Blog Archives
Perhaps you’re a healthy eater and you’re in love with someone who orders extra sausage and pepperoni on his pizza. Or maybe you’re a neat freak who can’t stand it when your guy leaves piles of his stuff all over the house. What seems like no big deal at the beginning of a relationship can escalate into a deal-breaker once the honeymoon phase ends. Anne Brennan Malec, Ph.D., author of Marriage in Modern Life: Why It Works,…
You have said, “I do,” signed the marriage license, and perhaps even celebrated your wedding with family and friends. With all the hard work of planning and executing a wedding behind you, now is the time to sit back, relax, and enjoy life as a married couple, right? The truth, of course, is that this picture of newly wedded bliss does not come close to the reality that nearly all couples face as they embark on their…
Love stories often arrive wrapped in cultural slogans and social media soundbites. Those messages sound comforting at first, yet many of them create confusion and disappointment over time. Relationship myths affect how people approach intimacy, conflict, sex, and commitment, and those myths quietly influence daily choices. From our perspective as clinicians, these beliefs often block growth and keep couples stuck in patterns that feel frustrating and lonely. At Symmetry Counseling, our work focuses on helping people recognize…
Many people say that dating is difficult and unpleasant. Rarely do you hear someone express unbridled excitement about going on yet another date, and that is because for a lot of people, dating is hard work! It requires one to be vulnerable yet energetic and engaging yet quiet enough to listen to your date. Even the most confident people can feel overwhelmed and self-conscious given all the elements one has to balance in order to ensure the…
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…
Depression is an issue that we are all too familiar with and hear about often in our culture. Recent studies suggest that nearly one tenth of the U.S. population has suffered from depression at one point in their lifetime. It is a pervasive issue, and so the primary symptoms of depression are known by most of us. We have a basic understanding that feeling sad, blue, hopeless, and unmotivated for a long period of time are some…
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.
In addition to rising temperatures, rainy days, and budding flowers, springtime also marks the start of wedding season. Couples are in the midst of planning the final details of their nuptials, attending to each element of the wedding day with care and consideration. It is an exciting time, to be sure. While preparing to create the perfect wedding celebration for you and your guests is laudable, it is even more important, perhaps, for you and your to-be…
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…