After reconciling with your partner, do you find yourself back in the same pattern?
Nancy wrote to me asking the following question:
“My husband and I were married for 15 years. Divorced. Reconciled after 9 months and re-married. I am having second thoughts about the reconciliation and I’ve become introverted with no desire to communicate or be close. I feel very protective of my personal affairs and feelings. The more he pushes the farther away I remove myself from the relationship. I feel the relationship is severely co-dependent. How do we break the co-dependency? What steps can I take to figure out why my need to protect is so extreme?”
Nancy, it sounds like the underlying issue is that your husband wants to have control over how you feel about him, and you are in resistance to being controlled. As long as controlling and not being controlled is the intent governing your relationship, your relationship cannot heal. Continue reading “Divorced and Reconciled – But It’s Not Working”
Should you leave a relationship that is stuck in a negative cycle? It is quite common for me to work with clients who are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship cycle. Sarah describes a common cycle that she wants to resolve:
Do you find yourself getting hurt over and over in relationships? Discover why.
Do you find yourself falling hard for someone and then ending up feeling rejected and not good enough when it ends? This is the problem that Sabrina is having:
Dating provides many opportunities to learn and grow. Discover some of what you can learn that will be very valuable for you.
Franklin writes:
“I am a 68 year old male who was married for 27 years and now divorced 15 years. I have fallen in love with a woman after only three months of dating, but she is disengaging by being incommunicado. I am mystified since things were going so well then suddenly she is not available. What to do?”
Franklin, as hard as it is, there is nothing you can do about her disengaging from you. You need to be very compassionate toward your own heartbreak. Generally, people do this when they get scared of intimacy. There are two major reasons they get scared: Continue reading Challenges of The Dating Scene
Discover the difference between needs coming from emotional dependency and authentic needs that we have within a relationship.
Every few weeks I do a free webinar. People can listen on their computers or on the phone; they can write in asking questions or they can ask me directly on the phone. Here is one of the questions a woman – I will call her Susan – asked in a webinar on emotional dependency:
“When we are in a relationship and we have made our needs clear to our partner, is hanging on in the hope they will follow through with promises to meet our needs a sign of emotional dependency?”
The answer is – it depends on whatneeds you are taking about. There are some needs we have that can only be met by another person, and there are other needs that we need to learn to meet ourselves. Continue reading Are You Emotionally Dependent?
Are you aware of what state you are in when you and your partner come together?
On a recent visit with my daughter and her family, she and I were taking a walk and talking about our mutual work.
“I read a lot of books about relationships that offer suggestions for how to approach your partner to get your partner to connect with you,” she said. “These books do a great job of describing the ways we behave that cause relationship disconnection—which is helpful—but I have not found it helpful with my husband to TRY to get him to connect with me. We connect naturally when we are both connected with ourselves.” Continue reading Do You Come To Your Partner Open And/or Happy?
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