Feel-Bad Motivation vs. Feel-Good Motivation
When you need to motivate yourself to do something, do you think about how good you’ll feel once you’ve done it, or do you make yourself feel bad about not having done it yet?
The Thief Within
There is a thief within us, and it can be remarkably persuasive. It tells us all the terrible things that might happen, reminds us of the painful things that already have, and convinces us that remaining vigilant will somehow protect us from experiencing them again.
Are We a High-Conflict Couple?
Every couple disagrees, but some relationships reach a point where conflict begins to dominate the experience of being together.
Why Do I Keep Asking the Same Questions After an Affair?
After discovering an affair, people often find themselves asking questions they have already asked. Some questions establish what happened; others seek a certainty no answer can provide.
I Don’t Want to Make Another Decision Today
You spend the day making decisions about people, money, risk, and deadlines. Then someone asks what you want for dinner and you do not care. Why decision fatigue at work becomes conflict at home, and what couples can do about it.
How Divorce and Parental Conflict Affect Children at Different Ages
A four-year-old and a sixteen-year-old live through the same divorce very differently. What children understand, fear and take responsibility for changes with age, and so does what they need from their parents.
PTSD, Resilience, and Post-Traumatic Growth: What Determines How People Respond to Trauma?
Learn the difference between PTSD, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, and explore what influences how people respond after trauma.
How to Effectively Sabotage Your Couples Therapy
Couples therapy can be expensive, inconvenient, and occasionally uncomfortable, so if you are going to sabotage it, you should at least be efficient.
Compulsive Behaviors, Shame, and Relationships
Why repetitive behaviors persist even when you understand them: how relief reinforces repetition, how shame drives secrecy, and how checking, spending and reassurance seeking affect a partner.
Why an Apology Is Not Enough
An apology can acknowledge that something went wrong. Repair requires understanding what happened, taking responsibility for its effect on the other person, and responding in a way that reduces the likelihood of the same injury happening again.
Are There Times When a Relationship Is Particularly Vulnerable to an Affair?
Why an affair happens when it does: what parenthood, career change, illness, loss, opportunity, a deteriorating marriage and substance use can change, and what they don't explain.
High Achievement and Shame: The Cost of Performance-Based Worth
Why can years of success fail to settle a sense of not being good enough? How achievement becomes evidence of worth, why each milestone becomes the new baseline, and what therapy can help separate.
Intellectualization: The Defense of All Defenses
Intellectualization turns painful experience into analysis. Why the defense is so convincing in highly intelligent people, why insight rarely changes a pattern by itself, and what changes when thinking and feeling begin to inform each other.
Intelligence and Terminal Uniqueness
Terminal uniqueness is the conviction that your circumstances are different enough that the usual advice does not apply. Why intelligent people build the best arguments for staying exactly where they are.
The Impostor in the Mirror
Why accomplished people can doubt their competence despite the evidence, and how expertise, advancement, preparation, and shame keep impostor feelings in place.
The Difference Between Couples Therapy and Co-Parenting Counseling After Separation or Divorce
Couples therapy and co-parenting counseling can involve the same two people and many of the same disagreements. The difference is the relationship being treated, and what the work is meant to accomplish.