Do you ever find yourself thinking things like:

• I’d better give her a call or she will think I don’t like her.
• If I do what I want to do he will be mad.
• If I don’t explain myself they will think I don’t care.
• If I wear the same outfit again they will think less of me.

And so on….

Do you automatically adjust your behavior to try to have some control over what others think of you – trying to get approval and avoid disapproval?

All of us, as we were growing up, learned a myriad of ways to try to have control over getting love, avoiding pain, and feeling safe. One of the ways we might have learned is to lie.

We all had many opportunities to learn this way of protecting ourselves, which is a form of manipulation/control:

Peter had been working with me on the phone for a number of months. He had sought my help because of problems in his relationship with his wife, Anika.

Peter grew up with an extremely empty, invasive, controlling mother and an extremely empty emotionally withdrawn father. His mother constantly pulled on Peter to fill her up with his praise and attention.

“Let’s talk tonight,” said Callie.

“Oh no, not again!” thought Darren as he gave Callie a blank stare, feeling like a deer in the headlights.

Darren knew from past experience that “Let’s talk,” meant, “Let’s talking about what you are doing wrong, and about how you are not meeting my needs, and about how hurt and unloved I feel.”

Frequently, my clients and members of our website ask me, “Is my relationship healthy? How do I know if it is healthy?”

Just as physical health is on a continuum, emotional health and relationship health are also on a continuum. And, like physical health, each person may have different criteria regarding what constitutes health. For example, some people say they are very healthy if they get a cold or flu a few times a year, while others’ health criteria is that they never get sick at all.

“I feel so frustrated when Mark is late,” complained Shauna, during our phone session. “What am I supposed to do with all this frustration?”

Shauna believed that her feeling of frustration was being caused by Mark. But this was not the case.

Very often, in my work with my clients, when I ask them what they are feeling they say, “I feel sad.” Often, they do not know why they feel sad.

Sadness comes from two very different sources.

Core Sadness

Core sadness is sadness that is in reaction to something that is happening or has happened externally. Many life situations can cause sadness, such as: