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There are numerous stereotypes about love, relationships, and marriage, and some of them have formed into broadly shared myths. Unfortunately, couples can be led astray by myths that promote unhealthy relationship habits or prevent partners from adopting healthier styles of relating. Often in therapy, I work with couples to break down commonly held myths so that partners can increase their awareness and take control of developing a more satisfying relationship. Here are some of the most common…

Sexual desire naturally fluctuates, but many partners and couples struggle to accept the inevitable fall in sexual frequency and desire following the initial romantic love stage of a relationship. Sexual desire often comes willingly and easily in the early stages of a relationship, and many couples are left unprepared to initiate more active efforts to maintain desire and sexual fulfillment in later phases of a long-term partnership. As a result, too many partners feel undesired and fall…

Behavior plans are commonly thought of as something specifically for children with ADHD, but they can actually be useful for any child with behavior problems or difficulty focusing on or remembering tasks. A behavior plan is basically a system of requirements and rewards- if your child performs the required tasks, then they can earn something of value to them. The point of this is that you focus on and reward the positive behaviors your child displays while ignoring the negative ones that you would like to stop.

An unhealthy phenomenon in many long-term intimate relationships is the tendency to keep score. It is not so much keeping score that is the problem but that when partners do keep score, they tend to unfairly focus on the negative. Rarely in couple therapy, my line of work, do I hear couples delineate all the good, loving, or wonderful things that their partners did in a certain week. Most often, I hear a list of all the…

Having a bad day? Fed up with a part of your life? Feeling angry with a loved one? It’s understandable that you may be suffering from negativity and in a bad mood. The problem is, not only does this bad mood affect you- it also affects those around you. When you’re feeling down and disgruntled, you may unintentionally take this out on others. For example, maybe you started the day with spilling your coffee all over the…

Like women suffer as a result of society’s Madonna-whore complex, I believe that men also experience a contradictory prejudice—something of a “hero-wimp” complex. Men are expected to be strong, infallible, and stoic. When we think of a good dad, we imagine him playing sports, fixing the plumbing and chasing our ex-boyfriends with a shotgun. But women also desperately want men to be emotional—which contradicts this desire for a “hero”. We say, “ I want you to be…