When Your Partner Lies to You

Will Bad Relationship Patterns Doom YOUR Relationship?

We’ve all lied at some point. Maybe it was big; maybe it was small. We’ve all learned the consequences of getting caught. Then we realize it’s better to be honest than wonder whether or when the truth will emerge.

Lying keeps secrets from the ones we love. We might even think we are protecting them. We assume not telling them is best, because telling them would hurt them, and we care about their feelings. Or we may simply fear the consequences. We may worry that we’ll be in trouble and people will get angry with us.

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How Looking at Others Hurts Our Relationship

How Looking at Others Hurts Our Relationship

When we fall in love with our person, we want to always feel that we are the most important and special being to them. I think this is the way most of us think about love.

We find our one true individual and then we want it perfect and wonderful all the time. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen? We see so many love stories and movies and ideas that many of us believe this is going to be how it will always be.

We fall in love and then love will take care of everything. But if you are reading this article, you probably have experienced something very different. Like wondering how your perfect partner really doesn’t know you as well as you thought they did.

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Do You Trust Your Partner?

Sometimes in a relationship we aren’t sure about our partner. Do they really love us? Are they going to stay? Do they really mean what they say?

Couples often ask themselves these questions. But where does trust come in? Maybe you say to yourself I will trust you, but you must trust me too.

This sounds equal. We are both in it and can say that if my partner trusts me then I can trust him. But that is really not what trust is about.

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When a Partner Cheats

When a partner cheats, you have to decide whether to stay...

All couples start out beautifully. Each person loves the other and there is a belief that the amazing union will last forever. But as we all know in a year or two things start to change.

It’s not that we stop loving our mate, it’s just that since our heart is so open, we get hurt when there is a misunderstanding. Sometimes these disagreements can separate us and keep us from connecting. This is pretty common too.

But when there is a mate who feels they have to leave the relationship in order to feel good about themselves well that is another situation entirely.

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My Husband (or Wife) Resents Me! What Do We Do?

My partner resents me. What do we do?

It’s easy to spot resentment. You can feel its power and its force. Resentment is like a wall of dislike coming at you and you have no way of getting around it.

You know it is there, you wish it would not be, but everything you have done has not made it crumble and it is a mystery to you as to how to dismantle it.

I have worked with many couples that experience this.

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How We Learn to Trust Again After Infidelity

How do we learn to trust again after infidelity in a relationship?

Sometimes in a relationship there is a difficulty where one of the partners might be attracted to someone other than the mate. This can also lead to some flirtation, some exchange of emotion, and even even more.

When this happens, there is a big rift between partners. The one who was cheated on often feels betrayed and can’t believe their mate would do that to them. Their heart feels torn and they might even wonder, “How in the world can I heal from this?”

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Why Do People Cheat? And Can We Survive It?

Why Do People Cheat? And Can We Survive It?

Being unhappy in a relationship is pretty common. Having an affair because of that unhappiness is also pretty common. When people feel lonely they will do almost anything to relieve the loneliness, including starting a relationship with another person.

I have counselled several couples where one of the mates turned to another to relieve whatever they were feeling. Usually they think they will never be caught by the other, but it often happens that the other already knows.

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Overcoming Temptation in Relationships

Overcoming Temptation in Relationships: Avoiding Infidelity

I was listening to a friend recently talk about temptation. You know that feeling of being tempted that takes hold of you and you just can’t put on the brakes and whatever it is that you are temporarily obsessed by seems like you just have to have it no matter what? Yeah, that’s temptation.

Being seduced by an idea, a substance, food, music, or person people is probably the most human experience we can all have. We all wake up on some days and crave something. Maybe it’s coffee or tea or soda or a donut. We start with an idea. We get tempted with a thought. The thought becomes a craving and then it is a must have it.

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How Jealousy in a Relationship Divides Us

Jealousy in a Relationship

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.

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Jealousy in Relationships and Why We Feel Hurt

Jealousy in Relationships

I was thinking about jealousy the other day and how it can be so difficult in relationships. What brought on this thought was me thinking about telling my husband that I was going to meet a male friend, a colleague, for coffee. I was thinking about how he doesn’t even blink when I tell him these things.

He knows about my friend and I guess he doesn’t feel threatened in any way. I don’t know this to be true but it is what I think he thinks. Maybe I will ask him. But on the same subject I do know he was telling me about a dinner he was going to with some of his male friends. I asked who was going and he read the list and I heard a woman’s name.

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