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.
Relationship arguments can be difficult to get through. You fight with your loved one, feel unsafe, and feel hurt. Most of all, you might worry whether your relationship can weather the storm.
It can. Here’s how.
I have talked about my sleep before. I love my sleep and I want to get as much as I can. I am also a light sleeper, so when my husband breathes or stretches I feel the effects. I have gotten used to his way of sleeping, but lately when I wake up in the middle of the night he apparently wakes too (must be our ages&em;we are getting older).
The new trend is, I try to get back to sleep as soon as possible and I am almost there and then he will move or make a noise and this move or sound wakes me up. I will try again to get back to sleep and I am almost there and then he will make a noise or move and I will wake up again. This has been happening a lot lately.
Here’s what I did.
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.
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.
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.
Annoying girlfriend, boyfriend, or spouse getting on your nerves? There are peaceful, loving, productive ways to deal with it. This article examines some of those ways, and also some of what not to do.
All of us sometimes in our lives get annoyed with people we love. It’s only normal that when humans interact in close quarters they are inevitably going to get on each other’s nerves. And in relationships this annoyance can happen regularly. In fact in many relationships it does.
Humans are funny beings. We are extremely well equipped to tell instantly when something doesn’t feel right. We know immediately when we don’t like something. And we are experts at understanding what we need to stop when something bothers us so we can feel better.
We use these skills almost automatically, especially when we are in a relationship. We are the first ones to tell our partner, the one person we love the most, exactly what we don’t like about what they do or didn’t do.
It would be helpful if all of us in relationships knew exactly what love is supposed to feel like. If we knew, then we would know if we were in love or if we weren’t. We wouldn’t wonder about it. As a couples specialist I work with a lot of people in relationships who are often not sure about the love they feel.
Some people will be very angry at their mate and tell me all the things the partner does to make them pull their hair out. Then I ask the same person, “Do you think about ending the relationship?” Then they scold me as if I haven’t been listening and then they tell me, “I can’t leave, I love him.”
Learning how to handle conflict in a relationship is tough, because it forces us to challenge our instincts.
When people get their feelings hurt, most of us don’t want to go near the person who hurt them. This holds true in families, with co-workers and in relationships. It’s just easier to back away when something painful happens. It’s just the way many humans are wired.
As a couples specialist I know that even with the person we love, for some of us it’s instinctive to pull away when things get messy. I work with people who love each other who just want to know what to do when they fight. They usually wonder if they could do the fighting part better so they don’t have to stay wounded and apart for so long.