Category / Attachment / conflict / Parenting
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Confession- I still yell!
People yell at their kids. And that’s ok. I mean it isn’t great but it is going to happen. You could drop your kids off at my house (please don’t- I do not take donations) and there is almost no chance that I would ever lose my shit with your kids. But mine? The ones that I love deeply? They can still take me down. 35 years I have been…
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Do These Pants Make My A$$ Look Big?
I want to be able to take feedback from the people I love because they are my best teachers and I know that I am not perfect and growth comes from feedback and hearing the feedback isn’t dangerous and I don’t have to change to be loved and the people I love want me to be even more amazing.
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Is Your Relationship as Frozen as Your Yard?
Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy whose work has transformed and inspired my own talks about the 3 Demon Dialogues that shut down couple’s ability to manage connection with flexibility. Here’s my super over simplified explanation of her years of research. Find the Bad Guy– the blame and criticism conversation that leaves little room for solution. The Protest Polka– the demand/withdraw dance where each partner pursues in…
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Can Your Partner Find You?
Mom…MOM….MOM…MOM!!! When our kids can’t find us, they yell. Sometimes we are sitting right there, distracted, on our phones, thinking thoughts not about them, trying to work… but they can’t make a connection so they GET YOUR ATTENTION. In marriage when we don’t feel heard sometimes we get loud. Sometimes we get mean. Sometimes we get sullen. When we can’t find the connection we use whatever coping skills we have.…
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Marriage Geek’s Serenity Meditation
Grant me the serenity to accept the truth about the people I love, the courage to ask for better behavior from them, and the wisdom to know where to put the bar. Marriage is tough because each of us, deep at our core, want to feel unconditionally loved and accepted. Criticism feels like betrayal or abandonment. Yet, to create a loving environment for our spouses, we must learn how to…
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Resist the Urge- the guide to less freaking out
I was asked to offer Stop Yelling for a company training. Not all their staff are parents so we wanted to make it more general than parenting. As I was teaching it last night I realized how parenting without losing our shit is the same as having a tough conversation with our partner without freaking out. Parenting and marriage require us to put relationship over self. We must trust that…
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I want my kids to feel lousy… well… kind of
Try this- read this to yourself (or out loud…interesting at work) I want my kids to feel (insert feeling) mad- sad- worried- abandoned- frightened- bored- embarrassed disappointed- insecure- foolish- guilty- lonely- ashamed- rejected- tense You ok with that? These are the feelings that we have decided are “negative” feelings… obviously these are the uncomfortable ones. The rules of the game for giving your kids emotional resilience and a deep emotional…
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2016 Post Thanksgiving Commentary
Each year I sit down to write my newsletter on Thanksgiving morning before the festivities begin and set it to go out in the evening when the party’s over. Mostly I steal stuff from last years post and tweek it a bit. The best thing about holiday traditions is just how predictable they can be. The first time I took on my family’s turkey duty at my house was 1983-…
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Wiping my tears- Time for Service and Resistance
Wednesday was awful and I feared I couldn’t write, couldn’t see clients. Everyone I voted for lost. Today I woke up ready to fight. My progressive politics are an integral part of my Marriage Geek message- you are not required to read any further. I get it that lots of people don’t agree with me but the greatest thing about the internet is that everyone can have their own soap…
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You Might Not be Fighting Enough
When a new couple comes into my office one of my first questions is “Are you fighting too much or too little?” By the time couples get to my office, the answer is usually they aren’t fighting enough. I have to say that if my practice was in some less Nordic state, I might get a different response. But this is Minnesota, the land of MN nice and passive aggressive…
