times in her charming summary of a study 20 years ago by psychologist Arthur Aron, we like learning about the person we love, but over time we forget to keep learning. In […]
The New Year: Rebirth and obstacles
By the third or fourth week of January, many of us are reevaluating our lives. We’ve either made resolutions (and perhaps already broken them) or we are resisting this ancient practice with awareness of the years of collapsed intentions when previous New Year’s hopes didn’t pan out. Yet we continue to be drawn to the symbolic cycle […]
