Responding Mindfully When Your Partner is Projecting On You
In my previous post on projection, I discussed two important skills for when your partner projects their “stuff” onto you. I encouraged awareness and empathy, and suggested that projection can paradoxically encourage connection; when you’re aware of what your partner is emotionally carrying, you can be more sensitive and speak directly to their emotional wounds, regardless of […]
Stop Apologizing For Your Truth
Women are trained to take care of other people’s feelings; through our conditioning, we learn early that it’s our job to make other people happy, to take care of other people’s experiences. And that it’s our fault and we should feel guilty if we don’t. Sharing a truth we think will be displeasing, inconvenient, or […]
How to Become Someone Who “Matters”
While “codependent” is not a clinical diagnosis or recognized personality disorder, it remains a widely-used term for someone who’s self-sacrificing, a caregiver who gives at the expense of her own well-being, and who enables her partner’s addictive or self-destructive behavior. Breaking behavior that could be described as codependent starts with greater self-awareness. Notice when you’re ignoring your own […]
How to Be Independent in Your Relationship: A New Model for Love
In Part 1 of this series, I examined what it feels like to need your partner’s approval in order to feel okay about yourself. Here, I’ll address some of the many complicated conditions that lead to this dynamic and some guidance for outgrowing this draining and disempowering relational paradigm. As I stated in the previous post, […]
When You Keep Getting Triggered by the Same Person (Part 1)
Dealing with a relationship that brings you back to old—and unwelcome—feelings and behaviors Jane, a client, was heading out to see her stepfather. She had described him as someone who talked incessantly about his importance and the remarkable things he’d accomplished (a lot of which weren’t true). At the same time, he’d never expressed curiosity […]
Can You Be Okay When Your Partner Is Not Okay?
While “codependent” is not a clinical diagnosis or recognized personality disorder, it remains a widely- used term for someone who’s self-sacrificing, a caregiver who gives at the expense of her own well-being, and who enables her partner’s addictive or self-destructive behavior. These tendencies show up in many forms, and are about much more than self-sacrifice and enabling addiction. In […]
A User’s Guide for Adding ‘No’ to Your Vocabulary
This post is Part 2 of a series. I ended Part 1 of this series on learning to say “no” by asking the question, How do we give ourselves permission to start incorporating ‘no’ into our life, and indeed into our very identity? How do we start living differently—with boundaries? The very uncomplicated answer is that we just do it; we […]
The Likability Cage: Are Women Still Trapped?
Thirty-five years ago, my sorority sister was raped at a fraternity party. She didn’t report it for reasons we can guess, having heard this story a thousand times by now. Indeed, it was the clichéd story: the popular, handsome fraternity boy from a powerful family who happened to be a big donor to the university […]
Do You Feel Like A Hostage to Your Partner’s Anger?
This is the third in a series of posts. Read part 1 and part 2. In this series, I’ve been looking at the experience of living with a partner with anger issues, as well as ways to shift your thinking so as to maintain peace of mind, regardless of your partner’s state of mind. Now I want to offer some […]
Your Partner’s Anger Issues Don’t Have to Be Yours – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, “How to Live (Peacefully) With An Anger Bully,” I looked at the experience of living with someone with anger issues, what it’s actually like and what happens to you internally when your partner’s anger is unmanaged and problematic. Here, in Part 2, I want to go further and consider how you can respond […]