Showing all posts in February 2014

Learn How to Be More Assertive

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Learn How to Be More Assertive

If you’ve ever enlisted the “disappearing act” method as a way to put some space between you and another person, I get it. When you feel like you might need some time away from someone, want to end a relationship, or change a relationship dynamic it can be anxiety producing; speaking up for yourself can feel tricky. Sometimes we’d all rather slink away to avoid conflict.

Now and then, everyone thinks that addressing a relationship issue might result in too many hurt feelings, a knock-down-drag-out argument, or something ambiguously scary. It can be tempting to stay silent and hope it resolves itself. It’s my experience, though, that problems tend not to fix themselves and that, the longer they’re left unmanaged, the more overwhelming they can seem.

There are some things you can do to effectively express what you need from a relationship without becoming invisible and without feeling like your only other alternative is to drape yourself in aggression and hostility. Putting these things to use will help you to feel more grounded as you organize your thoughts about your experience and think about what you’d like to convey. Eventually, while speaking up for yourself might feel slightly uncomfortable in certain situations, it won’t feel as unavailable to you.

The first step to take is to explore your experience. The idea here is to gain awareness of your feelings about the situation and how they connect to your thoughts and actions. This will help you to trust yourself.

For example, let’s say you want some space in a friendship. You love your friend very much and value the relationship, and you also feel overwhelmed by the various goings on in your life. Perhaps you’re afraid to tell the friend that you can’t help them as often as they ask or that you can’t spend as much time hanging out and talking on the phone with them. Because you’re afraid to communicate this, you might continue doing things that you don’t have a chance to do. By overextending yourself, you might begin to resent your friend’s requests and experience the friend as overbearing. Maybe you start to exert less effort in the help that you lend, continue to make plans with the friend but begin to break them.

Be curious about why you’re afraid to say that you need space; what are you afraid will happen? Why would you rather overextend yourself? What do these things mean to you? As you become more aware of your feelings, you will begin to trust your experience. You will feel more secure in creating a more desirable situation for yourself.

The second step is to take the information you’ve acquired and use it to clarify the choices available to you. Will you choose to talk to your friend? Will you choose to let your resentment grow? Gaining awareness of your choices helps you to feel more empowered. When you feel empowered, you feel less inclined to suffer silently, quietly disengage from the relationship, or engage in aggressive behavior. This sense of empowerment will give you comfort when you address the situation.

The third step is to show up in an authentic way. If you’re nervous to express how you’re feeling, let the person know. Be honest about what this experience is like for you, about your fear of what might happen. However they manifest, these feelings will surface at some point, and they are so much more manageable (and a lot less scary) when you address them as you become aware of them.

Standing up for yourself can be scary, but you can effectively say what you need to in an empathic and satisfying way.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Will Couples Therapy Save Your Relationship?

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Will Couples Therapy Save Your Relationship?

Pretty frequently, people ask me if I think couples therapy can “save” their relationship. Most of the time, with this question, what people are asking me is if they’ll be ok. People want to know that, no matter what the outcome, they will thrive.

There are many issues that drive couples to seek therapy or counsel. Sometimes couples feel that they have drifted apart and aren’t feeling as connected as they’d like. Sometimes couples come to me after some breach of trust; infidelity, financial mismanagement, and manifestations of addiction are common problems. Here, the common thread is an overall gap in understanding either partner’s experience.

Somewhere in the relationship, it became difficult to be honest with the other (and, frequently, with oneself). Feelings, needs, and experiences went unspoken, behaviors changed, and a felt sense of connection waned. Maybe this happened pretty early on in the relationship. Maybe it happened after careers and kids and the routine ebb and flow of life. Understandably, a lot of couples fear the implications of this disturbance in their connection so, they try to ignore it and hope it goes away.

More often than not, these problems don’t just disappear. It’s more common for issues to pick up speed and feel increasingly out of control. Quickly, things can feel incredibly not ok.

Sometimes it’s a matter of helping a couple shift how they manage conflict, increasing empathy, and fostering a sense of openness to one other. Other times, couples find that they are not well-matched. In this case, the goal is to explore the couple’s options. Is it better for everyone involved if the couple separates or divorces? Is a negotiation conceivable? No matter what the solution, a shift in an intimate relationship can feel scary and unpredictable.

Couples therapy can be an invaluable tool that helps couples overcome their fear, relational obstacles, and doubt. It can help couples get to a place in the relationship where they feel solid and held by one another. And it can help them get to a place of acceptance if the most appropriate solution is to part ways. Couples can find hope and comfort regardless of their decision to separate or stay together.

When a couple comes in for therapy, both members have been experiencing significant pain and distress. It can feel like an immediate decision must be made. One or both members often feel overwhelmed and are searching for a solution that will bring them soothing and relief. It’s best to slow things down. We are most successful in the decision-making process when we have the most comprehensive information; it takes time to acquire the necessary information.

Useful coping techniques are available to every couple so that they can find stability and resource in-between sessions. No matter what a couple’s instigating problem, there are exercises they can practice that will provide containment of overwhelming feelings, enlightenment about a particular issue, and increased patience. Couples therapy won’t definitively “save” a relationship, but it will foster safety, organization, and hope for whatever is to come. You will be ok.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

No, You Are Not A “Sex Addict”

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No, You Are Not A “Sex Addict”

We all think about sex. Most of us, who are able, masturbate. Sometimes we masturbate to porn; sometimes we don’t. We’ve all experienced some dissatisfaction with our sexuality. Many of us want to enjoy sexual adventure in some way. A lot of us have even damaged relationships or put ourselves at risk as a result of poor decisions we’ve made about sex. And many of us are ashamed of and secretive about aspects of our sexuality.

Much of the information about sex addiction encourages you to believe that you’re a sex addict if you have sex in a way that looks or seems different than the way members of the mainstream population report that they have sex. If you frequent swing clubs or parties, enjoy a particular role-play, or pursue sexually adventurous experiences you could be labeled “sex addict.” Someone else is uncomfortable with your sexual expression so that must mean your behavior’s pathological. Right?

Obviously (or, perhaps, not-so-obviously), not everyone is a “sex addict.” So, with such broad (and subjective) parameters, how can you tell who’s a sex addict and who’s not? Let me clear it up for you. You are not a sex addict.

This doesn’t mean you are free from pain related to your sexuality. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have aspects of your sexuality which you have attempted to change, but didn’t sustain, and it definitely doesn’t mean that you don’t regret choices you have made about the expression of your sexuality (and the consequences that followed). Any and all of this can be true; you’re still not a sex addict. You don’t have to swear off casual sex, fetish, polyamory, sex with sex workers, masturbation, or porn forever.

Human sexuality is an expression of ourselves, how we feel, what we think, what we have interpreted from information received. Not limited to behavior, sexuality includes thoughts and feelings. There are reasons connected to why someone likes to incorporate S/M into their sexual relationships, why someone else likes to have sex in complete darkness, why someone takes risks with their safety while seeking out or engaging in sexual activity, why different people enjoy different types of porn, and why someone is turned on by one thing the same way someone else finds said element a complete turn-off. None of these people are “wrong” or “addicted to sex” or “bad.”

There are various occasions for which someone might seek treatment regarding sexuality. The treatment is not for sexual addiction, but rather, a guided inquiry into the desired sex life (and why), the current sex life (and why), and insight into what someone can do to create resolution. Sometimes the aim of treatment is to help them understand and accept their sexuality. Other times, the aim is to help someone understand and negotiate their sexuality, incorporate more flexibility to decrease distress and increase health and satisfaction.

Sometimes sexual dissatisfaction can be identified as sexual dysfunction. There are times when it is seen as a symptom of another condition, biological or neurological issues, or things like depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and beyond. Sometimes the dissatisfaction is a manifestation of an unfulfilled need to connect, a quest for empathy, or a way to find soothing. The work is to explore why someone does what they do, what it means to them, and where to go from here.

Treatment for sexual discontentment is a way for you to gain understanding about yourself, learn how to accept your desires and needs and make any changes needed to improve your life and your relationships.

If you would like more clarification about this, please contact me.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Learn How to Change Your Thought Pattern

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Learn How to Change Your Thought Pattern

Think about what you know. How did you come to know this?

Now think about what you believe. Is it different from what you know? Why or why not?

What we believe and what we know (and what we think we know) organizes our philosophy on life- our paradigm, our mindset. It is why we behave the way we do, have the kinds of relationships we have, and it informs our level of satisfaction with our lives. Essentially, our mindset is… us. And we are our mindset.

Within our mindset each of us has a set of assumptions, which creates our operating system. We have methods to address, work within, and challenge these assumptions. This creates the impetus for us to make particular choices on every level- how we behave in our relationships, what we do for work, how we interact, how we manage conflict, everything. It provides us with a motivation to accept or not accept.

When I ask people how they’ve come to know or believe things about themselves, they often tell me stories of interactions they have had with others, gains and losses they have experienced, and how they’ve interpreted such experiences.

It’s easy to see how some of us create a particular meaning out of the information we receive. For instance, if I experience a lot of mismanaged conflict with my family, I might believe/”know” that they don’t appreciate me. If I believe or “know” this to be true, it will impact most of our interactions, and I might begin to feel defensive around them. This might cause me to behave in an aggressive, hostile, or otherwise distancing way during our interactions. Our relationship will start to feel unsatisfactory, and that experience will fuel my belief that my family doesn’t appreciate me. At this rate, I will feel increasingly alienated from my loved ones. That mismanaged conflict will have taken a stronghold on my beliefs, my relationships, and my life.

What would happen if I start to ask questions about the conflict I am experiencing, if I wonder about the information rather than ascribe meaning to it? What if I allow myself to be curious about this experience, allow myself to challenge beliefs that I have adopted? This complicated pain will begin to shift to transparent contributing factors. I will have a better grasp on the information and what it might mean. I will be able to reorganize what I believe is happening within my relationships. My perspective will begin to change.

What if you became more curious about what you know and believe? What would happen if you challenged how shy you think you are, how smart, how needy, how sensitive, or how mean you are?

Eventually, you will feel less dependent on what you have incorporated as part of your philosophy on life because you will have begun to trust yourself. You’ll start to feel safer challenging your beliefs, less defensive when others challenge you. You’ll equate these challenges with increased learning and development. You will find that failure is not a threatening statement about your capabilities, but a chance for refinement. Where you once felt a sense of safety in defining yourself with various restrictive proclamations (“I’m… smart stupid, bad/good at relationships, a good athlete, shy, Type A, mellow, easy/hard to please, socially inept, charming,“ – whatever.), you will realize how dangerously confining they are.

You don’t need them.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie