Does Holiday Time with the Family Shake you Up Emotionally?
You are of course not alone!
Spending the holidays with family can be a great chance to reconnect but also a serious stressor that can bring up old issues of sibling rivalry, territoriality, competitiveness, boundary difficulties, and perhaps hardest of all, trying […]
Healthy relationships are all about feeling emotionally safe, right?? Wrong!
Learn how to avoid the relationship comfort zone in this newly released podcast: http://www.idopodcast.com/mirel-goldstein/
In this episode we cover relationship topics that include:
Is “Three a Crowd” when it comes to relationships?
When I was in graduate school, the idea of using triangulation in relationships had a pretty bad rap. But there are healthy things about relationship triangles too. (As an aside, a great book that discusses triangulation […]
When You’re Tired of the Pain
If you’ve ever looked at the people around you and wondered, Why does everybody seem to have it so easy when I have it so hard, no matter how hard I try, then you might know what […]
To speak or not to speak?
Many people wonder why it’s a good thing to talk about problems, feelings, memories, and more, instead of just pushing them away and forgetting about them. This is especially true when the act of talking seems to […]
Contamination Fears in Relationships and Toxic Shame
While most of us associate fears of contaminating others with physical illnesses like the chicken pox or the Zika virus, many people harbor similar kinds of fears about being emotionally damaged or infected in ways that […]
Who is this person who abuses his/her partner?
(For the sake of simplicity, I at times have used the male pronoun to refer to the abuser, and the female pronoun to refer to the victim. In reality, the roles of victim and perpetrator are not […]
(Disclaimer: This story is a fictional piece)
Letting Go: Sarah’s Story
Sarah stared blankly at the empty journal in front of her, her therapist’s words reverberating in her head. “Just put yourself back there, as if you’re 14 again…or even 6. And write to me about […]
Sometimes we lose track of how much we can improve the communication in our relationships if we learn to really listen; to listen to understand without thinking about how we’re going to defend ourselves, fix a problem, or make the other person’s feelings go away. Listening sounds so simple, but […]
The tension between what we know and what we don’t know about our partners can make it hard to appreciate just how easily misunderstandings can happen.
Technology only adds to the difficulty; we get so much information with the constant texting, emailing, social media sharing etc…that we […]