Hi, this is Linda Nusbaum. It's been amazing being able to help everyone for so long, but it's time for me to retire. The site is up for archival purposes, but I've closed my practice.
Thank you.
All of us in relationships want to feel accepted and received by the person we love. It’s a longing we all share and impossible not to feel. We crave our person to see us and to remind us that we matter. We need to feel valued by the one we love and we hunger for these reassuring moments.
So the idea that we may NOT feel loved, necessary, or that we matter to our mate is, in my opinion, one of the worst things we can feel.
When we get into a scrape with the person we love we often wind up in a difficult place. We sometimes hurt and feel unloved. Maybe we get mad at our mate and sulk or lash out. These are very common positions that many couples engage in. No one likes them. They are difficult and unpleasant.
As a couples specialist I am always trying to understand how to explain relationships in the simplest ways so people can improve how they interact with the person they love. And as I was thinking about this concept it occurred to me that there are really two places we end up occupying after a fight. We are either doing something about our partners or we are doing something about ourselves.
When we think about describing ourselves to others, most of us probably think of ourselves as kind people. If you are in a relationship than you would probably tell people you love your partner. If you think of extended family you might say you love them too.
But I know in my own life, when I was struggling to make something of myself, when I look back, I don’t see myself as being kind. Yes I was always nice when I was feeling good. But when I felt bad, no one got kindness.
When I was mad I stayed mad and everyone around me knew it. Kindness? Are you kidding? I was MAD, and that’s where I stayed.
When people get upset, some of us just naturally think people know. It’s not uncommon to believe that if we get our feelings hurt, the person who hurt them knows what they did. We also sometimes believe that everyone else might know what happened too. Our thoughts, especially when we get our feelings hurt, are very strong and convincing.
Let’s talk about honesty in relationships.
When I think about honesty in relationships, I am talking about expressing our emotional truth. When I see this in a counseling session I always feel something, like I am sharing a moment that is very special and pure.
I had the pleasure of helping a couple recently. It’s clear they love each other, but they were both exhausted trying to get love from each other. They were angry and were extremely unhappy too.
Figuring out how to communicate with your spouse and feel heard in times of conflict can be challenging. Passions run high and you probably both know exactly how to press one another’s buttons. But do you know how to hear each other and bring the conflict to a close?
When I work with couples I often help them to really listen to what their mate is saying. We all know how to talk, so it might sound funny that a couple would need a professional to help them hear, but that is sometimes what is needed.
All of us complain about something. “It’s too hot!” I’m cold.” Some of us complain to another. “Turn off the light.” “Why didn’t you remember to call?” These phrases are how most of us communicate our discomfort with our mate. We feel a discomfort and we speak about it right away.
We learn this habit when we are small. That’s how we were taught to understand ourselves. We learn what works and what doesn’t. Then we tell someone what isn’t working. If you think about it, you can hear this kind of talking in just about every situation you find yourself in; work, school, family, friends, and relationships.
Figuring out how to control anger issues in your relationship can be challenging. Everyone gets mad. Some of us even blow up.
Controlling anger issues in a relationship means blowing up less often and learning how to minimize the damage when, despite our best efforts, an episode occurs after all.
Dealing with anger in a relationship can be difficult. Anger can push us away from our partner, so learning how to control anger’s influence on our lives and partner is incredibly important. Many of us don’t develop effective tools for dealing with anger until later in life, if ever. If you’re reading this, maybe you could use a helping hand.
If you get angry at your mate, you are not alone. If you get really mad and yell or do other things to your partner when you get upset… again, you are not alone. Anger is pretty common in relationships. And this is not an article about how terrible it is. This is a message about what to do about it.
If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.
But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?
As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.