Tag: communication
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Parents Texting with Kids in the Car
I see parents texting with kids in the car more and more often now, and it scares me. I am going to be blunt here: Do you want to risk killing your kids, or make it such that they have no mother or father to raise them? What about the kids and parents in other…
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Couples: Parallel Play or Interactive Play?
Couples: Parallel Play or Interactive Play? Are couples interacting and enjoying one another? Or are they living parallel lives, co-parenting, good roommates, going to functions, socializing, but always with others so they are not alone together? Parallel Play Young children play alone, enjoying a box as much as the gift that came in that box.…
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Kids and Marital Satisfaction
Kids and marital satisfaction have been studied a lot. Research “More than a hundred studies show that marital satisfaction falls off a cliff after the birth of the first child and doesn’t get much better until the last child leaves for college,” writes John Gartner, Ph.D in ‘Child.ol’.a.try’ in Psychology Today. Yikes! How Come Kids…
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Are You Communicating More or Less?
Are You Communicating More or Less? Isn’t it true that everywhere we go these days people are talking, texting, scrolling and swiping on devices? I find myself wondering if we had this much to say before we had these devices? I don’t recall being on our landlines telephones constantly . . . And yet, is…
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Personal Weather Report (TM)
Your partner can not read your mind, and my husband can not read mine, either. You actually have to say what’s on your mind. One homework exercise I like to give is to have couples give each other a Personal Weather Report (TM) once or twice a day. This is also helpful in finding specific…
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Couples Therapy: Professional Opinion of “Hope Springs”
I realize that Tommy Lee Jones has been in a lot of movies. I see many movies with my teenage son, and so when I saw Meryl Streep with Tommy Lee Jones, all I could think of right off the bat was, ‘Agent K.’ I think many people wish they had a neuralyzer to use…
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Premarital and Couples: Do you Fight, Flight, or Freeze?
When you are triggered or flooded — i.e., upset or overwhelmed — do you fight, take flight, or freeze? These are the biologically wired-in options for humans. This has made us survive as a species. You need this tool; it also gets in your way in your relationship at times. I often see couples where…
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Premarital and Couples: Here Be Dragons!
I wrote about the The Four Stages of Competency, that begins with the Unconscious Incompetent, perhaps also known as our unconscious. Jung referred to it as our “shadow” side — the parts of ourselves we don’t know about, and frankly don’t want to face. When I wrote the back cover copy for my Connect2 Personality…
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Couples Counseling, Al Pacino Style
I had the pleasure of listening to Pete Pearson of the Couple’s Institute in Menlo Park talk about the importance of working as a team in couple’s counseling. He showed the following video clip of Al Pacino giving an inspirational talk to his football team before a big game, and asked us to think about how it…
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“The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein
I recently read The Art of Racing in the Rain for the second time, and liked it just as much as I did the first time. It is a bitter-sweet story that is very well written. If you can’t relate to cars or driving at all, it may not be the book for you —…