InnerSelf

by Joyce Vissell. Do you ever wonder if you’re too much for those you love? Do you ever worry that you will burden them? Do you ever feel that your loved ones already have enough on their plate to be concerned about your upsets?

by Barry Vissell. Can men and women really understand each other? Sometimes it seems like the wall between the sexes is impenetrable. At my annual men’s retreat last month, the difficulty understanding women became a central theme. One after another of the men shared his challenges with his female partner...

by Starhawk. Put-downs are terms of disrespect, of ridicule and humiliation. I use the term shut-down for a form of communication that, instead of opening up a topic and encouraging debate and healthy conflict, shuts it off. Shut-downs may be overt but shut-downs can also be very subtle...

by Dr. Lisa Love. Though relationships can provide a lot of pleasure and reward, they can also deliver their share of hurt, pain, and misunderstanding. Whether intentionally or not, others may let you down. Learning how to cope with...

by Tim Ray. To become a VIP member of Club Shouldsville, you must constantly suffer from the belief that one "should" and "should not" say and do certain things in relationships. And since reality almost never lives up to most people's expectations and ideas about how...

by Isha Judd. How can we tell if our intimate relationships are based on need or something deeper? Here I share some common indicators of codependency and other behaviors that erode goodwill and harmony in relationships and...

by Joyce Vissell. Everyone has unique words they need to hear. These words are like a magic sound to their ears, for they have perhaps longed to hear them all of their lives. The important thing in our relationships is to...

by Karen Casey. Choosing to be peaceful over needing to be right is a big challenge. But it's one you must tackle if you want your life and your relationships to change. You have to give up the need to be "right." Giving up the desire to be right doesn't come as easily, per­haps, and that's...

by David Wygant. You need to be 100% genuine with yourself. If being completely connected and honest with the way you feel about everything sounds stressful to you, then I’m sorry. Sweeping things under the rug is not allowed...

by Carl Alasko, Ph.D. Because blame can appear as every­thing from an arched eyebrow or a cynical sigh to a shouted accu­sation, identifying blame is not a simple task. And taking steps to eliminate it takes sustained effort. Here's how to deal with blame...

by Daphne Rose Kingma. One of the reasons we often don't speak out is that we feel hopeless about being heard. It's probably true that you haven't been heard in the past — by your parents, siblings, spouses, or friends — and so, there's a part of you that says...

by Joyce Vissell. When you ask someone a personal question, do you sit back and listen to their response without any interruptions? Or do you fill in the waiting period with more questions and other talking? Most of us would right away say that we are like the first type of person or at least we want to be. Oddly enough, most people are like the second and don’t realize it.

by Barry Vissell.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far from “Mother River”: Go with the flow! Most times the main current will bring you through tricky areas without any struggle on your part. But how often do we fight against the flow, not trusting the divine current to keep us safe. One of my favorite...

by Marie T. Russell. Imagine... a world where any time you inflicted pain, whether physical or emotional, unto any other being you would immediately feel the same pain. Such was the situation that was brought to earth by an extra-terrestrial in a science fiction story entitled Rule Golden by Damon Knight.

by Sri Eknath Easwaran According to Spinoza, "Peace is not an absence of war. It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, trust, and justice." Even if all weapons were to disappear from the earth that would not guarantee peace. We must actively cultivate peace as a virtue...

by Marie T. Russell. "Don't tell me what to do!" We've heard that said many times... we've even said it, and at times when we didn't say it, we thought it! "Don't bug me! Don't get on my case! Don't tell me what to do!" Sounds like a teenager speaking... ah! but it is! It's that inner teenager that most of us still carry around inside.

Relationships don't just fall apart overnight. There are warning signs to look for, signs that your levels of emotional tension are rising and that the relationship is in trouble. I call these warning signs the Four R's. The Four R's encompass the four stages of tension in a relationship...

by Rick Phillips. We may think that because of the development of the ability to see and hear into the far reaches of space that we must be quite advanced in the field of communication. But all this has little effect on our ability to listen with our heart...

by Caroline Sutherland. In order to reach the summit of your own personal mountain, your mandate must be to love, inspire, and serve others in whatever you do -- not in some lofty purpose "over there," but in your daily life, right where you are right now. Every night before you go to bed, it helps to...

Do you consider yourself an emotional person? For centuries astute observers of the human condition have noted that people vary remarkably in this dimension. Emotional Intensity clearly plays a major role in love relationships, yet has oddly been all but ignored professionally...

Honesty does not come naturally to most people, but it is a skill that can be practiced and learned. I feel a deep sadness when I hear people tell me how much they have been hurt in their dating relationships and how this has caused them to approach each new relationship with fear or to give up on relationships altogether.

When most people are asked what they want to be remembered for, what matters most to them in life, or how they'd spend their remaining days if they only had a few left, the majority focus on relationship issues. They want to matter to someone, to love and be loved, and to contribute to making someone's life better.

"Communication" has become such a buzz word for what couples need to do that it's lost meaning. What you say and how you say it certainly matters, and I'll focus on ways to talk more effectively later. First, though, I want to emphasize that you can cut down on headache-causing strife using any number of strategies, most of which don't involve struggling for the right words.

Traditional models of couples or relationship therapy emphasize being honest about our feelings, being "up front" and standing up for ourselves. The problem with these models is that when we are upset, we do not see things clearly. We do not see how the situation looks to the other person...

by Roberta Maisel. Giving advice is one of the points of greatest tension and conflict in our relations with our children. Parents want to help their children out of scrapes and difficult situations by telling them how to do it better. But giving advice often makes matters worse.

by Riki Robbins Jones, Ph.D.

If you're in a relationship and are ready to deal with your conflicts, don't be afraid. You and your partner have the power to share your feelings and needs -- and reach agreement peacefully. Is it possible for you and your partner to resolve smoothly the differences that arise in your relationship? Can the two of you have conversations that are safe and mutually supportive?

I had a man tell me that the problem women have is that we get more hung up on a man's words than we do their actions. He meant that we don't always see if a man walks his talk. We get all caught up in the words, and ignore the value of actions.

by Susie & Otto Collins. Everyone gets angry. Some people show it openly and others don't. In relationship, anger can be either healthy or unhealthy. How you process it is what determines whether it becomes a tool for growth or a source of pain and destruction.

Partners sometimes try so hard to protect each other's feelings. They cannot connect, draw close, or touch each other emotionally because of these protective defenses. The object of truth-telling is to break down these defenses -- to stop the protection and tell the truth about how you feel.

by Dr. Riki Robbins, Ph.D.

Trust evolves. We start off as babies with perfect trust. Inevitably, trust is damaged by our parents or other family members. In order to heal, we must learn when and how trust can be restored. As part of this final step, if we cannot fully trust someone. then we...

The heart seems to be one of the most vulnerable in the system because it is the one that has held the most fear, the most old pain, perhaps, and repressed energy. It is the one that is most afraid to open to pure unconditional love, which is indeed where your power lies. So, in essence, when you open your heart and heal without fear, you are opening to your own spiritual power.

The idea that people are who and what they say they are is a necessary assumption. It's what some have referred to as the truth bias that operates in society -- an implicit assumption that unless we're shown some reason to believe otherwise, we generally believe we're being told the truth.

by Shakti Gawain.

The people in our lives who make us uncomfortable, who annoy us, who we feel judgmental or even combative toward, reflect parts of ourselves that we reject -- usually aspects of our disowned selves, the shadow side of our personality. Oftentimes we find ourselves attracted to our opposites...

We are all familiar with the persona of the stereotypical mother-in-law -- a woman bedeviled with an intrusive and critical nature. Mothers-in-law are derided in comedy sketches, in soap operas, in books, and in real life. Do all mothers-in-law live up to their nefarious reputation? Obviously not.

A relationship is something to appreciate. A relationship allows you to share experiences. It lets you see yourself through someone else's eyes, and if that can be annoying at times, it is also a wonderful opportunity for self-awareness and growth...

We spend much of our time talking about trivial matters and practical ones -- the weather, plans for the day, routine office events, frivolous gossip, the next technological miracle, etc. So little of our conversation addresses our passions, loves, emotions, dreams, or our creative insights and soul stirrings...

You will be much more successful at making core-level life changes if you enlist the support of the people around you. It will be necessary for you to discover those people who are relying on you not to change and then enroll them in the change you want to make...

There is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. One could say that wisdom is knowledge that has been brought into one's heart and experienced as true. We have all been introduced to many ideas and theories from reading books or listening to someone, but until this information has been tested in our own experience, wisdom is not possible.

by Rebecca Z. Shafir, M.A. CCC. If we could listen to ourselves as we converse, we would probably be astounded at how often we speak mindlessly. We are so taken up with being the speaker that, quite innocently perhaps, we make insensitive comments, speak inaccurately, or talk too much, hardly aware...