6 Questions to ask if you are unsure about your relationship

6 Questions to ask yourself if unsure about relationship“Relationships seek to obtain: Level flight, nice buzz, floating down the river, hitting rapids, “wee that was fun,” return to level flight.” Margaret Martin

 How do I know when it is right? Am I settling? What if I am making a mistake? These are common questions to ask yourself after the romance cools. These are extremely hard questions to answer because, let’s face it, there is always someone better. After the initial rush is gone, there is always another exciting romance to be had. No matter what your age, there is always someone else who can give you that initial high.

Are you asking the right questions?

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5 Steps to Calm Down

A walk outside can help

A walk outside can help

Last week, we broke down the 5-step process of getting upset. We used the example of a father trying to get his daughter ready for school. He wanted to remain calm in a stressful situation, but instead became anxious and angry. It ended with him yelling at his daughter, her crying, and him feeling like a bad father.

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Feeling Substitution: Tit for Tat

Feelings are essential to our lives and well-being, because they give us information about what is going on around us and inside of us. We learn from an early age that there are acceptable feelings and unacceptable feelings. Many families have only one or maybe two feelings that are understood and accepted by its members.

For example: a child grows up in a family where the only acceptable feelings are sadness or depression. When someone expresses joy and excitement, (s)he is met by a lack of enthusiasm, perhaps is even told to “calm down.” Children in this family quickly learn that excitement, joy, and enthusiasm are unacceptable.

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Love, Freudian Style

In the early 1900’s Freud and his colleagues were developing new and radical ideas about the psychological makeup of humans. It may not seem so today, but their ideas on love were on target.

They theorized what we believe about love is based on our early experience with our main caretakers. Freud and his colleagues said these early events determine, on an unconscious level, what we experience as love.

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