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Do Your Kids Know You Love Them?

 

Charles Lehman

I have kept journals for both of my kids that I write in from time to time. I write about funny things my children have done, experiences we have shared, thoughts I want them to read in the future and observations of how God has created them. They enjoy taking their book out and reading what I've written. Interestingly, they prefer reading their own book — not their sibling's book.

God’s masterpiece

Kids love to be known, and they really love it when their dad reminisces about something they did. Imagine what would happen if dads looked at their kids through the lens of Ephesians 2:10: "For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago" (NLT). Appreciating a masterpiece requires first recognizing its value and then taking time to admire and enjoy it. Imagine your relationship with your kids if you made the effort to observe, admire and enjoy them — they are masterpieces created by God.
Notice that Ephesians 2:10 does not say "created to be formed identical to your earthly father." The diversity in personalities, interests, talents and ideas is one of the riches we are able to enjoy in our relationships. It's what makes us all unique masterpieces.

Known and loved

Sometimes, at night, I will do a "high five" with my kids. I say, "Here are five things I know about you" or "Here are five things I love about you." Many times, they will hold up both hands with all 10 fingers stretched out, hoping to hear 10 things. I want them to realize that they are known and loved by their father.
They also love the morning notes I leave for them at the breakfast table. These notes are jokes, simple affirmations or encouragements, and observations of who they are. It's one way I show my kids I love them.
Let's take time to know, enjoy, observe and engage with the masterpieces in front of us.

The 4 Steps You Should Take Before Dealing With a Conflict

Pamela D. Garcy Ph.D. Fearless You

The 4 Steps You Should Take Before Dealing With a Conflict

         

Posted Mar 10, 2014   Do you leap right into potentially challenging conversations with your partner? Or do you avoid discussing topics that could lead to conflict? The best approach may be a combination of choosing your battles and waiting until you feel internally secure before raising those issues.

This four-step CALM system could help you approach such challenges:
C = Center yourself first.
Dr. George Pransky’s Relationship Handbook (Pransky and Associates, 2013) discusses the disruptive role of insecurity in communication. He suggests that you refrain from any difficult conversations when you are feeling insecure. Instead, wait until you know you'll be able to welcome whatever response your partner or spouse offers.
How do you calm yourself? Start to familiarize yourself with effective methods to shift out of unhelpful negative emotions that interfere with effective communication, such as rage, hopelessness, shame, and panic. The REBT Super-Activity Guide (link is external) (Garcy, Createspace, 2009) offers training exercises to change your underlying philosophies about yourself, others, and life, leading you to become more effective in your relationships. Strategies such as relaxation training and mindfulness are also proven methods for self-calming, and combine well with shifting your internal philosophical stance.
Self-calming and mindfulness also allow you to increase your awareness, empathy, responsiveness, and connectedness to your partner. Those who are more sensitive to emotional bidding, Dr. John Gottman writes in What Makes Love Last (Simon and Schuster, 2013), tend to have less conflict and are less prone to divorce.
A = Appreciate your partner.
Before a possible conflict, take a moment to notice what your partner has been doing right or well. Even if you do so only silently, it will help you to recognize your partner’s efforts and decrease what Dr. Albert Ellis identifies as the derivatives of toxic and demanding thinking: awfulizing, low frustration tolerance, and people-rating.
If you are truly calm and express your appreciation openly, it serves as positive reinforcement for your partner’s beneficial actions. People sometimes stop themselves from openly expression of appreciation in such situations because they believe doing so allows their partner to "win" an argument. But this is about building a relationship that is fulfilling in the long-term, and not about short-term victories which feel good in the moment (short-range hedonistic benefit) but erode overall relationship functionality (long-range hedonistic cost).
Researchers have found that couples have two primary concerns during a conflict: perceived threat and perceived neglect (Sanford et al., 2010, Psychological Assessment, 2010; 22 (2): 288). Expressing appreciation may be a strategy for diffusing these perceived threats for your partner. In addition, researchers have found that people are less aggressive when they perceive happiness (Penton-Voak, et al., Psychological Science, 2013).
Finally, everyday expressions of gratitude tend to serve as a “booster shot” for romantic relationships, according to Algoe and colleagues (Personal Relationships, 2010). Attending to the positive allows your attitude to become more optimistic and happy, thereby opening your partner up to listening to you, and ultimately leading to more effective problem solving.
The moral: Prior to discussing a challenge, spend some time in sincere appreciation, admiration, and gratitude for your partner.
Also, remember to take time to affirm and appreciate yourself before approaching a challenge. This will help you to lower your stress level and be more creative. Creswell and colleagues found that even brief self-affirmation could reduce the harmful effects of being stressed and improve your creative problem solving (PLoS ONE, 2013).
L = List.
Putting pencil to paper may allow you to have greater working memory, the RAM of your brain. The more available memory you have to think with, the more effective your analytical problem solving (Wiley, et al., Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(4), 2012). Consider listing the problems that you and your partner are struggling to solve. Then focus on those you think you can solve together, prioritize the list and have a problem-solving meeting with your partner on your top concern. Limit problem solving to only one problem per week, brainstorm solutions and select the best outcome together.
M = Manage your agreement, not your partner.
Although not about couples' relationships, Steve Chandler’s The Hands-Off Manager (Career Press, 2012) describes one of the keys to getting along with another person: managing your agreements with him or her, rather than your expectations. This principle applies surprisingly well to personal relationships, as it considers the positions of both people and keeps you in problem-solving rather than finger-pointing mode.
Your expectations are your ideas about what is supposed to happen in your relationship, but they are often unexpressed. If you have not clearly communicated what you want, or have made a request that your partner hasn’t agreed to fulfill, and you then behave as though there was a clear agreement on the expectation, you’re likely to be very disappointed.
To avoid disappointment, check yourself by asking, “Did my partner and I form a true agreement on this, or am I only assuming we did?” Revisit your discussion and confirm that both of you not only truly agree to do your part but also have methods for fulfilling the mutual agreement. When you manage your agreements, make sure that you create a plan that will lead to success for both of you.

5 Steps to Take Before Starting a New Relationship

5 Steps to Take Before Starting a New Relationship

              

 

Forget “The Rules." Stop believing “He’s just not into you." In fact, skip all the self-help confusion that instructs you on how to morph yourself into the perfect match for Mr. (or Ms.) Right.
People who are genuinely happy with their romantic choices spend more energy working on their own self-development than on appearing a certain way to attract love. Instead of focusing on playing the game to entice a partner, put your focus on these five principles and, over time, the right match for you will present itself:

1. Understand yourself, sexually and emotionally. If you have not done the work of understanding yourself emotionally and sexually, you will enter romantic relationships from an emotionally dependent place. You may have the unrealistic hope that someone else will know how to understand you and make you happy—even when you, yourself, may not know. Directly communicating to your partners about your emotions and your sexual side is important; hoping others will intuitively perceive who you are emotionally and what you need sexually is a fantasy. Make a conscious effort to become aware of your ongoing emotional reactions to the people and events in your life. Observe and label your emotional reactions. Reflect on your feelings and talk with people about how you feel or what you are noticing about yourself, without expecting them to put you back together again.
2. Believe what people show and say about themselves. It is common when attracted to someone to want to rationalize their poor behavior. If someone treats you with disrespect or chronically lets you down, take this as data about whom he or she is as a person. If you try to talk with someone and he or she dismisses you or rationalizes mistreatment of you, take this seriously; this may not be a suitable match. If a man says he is not looking for “anything serious” or he needs a lot of “space,” let him go. This person is not in the same place you are and may not want the same things you want. Believe what people communicate about themselves. If they are acting immaturely or disrespectfully, or saying things that hurt you, move on. It is not your job to show someone a better way; it is your job to work on growing as a person.
3. Avoid "sextimacy." As I describe in Having Sex, Wanting Intimacy (link is external), sextimacy is a cycle of working to achieve emotional intimacy through hastened sex. If you are hoping that a sexual relationship will eventually lead to a more emotionally intimate or committed relationship, cease and desist: Research shows relationships that start with sex before emotional intimacy is present typically do not become committed unions. You will spend your time hoping and working to get someone to change or "step up to the plate" when you could be putting your energy into growing as a person and finding someone who likes the person you have become.
4. Separate psychologically from your parents. This is no easy task and many think they have done so when, in reality, they have not. As an adult, if you continue to allow your parents to meet all of your emotional needs then you siphon off some of the energy that needs to go into your romantic attachments. As much as possible, little by little, work to be independent of your parents. This does not mean you can’t enjoy their company, spend time with them, and share what you wish with them about your life. It does mean: Work to become comfortable making your own decisions. Excessively asking for their opinion, reassurance, or guidance, or allowing them to control your life means you are not living for yourself. And if you allow your parents to continually do the heavy lifting for you, then you will not be a whole person when the right match presents itself. Entering into a romantic relationship believing that the person is going to take care of you in the way your parents have can turn a healthy match into a toxic one. You have to be in control of your own life, self-aware of your goals, needs and emotions.
5. Put yourself in new situations. A popular idea holds that in order to find the right partner one must first work alone on self-improvement—"I just need to do me for a while." In my experience, when women do this, they put themselves in arbitrary exile, where they feel sad and out of touch. With such a vague goal of "working on myself," enlightenment eludes and isolation compounds the misery. Work on yourself through developing greater emotional and sexual self-awareness. At the same time, you need new relationships with romantic partners and friends to truly know yourself. Each dating experience provides you with in-the-moment information about your preferences, weaknesses and strengths. If you continue to think and do the same things that you have always thought and experienced, you will remain stuck. Your brain has an extraordinary ability to adapt and grow—if you allow it. For the brain to grow you have to give it new stimulation and new experiences that challenge you on some level. Perhaps there are things that you like or have wanted to try but have been afraid to do so. As long as they reflect your genuine interest, work through the anxiety and put yourself in novel situations where you may meet different kinds of people and experience other aspects of your personality.

What to Do When Your Life Is a Mess

What to Do When Your Life Is a Mess

         

• TWEETSH

Source: Diego Cervo/Shutterstock

Your home is in disarray, you’re behind on your bills, your In box is overflowing, and your cat is in need of a visit to the vet. There are things to be done everywhere you look, and you don’t know where to start. It seems like your life is a mess, and you don't know how to take control of it. You shouldn’t even be reading this article because you’ve got so much to do.
Fortunately, you have come to the right place: Psychology give us fantastic ways to cope with stress—and it is stress that’s causing you to feel this way. The field of stress and coping is one of the most prolific in psychology, and also one of the easiest to understand and apply to your life.
Some of the first forays into stress were conducted by the renowned physiologist Hans Selye, who defined the “General Adaptation Syndrome.” Selye proposed that we deal with stressful situations much as his lab animals did—by becoming alarmed, trying to resist, and eventually succumbing to exhaustion if the stress continues.
Unlike lab animals, humans possess “cognition,” meaning that we think about our experiences and decide whether they represent stress or not. Berkeley psychologist Richard Lazarus proposed that a situation is stressful only if we perceive it that way. A “threat” to you may be a “challenge” to someone else. You see a full inbox as presenting an insurmountable problem, but your best friend loves to tackle all of those emails in an efficient way, and even sees them as a testimonial to her importance to others.
Lazarus and his collaborator, Susan Folkman of the University of San Francisco, proposed that we deal with stress in two basic ways:

• In problem-focused coping, we directly address the threat by trying to change the situation.
• In emotion-focused coping, we try to make ourselves feel better about the threat.

Lazarus and Folkman’s research showed that there’s no one best way to cope. Whatever helps reduce your stress is the method that is best for you, although problem-focused coping is better when you can actually change a situation and emotion-focused is best when you can’t.
In the three-plus decades since these advances in defining stress and coping, hundreds of studies have further elucidated the relationships among stress, coping, and psychological well-being. University of Connecticut psychologists Kristen Riley and Crystal Park (2014) provide insight into how you can take the feeling of being overwhelmed by life’s messes and transform it into useful action that helps you turn a threat into a challenge.
According to Riley and Park, there is a third type of coping—meaning-focused coping—in which you change the way you approach a stressful situation and see it as providing you with an opportunity for growth. This is like looking for the silver lining after a relationship ends.
However, the silver lining may not always be so evident, nor may it provide you relief from the stress that's a result of feeling like your life is a mess. Riley and Park studied the possibility that by redefining a threat as a challenge, you can actually do a better job of feeling better. Instead of just refusing to open your In box (emotion-focused coping), you should see it as a challenge to your ability to tackle the task. Now you’ll confront the process more confidently, which allows you to eliminate this as a source of stress.
Riley and Park asked a sample of 284 undergraduates to complete a set of questionnaires at three time points over a three-month period to report on their reactions to the same, participant-defined, stressful event. The event they selected was prompted by the researchers to be “the worst ongoing thing you are dealing with,” or what is called a “chronic” stressor. Participants rated whether the event involved something truly serious, and whether they felt they could control the event. Outcomes included ratings by participants of their degree of stressful and depressive feelings.
The fact that the study allowed multiple assessments over time gave the researchers the chance to test a causal model in which they pitted problem-focused vs. meaning-focused coping as a way to reduce stress and depression. Riley and Park predicted that problem-focused coping would actually be better than meaning-focused coping at getting these chronic stressors to be perceived as controllable, and hence, better adjusted to by the participants. Although participants weren't able to reduce their stress entirely, by seeing themselves as able to manage the stress, participants did begin to tackle it.
The types of stresses identified by the University of Connecticut students were, as you might imagine, primarily academic in nature. Therefore, this study provides a good framework for thinking about the kind of stress that makes you feel that your life is a mess. Students have to balance their academic workload with jobs they need to help pay for school, as well as problems with roommates, parents, and other things going on in their lives. Feeling they had the resources to address their problems gave the students the energy they needed to help reduce their stress.
In your own life, redefining a “mess” as something that you can straighten out is the first step to take to make that mess more organized. Retreating into Facebook or your favorite video game won't help—although it may help you forget about things for a while. Instead, take those first steps; you’ll be able to see your mess as controllable, and one by one, its causes will go away.
Fulfillment in life doesn’t mean that things always go smoothly. Instead, when the going does get rough, see yourself in control of managing life’s messes. Eventually, your fulfillment will follow, one stress-reducing step at a time.
 

Good Enough Parents are the Best Parents

Good Enough Parents are the Best Parents

               

Posted Jun 26, 201

Source: Google Images/Used With Permission

By Don Greif, Ph.D.
Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst developed the concept of the “good enough mother.” He encouraged mothers (and fathers) to trust their instincts and judgment about caring for their babies—and not to worry about or aspire toward perfection.
Will I be a good enough parent?
Diana, a pregnant woman in her second year of therapy, sits down on my sofa and tells me that for the past week she’s been waking up in the middle of the night and having a hard time falling back to sleep. I ask what she was feeling and thinking about when she couldn’t sleep. She says she read a magazine article about the importance of getting your kid into a top preschool so they can get into a good elementary school, which is critical to getting into a good high school and a good college; all of which, according to the article, are crucial to succeeding in life. She’s been looking into daycare options near where she lives and they all seem pretty good, but the article prompted her to think, “Maybe they’re not the best.”
“So this is what you’ve been worrying about at night,” I said. Diana nods “yes” and says that a good friend of hers, who pays close attention to her children’s homework, realized that the public school they attended wasn’t teaching them what it was supposed to teach so she moved them to a private school. Diana worried that she would be a bad mother because she wouldn’t even know what her child is supposed to learn in school, since she, unlike her friend, works outside the home full time, and plans to continue doing so after her maternity leave.
I said, “It’s understandable that you’re worried about being a good mother. I can also understand why the article made you anxious.” She reveals, with a laugh, that she only read the first paragraph before getting so freaked out that she couldn’t continue reading.
“Does it really matter that much where your child goes to preschool?” she asks.
I respond emphatically, “That’s a good question.”
Diana says that she and her husband went to public schools in their neighborhoods and both turned out okay.
I was glad she could question the validity of the article—or at least her takeaway from it.

“So part of you is skeptical of what you read,” I said.
Being the best
I thought for a moment and went on, “There’s an obsession in our culture with being ‘the best’.” I told her about Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother.”
I know how vulnerable Diana is—how vulnerable we all are—to feeling anxious about falling short of cultural expectations. I was keenly aware that being a first-time parent heightened Diana’s vulnerability to cultural messages about what and how she should provide for her child. She did not want to fail.
In my view, the notion that the school choices that parents make for their 4-year olds (or 14-year olds) will determine the child’s success--let alone the idea that there is a “best” school--limits parents’ freedom to choose a good enough school based on their child’s unique needs and their own personal circumstances.
Focusing on the best school—the best anything, for that matter—often reflects an emphasis on status and external markers of success, rather than intrinsic qualities such as the love of learning and the enduring value of a good education.
Absorbing cultural expectations   
We are all deeply affected by our culture and absorb its expectations and messages, often without being aware of it. Personal growth sometimes requires us to recognize aspects of our culture that are oppressive or constricting, and to resist this influence. Becoming aware of the impact of cultural values and ideals frees us to make choices that are personally meaningful.
It can be helpful to remember that rarely is there a clear-cut best choice.
For example, in my experience many parents who return to work soon after their babies are born—including those who do not have the means to be able to choose to be stay-at-home parents--worry about the impact of leaving them in the hands of a caretaker, whether it’s a babysitter, nanny, relative, or daycare facility. Those who can choose to be full-time parents often worry, as well, about the impact on themselves of staying home with their babies. They worry about the loss of stimulation from the outside world, sacrificing their professional growth or even jeopardizing their careers.
As with most choices parents make, there is no perfect solution or best choice. Most choices involve compromise, and that means there are only good enough choices. Parenting, much like the rest of life, is “not a game of perfect.” And maybe “good enough” is as good as it gets!
Don Greif, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with a clinical and forensic practice in NYC, co-Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (link is external).  He has taught and supervised at the William Alanson White Institute (link is external). He has written about psychoanalysis as an antidote to electronic culture; revaluing sports and mastering athletic demons; forensic issues working with sexual offenders; and he is writing a counterpoint to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. 

"And" Not "But": The Secret to Healthy Relationships

"And" Not "But": The Secret to Healthy Relationships

         

• Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say. Similarly, it seems that human beings abhor contradiction, particularly in the context of relationships. We like to package our feelings as positive or negative, believing that contradictory feelings cannot and should not co-exist. In approaching relationships, we use the word but to connect contradictory feelings, as if the positive should eliminate the negative and vice versa. In fact, for a relationship to succeed, "and," NOT "but," must be the approach we take when linking the inconsistent feelings that are at the heart of all relationships.

All relationships resolve in contradiction. Why then is it so difficult for us to accept contradictory feelings inside ourselves? Unfortunately, we are trained to believe that consistency is the basic nature of all things, that there is an answer to all questions.  One answer. “Is it good or bad?” “Is it true or false?” “Is it right or wrong?” We like simple, clean, straightforward answers. If it’s both, simultaneously, then we are in for a more complicated consideration, a more unsettling resolution.
We seek to obliterate internal contradiction because it causes discomfort and ambiguity. We are always trying to grasp certainty and avoid the unknown. It doesn’t make sense that we can feel both love and hate, appreciation and disappointment, relief and frustration, all at once. In relationship, when we open to our full experience we must face the truth that all of these contradictory feelings exist in our experience of our partner. Such an openness of vision means accepting that we are receiving certain joys and being deprived of others. This can be quite un-grounding.
People use two primary strategies to eradicate internal inconsistency in relationship. Either we make the other all good or we make him/her all bad. Both paths are attempts to right the inconsistency, to manipulate the experience in order to feel just one way.
To make our experience consistently positive, we disconnect from and deny our negative feelings, the parts of the relationship where we are not getting what we want. Having successfully removed the negative, we can remain in the relationship “pain-free.” Ironically, internal criticism can serve as a way of denying negative feelings. Telling ourselves that we are “ungrateful,” “overly demanding,” “impossible to please,” and thus somehow to blame for the deprivation that we are experiencing, is a strategy to reject our pain and thus eradicate the anxiety that contradiction arouses.
Making the experience consistently negative, on the other hand, requires rejecting the parts of the relationship that bring us joy. The “He’s a louse and I don’t know what I’m doing with him” brand of thinking. In this approach we focus only on the problems, not allowing ourselves to acknowledge or appreciate the reasons we are actually in the relationship.
The problem with denying a part of our internal experience is that it prevents us from being able to fully experience our lives, to authentically enjoy what is working in our relationship or to change what is not. We cannot cut off a part of our experience without damaging the other parts. We cannot put a blanket over the negative without blunting the positive. So too, when we bury our experience we create an underlying resentment. It is this buried resentment that will destroy the relationship, not the acknowledgment of our contradictory feelings.
By suppressing the painful parts of a relationship, we are destroying our chance to improve the relationship. We become paralyzed because there is nothing to fix and yet we are unhappy. The difficulty has to be felt first before it can be corrected. While it may seem counter-intuitive to welcome the negative, it is the denial of pain that prevents us from actually becoming happy.

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On the other hand, the denial of the positive aspects of a relationship creates a different kind of stuckness. When we are committed to making our partner all bad, it is actually more difficult to leave him or her. As long as we are unable to acknowledge the positive feelings, we end up staying in the relationship as a way of bringing life to the positive.
As long as we are not honoring what we do love in our partner, what we are receiving, we are not free to choose a path, whether to leave or stay. The positive is all tangled up in the staying together and this creates a paralysis of its own.
Contradiction is truth; both positive and negative exist simultaneously—always. When we operate from a place of and, not but—yes and yes—we relieve the need to make everything one particular way, tidy, easily understood. With permission to include all the ands, the whole of the relationship, we can then determine if what we are receiving is indeed what we need, enough, and conversely if what we are giving up is acceptable to give up. We generate compassion and appreciation for ourselves when we are able to accept the whole picture that is relationship. It is a compassion born of awareness, recognizing the profundity of the choices we are making, whatever they may be