Search Results for: lisa firestone/feed/2009/11/fear-of-intimacy

Why Some Men Give Up Their Identity in a Relationship

…t-shirts reading “My only boss is my wife.” Many married, heterosexual men feed into this idea by joking about their “old ball and chain” or being kept “on a short leash,” or “happy wife, happy life.” This is not only a distorted and unfair characterization of men and women, but a kind of rigid relationship role-playing whose paradigm was supposed to have gone out of style back in the 60s. Good relationships are about equality. They involve give a…

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The Origin of Polarization, Prejudice, and Warfare

…tional conflict. For example, Erich Fromm (1941) explained how existential fears of aloneness and the “terrifying responsibility of freedom” compel people to take actions as a group that would be unthinkable to them as individuals. In Escape from Evil, Ernest Becker (1975) explored in considerable depth the connection between the fear of death and the social evil, which finds its primary expression in warfare. I am aligned with Fromm and Becker in…

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disorganized attachment, dan siegel, ambivalent attachment, avoidant attachment, mindsight

Identifying Your Child’s Attachment Style

…capacity as a mom, so you come to me, seeing I’m hungry, really wanting to feed me, but being terrified that you’re not going to be able to do it and nervous and concerned and doubting your ability. And you come with all this anxiety inside of you that I’m just hungry, but now you’re feeling anxious. So my mirror neurons, which probably should be called “sponge neurons” is really what it is. I’m not really going to so much mirror you as sponge in,…

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disorganized attachment, dan siegel, ambivalent attachment, avoidant attachment, mindsight

Identifying Your Child’s Attachment Style

…capacity as a mom, so you come to me, seeing I’m hungry, really wanting to feed me, but being terrified that you’re not going to be able to do it and nervous and concerned and doubting your ability. And you come with all this anxiety inside of you that I’m just hungry, but now you’re feeling anxious. So my mirror neurons, which probably should be called “sponge neurons” is really what it is. I’m not really going to so much mirror you as sponge in,…

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perfect imperfect moment

3 Steps to Experience the Perfect Imperfect Moment

…psychologist and my co-author on Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice, Robert Firestone, recently pointed out that living in the moment isn’t always as joyful as the saying would suggest. Life is filled with a wide array of emotions including pain. However, living in the moment does ensure us a more lively existence. We can’t experience the past or the future, yet we spend much of our time lost in regretting the past and worrying about the future. Th…

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relationship fix

The Key to Healthy Relationships: It’s All in Your Head

…s or property. They don’t regard a child as an extension of themselves, or feed off of his or her achievements. Doing so prohibits children from ever discovering who or what they could have become. This is not to say that the connection between a couple or a parent and child does not involve a special feeling of love, care, or concern. However, loving implies an enjoyment of the other person’s emergence as an individual and sensitivity to his or h…

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Are You the Pursuer or the Distancer in Your Relationship?

…eate in our romantic relationships and in our degree of tolerance for true intimacy. In the process of growing up, we develop fears and defenses that keep us at a simultaneously frustrating, yet safe-feeling, distance from our partner. That is often why even when things shift, and the distancer starts to seek closeness, the pursuer will often recoil, and the roles will seem to shift. For example, for years a man I worked with in therapy struggled…

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Forgiveness: The Secret to a Healthy Relationship

…nner critic and act in ways that lead us toward our goals. Be aware of any fears of intimacy – If we find ourselves all of a sudden picking apart our partner or stubbornly unwilling to forgive a character flaw that was there from the beginning, we may want to consider that our own fears of intimacy are driving us to push our partner away. Most of us can easily see certain fears or hesitancies around closeness in our partner, but we often fail to r…

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Six Tips to Keep Long-Term Relationships Exciting

…It means challenging our own defenses and facing our, often subconscious, fears about intimacy. Fighting for a relationship means being stubborn about not getting in our own way of staying close to someone else. Here are six tips that I have found to help couples stand the test of time. 1) Make Sure to Have Joyful Time Together The ability to laugh with one another is a true sign of vitality in a relationship. It’s important to be able to share i…

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expecting too much in relationship

Are You Expecting Too Much from Your Partner?

These 7 ways we over-rely on our partner can seriously hurt our relationship. When a couple comes to therapy, they tend to each arrive with a laundry list of complaints about the other. While neither person may claim to be perfect themselves, they find it much easier to talk about their partner. “She never picks up after herself.” “He hardly notices when I’m feeling down.” “She cares more about seeing her friends than spending time with me and th…

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