If you have poor self-esteem or are easily offended, shame is the operative emotion. If you lack confidence, feel awkward around others or just are uncomfortable in your own skin, then an unhealthy shame is defining your experience. Continue reading
Marriage Bottom Line: “I Need Your Support”
A marriage is an attachment relationship for adults. As in childhood with one’s primary caregiver, attachment is a relationship bond to a thoroughly supportive other. Continue reading
Parenthood Never Ends
On the deepest level, you never let go of your children. Perhaps you thought that when they leave the home, get established, you would detach to some degree. Hopefully that is true in day to day matters. Yet whenever they report a success your spirit soars and whenever they share a setback you suffer it … Continue reading
Compassion Reduces Shame
Compassion must be a superpower for it even helps to reduce shame. How does it work? Shaming by others relies on authority, a kind of power, to make it stick. Without authority, we cannot take it seriously. Imagine your 4-year-old telling you in a tantrum that you are a “bad parent.” It slides right off … Continue reading
A Union of Inter-dependence
To marry somebody is to emotionally depend on them before all others, in perpetuity. Likewise, it is to agree to be dependable for another, as first and last resort. This word “dependence” has a vulnerable quality – without their emotional support we are vulnerable to isolation and collapse from the burden of our emotional lives. … Continue reading
Argue With, Not About, Emotion
Most couples will initially present relationship difficulty as “a communication problem.” Many workplace conflicts will be “resolved” by a commitment to better communication. Stacks of volumes have been written about communication in all sorts of relationships and settings. In this little postlet, I want to highlight the role of emotions in contentious discourse. Reversing course, … Continue reading
Everybody Needs a Creation Story
For mental security, you have to know whence you came. In the disintegration of shame, in the free fall of self-worth, in the evaporation of self-confidence, there must be some kind of backstop, a place past which you can descend no further. Beyond the backstop is the abyss, a word used in ancient scripture for … Continue reading
Seeking Union 