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.
Trust issues pervade relationships everywhere, but they can be overcome.
It almost sounds funny to talk about how we have to learn to trust our special person, our partner, our mate. But we do. We have to learn that the one we are in relationship with does love us, even when we can’t feel the love. And that is one of the hardest parts of staying together.
When we meet our special person, most of us fall into believing that since we have found them, that’s all we need. Everything will be right from here on out because we are with our perfect mate. Most of us start our relationships this way. And then we realize that the perfect person is not enough to sustain our happiness.
And believe it or not, this is normal. It happens in almost all relationships. So what do we have to do to make our relationship last, even though sometimes we don’t always feel great about it? I believe we need to grow our relationship muscles.
The most satisfying feeling for two people to share is experiencing a connection with their partner, the person they love. To know you are understood by them and to feel closeness that develops out of this connection is a place all humans long for. It is what reminds us of our togetherness, and it is way we all feel love.
Every one feels this when it’s happening, and we feel it distinctly when it’s cut off and is not available to us. All of us have felt a cold shoulder from someone we wanted to be with. Every one of us has been sad because we were not understood by our mate. This is the pain of being in love with our special person. This is often the key issue that keeps people apart.
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.
Learning how to overcome anger can be a struggle, but you can definitely do it if you put your mind to it.
I was thinking about all the people we know who get mad. You know who they are. They are the ones we are careful around because we don’t want to get them upset. They are the ones who get mad out of nowhere and then there is a problem.
We all know someone or some people like this. Maybe it’s you. I know it’s me. When I was a little girl if something didn’t go my way I got mad. This is what I saw my mother do when she was disappointed or frustrated. This is what I learned to do too.
I was talking with my cousin’s husband the other day and I felt myself wanting to stress a point from my experience. It was a memory from my history that was really important to me, yet he was talking about something that was equally important to him; it was not in agreement with, and different from my story.
It felt like we were getting ready to disagree about parts of the story when I realized how important we as humans feel about our particular memories. It’s as if the way we think about things is so vital to our way of presenting ourselves in the world and to each other. This moment gave me some insight as to how we as partners in a relationship might want to argue to the death with our mate over memories that we perceive as not remembered correctly.
Being confident takes practice. But building confidence in ourselves and then applying it to our partner might just get us some great results.