Thursday, December 26, 2024
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The Shifting Truth of Boundary Blowout

Reading Time: 8 minutes He cheats, or he shoves you to the floor in a fight and you didn’t see it coming. You freeze in place, like a deer in the headlights. Then one of two things is going to happen. Either you’re going to flee or you aren’t, but if you don’t flee, chances are you will experience “boundary blowout”. Then, because you have to, you will start lying to yourself and everyone else. You won’t see it exactly that way, but that’s exactly what it is.

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Forgive or Get Out

Reading Time: 3 minutes Some things are unforgivable when you’re in it. Sometimes you have to get some time and space between yourself and the pain to get there. I lived in a marriage where my husband cheated. If it had been once, I might have gotten past that. However, it wasn’t one. For a very long time, I had neither courage to forgive or get out. I tried to forgive it. I tried everything. But it wasn’t until years after our divorce that I honestly did. While we were still together I hated him and myself. By the time it was over I had a lot of forgiving myself to do also.

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5 Habits of Unhappy Couples and How to Avoid Them

Reading Time: 4 minutes Show me a couple where thank yous don’t flow liberally between them and I’ll show you a couple that has a lot of resentments lurking just under the surface. 

Politeness and appreciation are the two things that make the day to day business of sharing a bathroom sink and a closet with someone doable. 

Appreciation tends to flow very easily at the beginning of a relationship. However, as the newness starts to wear off, appreciation can drift to other things. The problem is, you get what you focus on. When you quit focusing on appreciation you find fewer and fewer things to appreciate. 

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How to Stay Married

Reading Time: 3 minutes If you are committed to staying married, and you are less happy than you want to be, that’s not normal and it’s not ok. The good news is it’s probably mendable because you can learn the skills it takes to be in a relationship. Sooner is better than later, because sometimes later is too late. Waiting too long might not mean divorce. There is a fate far, far worse than divorce. Waiting too long may mean spending the rest of your life in a soulless, loveless, lifeless marriage, and that is a recipe for slow, early death.

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What Management Gurus Know About Relationships

Reading Time: 3 minutes We know this stuff. I’m stating the obvious. Focus on what you want more of and you’ll get it. Focus on what you don’t want and you’ll get that too. The key in relationships is to be willing. Are you willing to let go of resentment and irritation to get more of what you want? The easy answer is yes, but in practice, it’s a little more difficult for many people. You think you’ve earned your resentments. You deserve them. People wear resentments like bad relationship merit badges, they collect them.

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3 Totally Unorthodox Ways to Win at Life

Reading Time: 5 minutes Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with a manual, and yet we’re all playing by a set of rules we are programmed with. A lot of the time we aren’t even fully aware of the programming that shapes almost all of our choices, behaviors, and experiences.

We learn most of the rules we live by early in childhood. We accept those things as if they are true whether they are or aren’t. Most of the time we don’t question whether or not they’re even effective.

Because we can rarely see our programming, we spend all of our time playing the same game by the same rules. Doing the same thing over and over again will naturally produce the same result.

If you want different results in your life, you might want to change the game and the rules. The good news is you can. It’s your life. You get to do it however you’d like.

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Everything You Need to Know About that Asshole You Should Avoid

Reading Time: 5 minutes I recently talked to a woman who’d been emotionally and psychologically abused by her fiance for almost two years. It was bad. Everyone could see it but her. She told me that after her best friend’s roommate pointed out to her that he was a classic malignant narcissist she knew she needed to end it. She looked it up online. She read all the “symptoms” and sure enough, it fit him to a tee. So, she was finally done. He’s crazy. 

The roommate is a barista. While the observant barista might have been right, those kinds of diagnosis are very complicated and it’s not easy to get right. Even more so, it’s sad that so often we need an excuse to leave a relationship that’s not working. 

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How You Feel About Yourself Is Contagious

Reading Time: 4 minutes It doesn’t come naturally for a woman to love herself in our society. In fact, things are set up quite the opposite. A lot of huge, money-making corporations in the world that control most of what you see out there every day, bank of the fact that you will feel unworthy.

This is a bold statement, but I’ll say it anyway. If you don’t have the skills to truly love yourself, you might not have much business in a relationship. You are dangerous to yourself and others until you heal. A relationship won’t fix you. Only you can do that.

This story was shared with permission and the names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

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