Or: I won’t stretch professionally, because I am afraid I might outgrow you. And to make sure you don’t outgrow me, I’ll discourage you from stretching. Or: I won’t give up my criticalness, because then you might become too confident, and that could jeopardize our marriage as we know it.

Almost universally, marriage partners develop a remarkable, unwritten agreement: I will live with you despite your ridiculous behavior if you will live with me despite mine. In the process, couples limit their own and their partner’s unfolding, reducing themselves to their least capacities rather than inspiring each other to their fullest. This is the prototypical frog-in-the-pot story. We enter the relationship full of zest and dreams, then let both slip away for the sake of the marriage.

In my own marriage, I used to have the deep, underlying fear that if I changed too much, if I became too mature, too professionally successful, if I carried my meditation practice too far, I would leave my partner behind. Then I would be all alone.

So I held myself back. For years I did not step into my full professional capacities and also restrained myself from leaping fully into my meditation. Of course when you say out loud that you are giving up the fruits of life in order to keep your partner, it sounds absurd.

Nevertheless, fear of losing one’s partner produces all sorts of strange, semi- conscious, self-limiting strategies. When I finally voiced this concern to my wife, about leaving her behind, she expressed the very same concern about leaving me behind. Fearing for our marriage, we had both held ourselves back.

It is possible to remember that when either partner moves forward professionally, psychologically or spiritually, when either partner drops some fear and opens their heart further, the other follows. Instead of the marriage keeping one static, it can become a source of leap-frogging forward.

If you suspect that you are stunting your own evolution to preserve your relationship, two things can be recommended. One, have faith that your personal development will not interfere with your relationship’s long-term health. Or, if it does, you are in the wrong marriage. Two, seek professional help.

In any case, as Dylan Thomas said under different circumstances: Do not go gentle into that good night. Do not stunt your own growth. Ask yourself: Is there any important way I would be living differently if I were not in this relationship? In order to preserve this relationship do I hold myself back: Professionally? Socially? Psychologically? Spiritually?

The original post is titled Do Not Stunt Your Own Growth in Relationships , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

Our mate takes on the psychological weight and fullness our parents have had for us and we ultimately invest them with all the power to hurt and anger us our parents had. When our wife makes a simple complaint we hear and experience it as our mother’s incessantly critical, rejecting voice. When our husband takes a week-long trip away it crushes us with the weight of our father’s abandonment. We perpetually imagine our partner to be someone they are not. We then respond explosively to them, which can lead to an atomic chain reaction.

Hal Stone, Ph.D. and Sidra Stone, Ph.D., developed a seminal model of this phenomenon they call bonding patterns. As they describe it, this is the arising of parent/child interactions between any two people: the bonding of the child selves of one to the parental selves in the other. For example, the mother self of a woman may lock into the son self of a man…much the same as the bonding process that occurs between infant and parent….It is natural, instinctive and unconscious.

Thomas S., one of my clients, is a very successful, 37-year old college professor who develops complete mental and emotional paralysis whenever his wife, Jane, becomes even mildly disapproving. In his mind, she transforms into his overwhelming mother and he transforms into a helpless little boy. Thomas describes this as the deer in the headlights syndrome. If Jane simply shakes her finger at him, this otherwise dynamic, high-powered man becomes completely immobilized.

Only after months of group therapy, where other members’ role-played his wife while he practiced standing up for himself did he even begin to get over this. It is as if we are each programmed with holograms of our parents. Do you remember the hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars, who kept repeating the same words and actions over and over again?

When a partner does something that even vaguely reminds us of one of our parents, we suddenly see that parent right in front of us, like some 3-D image stored in our mind that has just been switched on. And we not only lose all sight of our actual partner, but also of ourselves. The parental hologram hurtles us back decades in time, so that we become the powerless victim we were at seven years old. We re-experience the hurts of childhood and we respond with the terrified shutting down, the whimpering tearfulness or the murderous rage that were the only choices available to us back in those days.

Dorothy B., another client, is a lovely, caring woman and successful health professional who becomes a killer tiger whenever her boyfriend even raises his voice. In Dorothy’s mind, her non-violent boyfriend becomes the father who used to raise a chair in the air and threaten to crack it over her head, and she becomes the twelve-year old who was ready to claw him to death.

In our work together she has found imagery techniques very helpful. Now when her boyfriend becomes angry she shrinks an image of him in her mind until he is six inches tall and no longer a threat. This allows her to feel safe and remain adult. Another practical solution is to ground oneself in the body and therefore in the present moment. To do this, one can simply allow oneself to breathe, to follow the breath down to the diaphragm then to center oneself by placing ones attention a couple of inches below the navel and a couple of inches inside the body.

It also helps to keep reminding ourselves that this is not 1941,1952, 1963, 1974, or 1980, but the present moment; our partner is not our mother or our father; we are not a child, but full-grown adults, with the adult strengths and resources to protect and care for ourselves. If we ground ourselves in reality, feet on the earth, we will respond to our partner appropriately.

Hal Stone, Ph.D. and Sidra Stone, Ph.D., authors of Embracing Your Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual, describe how they were originally driven to create Voice Dialogue, a wonderful therapeutic tool, fore mostly to protect their own marriage. Each had been previously married and seen those relationships collapse under the weight of unconscious parent-child relating patterns. Determined not to let that happen again, they developed Voice Dialogue, an approach for bringing the parent, child and related parts of themselves into consciousness.

Wake up from the nightmare that your partner is your original, difficult parent. Visualize your partner as being about six inches tall and standing in the palm of your hand. Take a good look at them. See their fears, needs, wonderfulness, and uniqueness. Unhook from any idea you may have that they are a manifestation of either of your original parents.

The original post is titled Wake Up from the Idea that Your Partner is your Original, Difficult Parent , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

If you can, insist your partner keep his word and he continues to disregard you, create effective consequences; the more creative the consequences, the better.

Equally important, let the consequences fit the occasion. For example, with a constantly tardy mate, you might stop taking him into account for your evening plans.

Eat when and where you want, without discussing it with him. When your lover returns home enough times to a cold meal or an empty house, he will probably learn to become timely. Or at least you won’t be held up and disappointed. Whatever you do, make an impression.

One of my clients recently described a yachting trip with her husband. As they prepared to set sail, he taught her to move quickly – by purposely pinning her leg between the dock and their forty-foot sailboat. Despite this voyage into Stephen Kingland, the client wasn’t sure this qualified as abuse.

If you are uncertain, but even suspect, that you are in a seriously abusive relationship, seek professional help immediately.

Just as it is with the toughest prisoners of war, the longer you are victimized, the more difficult it becomes to stand up and break out of it… and the more difficult it becomes even to recognize that you are being abused.

Don’t fool yourself that it will get better by itself, or that if you just did the right thing you can make it stop, or that in some way you deserve to be mistreated. It won’t get better by itself.

There is no doing the right thing – except for leaving. And though your childhood might have conditioned you to be abused, no one deserves it.

Do not collaborate with abuse

1. Make a list of your partner’s behavior that might be considered abusive.

2. Call a help hot-line (it isn’t necessary to give your name) or see a mental health professional and ask for expert opinion about whether the behavior is abusive.

3. If it is, visit a mental health agency or specialist dealing with abuse.

The original post is titled Do Not Collaborate With Abuse , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

For the mind’s tendency is to dodge and weave, to use denial, delusion, stupor and all sorts of other crafty means to avoid seeing what otherwise lies right in front of our nose. No one wants the pain of perceiving their own frailty, hurts and unmet needs. So though many of us pay lip-service to the great value of awareness, to some degree we all avoid it.

Arguably the finest technique for developing powers of awareness is meditation. But even in meditation we dodge and weave, seeing and experiencing what we want to see and experience and neatly avoiding the rest. My personal favorite method for gaining awareness is a combination of meditation and primary relationship.

Meditation is the finest practice for honing awareness. And primary relationship is the mirror in our face that shows us our every limitation. Every reaction to our partner, every bit of anger, hurt or blame is a wonderful red-flag, announcing that within us something is murky and in need of our attention.

Don’t Leave Your Partner….If You Are Only Running Away From Yourself

After discovering a long list of our partner’s limitations, we sometimes reach the conclusion that we have outgrown them, that maybe it is time to move on. Maybe it is. But how do we know? First, it is key to remember that all partners have their deficits. Ben Franklin’s recommendation was to keep both eyes wide open before marriage, to look very carefully at who we choose to settle down with, then to keep them half shut afterwards, once coupled, to give the other reasonable latitude.

However there is another entirely different perspective from which to view our partner. Many of their less-than-perfect behaviors are simply their reactions to our less-than-perfect behavior, their defensive response to our offensiveness. If we are withholding or cool, they may act needy or angry. If we are critical, they may be emotionally or sexually withholding.

We can greatly exaggerate in our minds a partner’s deficits when we transfer our parent’s behaviors onto them. At times, even a mate’s mild behavior; say a slightly controlling quality or a relatively minor insensitivity can cause us to project onto them a parent’s long-ago, abusively controlling or insensitive behavior. We can then enter a downward spiral of excessive anger or blame, which may actually create our partner’s controlling or insensitive behavior.

Whatever the explanation for our partner’s genuine or perceived deficits probably 99.4% of the times that we tell ourselves that we have outgrown our partner, we are fooling ourselves. (Conversely, it is often the abused people who ought to be on their way, but who are convinced they just need to try harder.)

The original post is titled Developing Awareness in Relationships , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

The amount of time children take greatly limits a couple’s opportunities to play together, nurture each other, communicate, make love, and generally do the things that keep a relationship on a healthy keel.

Children are also financially costly, which adds to the stress level. Probably most important, children rearrange our psyches, as if they were removing one program from our psyche and adding another.

Whenever children are around, good parents tend to assume Mom or Dad energy, which is a very caring, but very unsexy, quality. To take care of all the household chores that accompany child rearing, parents also develop a lot of responsible doer energy.

In contrast, juicy lover energy and erotic, sensual energy tends to fly right out the window when Mom or Dad and Mrs. or Mr. Responsibility is around. It takes a great effort – and often getting away from the house and children altogether – to recoup them.

All these reasons are probably why a respected study found that marital satisfaction drops 75% after the first child. Furthermore, each additional child significantly increases the level of marital stress. When children arrive, everything in a marriage is changed forever.

Why one is having children is of profound importance. Is it to have someone to love you and look up to you? Is it to please one’s partner? Is it to please one’s parents? Is it to be socially acceptable? None of these reasons are strong enough to fuel the tremendous effort it takes to succeed at both parenting and partnering.

Especially beware the trap of having children to fix or strengthen a marriage. It doesn’t work. Or do you feel ready to give and devote yourself to the welfare of another very human being – while simultaneously giving and devoting yourself to your partner? If you fail, it is hell, all the way around. If you succeed, of course, it is heaven. Before you do what cannot be undone, it is well worth asking all the above questions.

For Children’s own good

For your future children’s own sake, it is advisable to wait for a marriage to grow steady. When couples are in conflict, in an emotional vacuum, or in any form of psychological distress, children assume, on one or another level, the debilitating burden of caring for and carrying their parents. They will do almost anything to try to keep their parents from being depressed or from abandoning the family.

Sacrificing themselves emotionally, mentally, and sexually, children can lose all sense of what they need and who they are. And when children invariably fail at the hopeless task of rescuing their parents, they absorb an anxious sense of failure that can last a life-time. A stable, relatively happy parenthood, and psychologically mature parents, are essential for a child’s well-being.

The original post is titled Do Not Even Think About Having Children , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

Marrying for the right reasons is taking care of you from the onset. It is the simplest way to limit the struggle and suffering stage and move directly towards the ultimate phase of personal power and selflessness. First, what are some wrong reasons to marry?

The Wrong Reasons for Marriage

Because you Love Someone

Generally, we start out equipped only with the innocent belief that love is all it takes to make a long-term relationship work. And by love we mean conditional love: I’ll love you if you’ll love me. The truth is, conditional love is not nearly enough to withstand the tremendous power of unconscious forces: the hurts, fears, and rages of two wounded creatures. Love is not enough to get anyone through the wilds of long-term relationship. If this is what is leading you to the alter stop and simply savor this someone you love. Don’t burden the relationship with marriage.

Because everyone is supposed to Get Married

People marry, even when they are not ready to, because marriage is taken for granted in our society. Despite a massive cultural shift that accepts unmarried couples living together and acknowledges that about half of all marriages end in divorce, I constantly find even among the most educated clients the persistence of the old fashioned belief that being married is somehow the proper, mature, normal way to live, that it makes us socially acceptable.

A related belief is that, despite all evidence to the contrary, everyone else is succeeding at it. It often looks easy from the outside. The thinking goes: if everyone else can do it, we ought to be able to succeed also.

Because Other People want you to Get Married

One of my clients, Daniel R., was eager to please everyone around him. A very bright, successful computer-wiz in his thirties, he was enjoying a wonderful life: mountain-climbing, jazz-playing, flying his own plane, following a fulfilling career, and living with an intelligent, lovely girlfriend. Though he seemed to have everything, Daniel came to see me in distress. Engaged to get married, he didn’t actually want to be married. His girlfriend, her family and his family all were pressuring him to tie the knot.

Though knowing he wasn’t ready, Daniel wanted to be a good guy and acceded to their wishes. Such pressure is tough to resist, especially if, as in Daniel’s case, you are a good, obliging, conflict-avoiding person. As Pepy’s quote above suggests, few people who are married actually enjoy it, yet they are nonetheless insistent that the next generation, ready or not, join them.

Because Marriage and Family Offer Security

Most of us have this great fantasy of wonderful, warm, caring company and shared experience. We gloss over the reality that many marriages and families are filled with little more than wall to wall suffering. If you peel back enough layers of image, and look closely at almost any couple you know, you will find a great deal of frustration, pain, and unhappiness.

The cinema genius Ingmar Bergman writes of his astonishment while reading his mother’s diary after her death. During her 40-year marriage to a widely-respected minister she had never complained. She and her husband looked the perfect couple. But she had been miserable from their first year. Her husband had been a cruel, tyrannical man and as a result she had suffered depression for many decades. (The director used this sad story in his wonderful film “Franny and Alexander”.)

Because Marriage Means Steady Sex

This has got to be one of the most tragic-comic beliefs and greatest sources of disillusionment. Most couples leave their sexual passion at the chapel. Though many people who have not been through it find this amazing, it is common for couples to go months and even years without making love. And these are often individuals who prior to marriage were prolifically sexual with each other or with other partners. If it’s primarily sex that you are after – don’t get married.

The Right Reasons for Marriage

Because you are in love and you have been together long enough to know you are compatible and you are both deeply committed to the long-term process of knowing yourselves.

Marry for the right reasons. Is someone more eager than you are for you to marry? If so, why are you letting them influence you? If you love your partner, what is your objection to simply dating or even living with them? Are your reasons for marriage suited to long-term commitment?

The original post is titled Marry for the Right Reasons , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

If having children is your prime motivation for a relationship, explore arrangements for conceiving or adopting without a mate, and for single parenting. While single-parenting is a handful, it beats constant conflict with a partner. And some people are better equipped for parenting than for marriage. If you are getting married so that you can make love, seriously consider a more liberated approach. Enjoy love-making and leave it at that.

To enter marriage simply for the sake of sex or children is to sacrifice long-term well-being for short-term fulfillment. Neither marriage nor kids are automatically in everyone’s best interest.

One couple I know wanted to marry, but appreciated that the independence and spaciousness of being single were equally important to them. To accomplish this, each kept their own apartment in different sections of Manhattan. What made this especially practical for them was that each was willing to give up having children. After fourteen years together each continues to enjoy their own place half the week, while living with their partner the other half of the week.

As evidence that marriage is not for everyone, many people who in later life lose their partners are not so eager to remarry. Once there is no child-raising to do, and the hassles of marriage have been experienced, marriage loses much of its attraction.

Many mature adults enjoy a wide spectrum of activities and a broad social life without tying themselves a second time to a mate. Friendships, a good book, travel, sports, humanitarian work are all cheerful alternatives to messy marriages – and good antidotes to the loneliness of the single life.

If you are single, dreaming of marriage, and looking out at all those happy couples consider the fact that many partners are perfectly miserable and dreaming about nothing more than getting out of the whole thing. This is not to say that the single life is easy. The point is to do what is right and true for us, what we are ready for, as opposed to trying to fulfill a fantasy, or escape from ourselves.

Instead of hurtling into marriage, many of us would be better off healing ourselves and enjoying life to whatever degree possible. In any case, coming to terms with our own fears, hurts, and rages, produces the foundation for a solid marriage.

Consider an alternative to a committed or a traditional relationship. Ask yourself: Am I ready for committed relationship?

If yes, what would the relationship look like if it ideally suited your needs? Would you live together as a couple full-time? Would you have children? Imagine the exact kind of situation you would like. See it as completely as you can, from waking up to going to work, to going to sleep. How does it feel? Is there anything about it that makes you uncomfortable? If so, what adjustment would you like to make to this image of primary relationship?

The original post is titled Consider an Alternative to a Committed or Traditional Relationship , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

Enduring, healthy couplehood is probably the single most difficult human task. Albert Einstein described making a mess of two marriages: he could deal with God and the Universe, but not with wives. Heroes and geniuses fail at it.

Psychotherapists and spiritual masters fail at it. Not all of the time, but enough of the time. Relationship success requires great devotion: to the care of our great vulnerability and emotional need, to the care of our partner, and to tending the infinite, yet delicate flame of love.

If a love relationship is of ultimate concern to you, Every circumstance that supports success should be embrace and, to the degree possible, every circumstance that increases relationship difficulties should be avoided.

Determine what means most to you. What do you most want out of life? If you were on your death-bed, what area of life would you wish you had been most successful at? List your four primary concerns in order of importance. If a love relationship carries the most weight…Go as Slowly as Possible.

First of all, when you are in a romantic relationship, hold off living together until you have a reasonable foundation of trust and caring. Get to know each other as well as possible before you live together. Once you live together, hold off getting married until there is an even more solid foundation of trust and caring.

And it may not necessarily be in your best interests ever to live together full time, or to get married. In any case the greater the involvement, through living together or through getting married, the greater the expectations and the greater the expectations, the greater the chances for getting hurt and frustrated.

Relationships that move too quickly can easily become log jammed and overwhelmed with problems. Taking time allows you to process and resolve issues as they come up. If in the midst of a passionate and intense relationship you quickly move in together, you can also quickly lose a sense of your own boundaries and self-hood. The price of lost boundaries is generally dissatisfaction, conflict and ultimately separation.

Enter the wilderness of coupleship one step at a time. While it is fulfilling to extend our capacities, to stretch in relationship, it is something else entirely to place ourselves in an overwhelming situation, a situation we as yet lack the tools and skills to handle.

James C., a 42-year old client, was happily engaged in all sorts of pleasant activities: cycling, hiking, dinner parties, dating. But he was so eager to have a family that when he fell in love with a very likable young woman, he plunged in much faster than he could deal with. He pressured her to leave her home and job sixty miles away to move in with him.

She pressured him to give up many of his favorite activities. They then quickly began planning a wedding. The fast pace didn’t allow either to get to know each other gradually, so that they might work out differences over time. Instead, it increased the pressure to have a deep, intimate relationship. And in no time James’ life was a mess of fighting and stress. With the relationship unmanageable, they finally broke off with each other.

Advaita Vedanta, a Zen-like sect of Hinduism, traditionally discourages young men and women from early marriage. Instead, it encourages them first to spend several years undergoing monastic discipline and self-inquiry. Vedic tradition appreciates that marriage in many ways is more difficult than the monastic life, and that spiritual discipline is an invaluable precursor for a successful marriage.

As a minister-colleague points out in his sermons, waiting is often essential to relationship success. If only Romeo had been willing to wait, he would have gotten the message from the Friar about Juliet – and lived to enjoy her. The slower you go and the more issues you resolve within yourself and within the relationship before you become overly involved, the more likelihood there will be that the relationship will blossom.

Go as slowly as possible. Ask yourself: Am I in a hurry; am I over-eager with my relationship? If so, what is the hurry? What is the objection to giving the relationship time to ripen before taking the next step?

The original post is titled Determine What Means Most to You and Go as Slowly as Possible , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

Despite widespread rumors to the contrary, poor sex and poor communication do not ruin relationships; poor relationships ruin sex and communication. If communication skills made the difference specialists claim they make, then therapists and communication specialists would excel at marriage. They do not.

When I ask couples who come for help about their difficulties, often each partner acknowledges that the other was more adept at both love-making and communication in their earlier, better days. It isn’t that people forget how to communicate and make love; they lose interest in trying.

Likewise, partners don’t tend to need much training in communication and love-making. They need help in dissolving the obstacle to healthy relationships, which is unconsciousness, and specifically unconsciousness of the deep fears and needs of the child-like aspects of the personality.

War of the Sexes

It is also accepted wisdom that gender differences are a primary cause of couple difficulties. While such differences as the female tendency to work collectively and respond emotionally, versus the male tendency to work autonomously and respond cerebrally provide convenient and colorful explanations for couple conflict, they in fact play a modest role.

Educational, economic, religious and every other cultural difference also play at least as important a role as gender does. It is easy to imagine an atheistic, Swedish wife and a Catholic, Italian husband having more conflict around religious-cultural differences than around male-female differences.

The gay couples I see struggle every bit as much as the straight ones. And I have watched several clients leave rocky heterosexual relationships for homosexual ones, only to wind up with just as much relational conflict.

Recently a colleague completed research proving that men and women tend to anger differently. But that they both anger is the significant point. It is the anger, not its different forms, that creates the trouble. The fundamental cause of couple conflict is the exquisite fragility and emotional need that underlies all of our humanness.

Focusing overly on gender only obfuscates the much darker and more difficult region in need of light: which is our all-too-human soul in its bumbling attempt to live harmoniously with another.

Why Some Survive

Why do a rare handful of couples, including ourselves, not only manage to get through the unavoidable difficulties over the years and endure, but manage to retain a lively, respectful and joyful marriage?

Altogether it seems to be a combination of simple good fortune and the following:

* A thorough determination to make the marriage work. Faith that marriage is do-able, largely inspired by another, older couple as a model of success.

* An openness, sooner or later, to self-examination, to looking closely at all one’s own unappetizing limitations, at one’s own sorry part in marital conflict.

* The use of spiritual and emotional technology such as meditation, prayer and psychotherapy for dealing constructively with fears, needs and differences.

* Finally, and paradoxically, a willingness to give up the marriage for the moment, or even permanently if necessary. As important as it is to wholeheartedly throw oneself into a relationship, it is also essential in the course of a long partnership, during periods of being stuck, to be willing to walk away rather than spend a life in a hobbled marriage.

When one knows one’s partner is willing to do this, it forces one to dig deeper and change. Some wise person once commented that keeping a marriage alive requires an occasional pinch; but the truth is it probably requires an occasional kick in the butt.

While generally the healthiest direction for righting a relationship is to dig deep into one’s own inner deadness or discontent, on occasion the only way to significantly move a relationship forward is first to step away from it, perhaps dismantle it, then start fresh from a new beginning.

The original post is titled A Few Scenic Views of Relationships , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .

To the degree that our partner succeeds at this essential job, we love them. To the degree that they fail to come through and deliver the goods, we get frustrated, angry, closed, rejecting. What makes this situation so combustible is that, child-like, we throw wide-open the doors of our heart to our dream parent; when they inevitably and in any way fail to handle us with due gentleness and love we become easily and deeply wounded. Then to protect ourselves we flip into fighter-attackers, or coldly withdraw ourselves, in turn wounding our partner.

Once we can begin to comfort and nurture ourselves, once we become our heart’s primary caretaker and give up the dream that our partner be our good mother or father, that our partner is primarily responsible for our care, we can loosen our demands on them and drain off the fuel that otherwise ignites emotional bombs.

Moreover, whenever we can take one step further and recognize that our partner has as much child in them as we have, that their difficult behavior is mostly their fears and needs rising to the surface, then it is easier to be more compassionate and less reactive to them.

Following is an exercise that can help to give up the dream that a partner will somehow act as your dream parent.

Imagine that you are up in the clouds. Look down and see your partner with all their fears, anxieties and needs. See how much child they have within them; and see that there is no possibility that they can fulfill the role of being an ideal parent.

In turn, the most pragmatic way to learn how to parent yourself is to practice a visualization exercise, such as the following: Close your eyes. Pretend you are looking at a blank screen. Imagine the child part of yourself on the screen. Let whatever picture comes onto the screen be there. (The child doesn’t have to look like you or in any way be familiar.)

How does this child appear? Scared? Lonely? In tatters? Now imagine that a loving mother or father approaches the child and gives the child whatever he or she wants. If the child wants to be hugged, let the mother or father hug him. If the child wants to be protected, let the mother or father protect him. If he wants to be played with or just watched, let the mother or father play with him or just watch him.

Once we begin to parent ourselves we can more easily unhook from unrealistic expectations of our partner. This in fact actually invites our partner to want to give more to us. Creating a wholesome space between ourselves and our partner, we are free to enjoy a deep mutuality with them.

The original post is titled The Eternal Dream , and it came from Marin Couples Counseling & Therapy .