Psychotherapy • Consultation • EMDR
Recently, my friend David told me “My pumpkin spice latte syndrome is back.” He was referring to the fact that every year, just about the time his coffee shop starts serving pumpkin lattes, he begins to feel sluggish, blue, and irritable; and his down mood persists, off and on, through the winter months. He’s…
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If you’ve recently suffered a traumatic event, such as the loss of a relationship, or a serious medical diagnosis (and I’ve talked with many people who are having classic post-traumatic stress responses to the recent election) you may also be feeling surprise and confusion, not just because of the event itself, but because of the…
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What constitutes mature love? This is the subject of an excellent book, How to be an Adult in Relationships by Dr. David Richo, a book I highly recommend. In this book, Richo discusses five characteristics which he believes are the essential ingredients of maturity in adult love. These “five A’s” are: Attention: This is…
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Some of the unhappiest people I’ve ever met are “injustice collectors,” an evocative phrase which most of us intuitively understand as soon as we hear it. Injustice collectors ruminate continually about the Bad People who have harmed them. They are preoccupied with the injustices that they believe they’ve suffered; and as a result they…
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In this final installment of three columns examining Dr. John Gottman’s research on successful relationships, the focus is on what he discovered about how successful couples approach conflict resolution. One of his discoveries was that most conflicts in successful relationships – 69 percent to be exact – are never resolved at all. Tom is…
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Last time I summarized some of the ground-breaking research of psychologist John Gottman into what makes relationships work or fail. To recapitulate, he identified four patterns which, if unchecked, are so lethal to a relationship that he termed them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Most couple counselors…
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After watching a couple communicate for just five minutes, psychologist John Gottman can predict, with 91 percent accuracy, whether they’ll break-up or stay together. He learned to do this by observing many volunteer couples interact in over night stays in a specially fabricated apartment in Seattle. The couples were instructed to act as naturally as…
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Q: I’ve been with my partner for two years and I love him deeply. He wants to get married, but for me the problem is that we have a good sex life, but not a great one. It’s nice, but there isn’t a lot of passion in it. With my last boyfriend, the sex was…
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Rubin and his partner Alan, the couple I’ve been discussing in this series on effective speech, are trying to resuscitate their dying relationship by doing couple counseling. They genuinely love one another, but they’ve become lost in a downward spiral of destructive and hostile speech which they know will doom their relationship if things don’t…
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Last time I said that the first step in practicing effective speech is to keep our eyes on the prize – to be constantly mindful of our intentions for speaking in the first place. What do I want in my life? I want to give and receive love. I want relationships with others to…
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