We've gathered Psychotherapy Networkers most popular posts and arranged them here by topic.
How Illness Can Leave Marriage on the Rocks
Jeri Hepworth
By Jeri Hepworth - As human beings vulnerable to a wide variety of infirmities, we need to know at the deepest level that our partners will stick around even when our bodies betray us. And yet, even though we generally agree that abandoning an ailing partner is unacceptable, we don't really appreciate how high a toll a serious medical problem can take on a relationship.
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Susan Johnson on Infusing Sex with Emotion and Attachment
Susan Johnson
By Susan Johnson - Passion is about so much more than responding to novel stimuli or ramped-up lust. In the dance of sex, passion can be constantly renewed, not simply by finding more exotic sexual positions, but by changing the level of our engagement in the moment and with our lover. If we really understand love, we can also understand how to shape lasting passion.
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Why Does Parenthood Deliver Such a Fatal Blow to Intimacy?
Esther Perel
By Esther Perel - The transition from two to three is one of the most profound challenges a couple will ever face. Family life flourishes in an atmosphere of comfort and consistency. Yet unpredictability, spontaneity, and risk are precisely where eroticism resides. Eros is a force that doesn't like to be constrained. When it settles into repetition, habit, or rules, it touches its death.
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Three Steps to Help Male Clients Tolerate Emotional Intensity
Karen Kissell Wegela
By Karen Kissell Wegela - When men come into therapy, typically in a crisis after a partner has just ended a relationship, they have an opportunity to learn not only how to communicate more personally, but also to discover how much they've become estranged from their own inner life. Therapeutic work with these clients has three parts.
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Teaching the Concept of Sexual Teamwork
Michael Metz
By Michael Metz - For the majority of middle-aged and older men experiencing problems getting and/or maintaining their erections, the drugs being promoted in the media are hardly a panacea. We've found that helping couples deal with erectile problems and other sexual realities brought on by the aging process has as much or more to do with their psychological and relational lives as it does with their physiological capacities.
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How a "Secure Base" Promotes Sexual Exploration
Susan Johnson
What does it take to restore physical intimacy to a failing relationship? In this video clip, Susan Johnson, the originator of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, uses bonding science to explain the one condition every relationship needs in order to repair emotional hurt and restore satisfying sex. Take a moment to watch this clip. You'll be glad you did.
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A Guide to the Four Types: Traditional, Soulmate, Emotionally Expressive, Complementary
Barry McCarthy
By Barry McCarthy - What is a sexual style? It has to do with recognizing how different elements of a couple's sexual experience form a pattern—their way of initiating sex, how they pleasure each other and engage in erotic scenarios, the role of intercourse in their lovemaking, the afterplay scenarios they prefer, and the meaning sex has for them and its place in their relationship. In my clinical work, the vast majority of couples tend to fall within one of four styles.
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Here's a Mirroring Exercise to Help Partners Empathize and Compromise
Olivia Mellan
By Olivia Mellan - After years of doing therapy and coaching in areas relating to money conflicts, I've discovered one constant about prenuptial agreements: whoever broaches the subject is labeled the bad partner. Yet prenuptial agreements have a role to play in helping couples plan and commit to their future together, particularly when they've been married previously. When handled well, they can even make a marriage stronger.
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Two Contradictions That Can Help Couples on the Brink Restore Connection
Michele Weiner-Davis
By Michele Weiner-Davis - Couples therapy can be difficult and dicey, especially when there’s an affair in the mix. To keep afloat in the emotional tumult, most therapists cling to certain hard-and-fast rules that form the foundation of their work. One therapist learns some surprising lessons when she reevaluates those tenets.
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The Importance of Creating "Shared Meaning"
Julie Gottman
According to renowned couples therapist Julie Gottman, one of the main predictors of a romantic relationship's success or failure is how well partners can dialogue about their differences. In the following clip from her 2015 Networker Symposium keynote, Gottman explains what a healthy dialogue looks like, and how it fosters "shared meaning."
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