If you’ve ever read any marriage or relationship advice articles/books, you probably heard the authors discussing the importance of empathy—the skill considered by many to be the gold standard of healthy relationships. I have written several relationship help articles on the topic of empathy here at strengthen your relationship.

What is needed for empathetic communication?

When trying to capture the essence of what it means to be empathetic, the metaphor of a bridge is frequently used:  Empathy involves a kind of psychological travel where you leave your inner world (for a period of time) and cross over into your spouse’s/partner’s psychological landscape.

The purpose of this bridge crossing is to allow you a better understanding of your partner’s inner world: stepping into his/her world gives you a first-hand account of his/her perspective, feelings, values and experiences. (Empathy always involves approximations, and some trial and error–we come as close as possible in capturing what the other person is experiencing, though we can never truly experience another’s feelings exactly how they experience them.)

Implied in the bridge metaphor is that there are two separate people (psychologically separate) with healthy boundaries, each with a stable sense of self that can be momentarily left (during the empathic moment) and subsequently returned to. For empathy, these psychological boundaries must be flexible, allowing for an emotional openness that grants others access into your inner world and that allows you the ability to enter into another’s emotional experience.

These empathic bridging moments are indeed a gift—this type of emotional joining allows couples to feel deeply understood and emotionally connected to one another; couples describe feeling more loved and accepted because of empathy. You may even feel less alone in the world because of empathetic experiences.

In essence, empathy is a conscious choice that arises out of love and compassion for another.

There are times, however, that couples may appear to be exhibiting empathic behaviors, yet something is awry in their communications—the relationship remains tenuous and on the verge of collapse. This danger exists when compassion and genuine empathy is replaced by a type of pseudo-empathy.  

Empathy is not…:

1) Driven by anxiety (or a fear of losing another). These fear-based reactions may lead to an emotional clingy-ness or hyper-vigilant focus on your partner that can look like empathy, but empathy is never driven by fear—rather, empathy is driven by a desire for mutual understanding. Anxiety-based behaviors have a frenetic and desperate energy often unrecognized by the fear-motivated partner.

2) Drive by martyrdom. The martyr feels the pain of others very deeply, but this emotional connection centers around the sacrifice of one’s self—a self-sacrifice for the suffering of another. When you’re feeling sad, the martyr feels tormented and immobilized because of your pain. This leads to a relationship and intimacy feed by suffering rather than mutual empowerment.

3) Driven by perpetual care-giving. The perpetual care-giver feels most at home in the maternal role, nurturing and giving emotionally without ever asking or expecting anything in return. This creates a relationship asymmetry, an emotionally off-balanced relationship where one person is constantly giving and the other constantly taking. In the long run, such a dynamic fails both partners.

4) Driven by emptiness.  Feeling emotionally empty (which we can all feel from time to time) is a highly distressing experience, an experience that can lead to impulsive behavior aimed at filling our inner vacuousness (over-eating, over-exercising, compulsive sex, abusing drugs/alcohol, etc.). When one partner feels emotionally incomplete, this partner may unconsciously attempt to feed his/her emotional hunger by taking on the feelings and experiences of the other partner—feeling everything your partner feels can temporarily fill the emotional void, giving you a tenuous sense of completeness that cannot be sustained without overwhelming the other person.

True empathy is driven by mutual compassion and a conscious decision to better grasp the ever-changing emotional landscapes that are part of every marriage/relationship. Acts of empathy strengthen your marriage or relationship, and usually, partners feel emotionally invigorated and enlivened by empathy.

When one or more of the four pseudo-empathetic reactions are occurring in your relationship, the gifts of empathy aren’t realized and you may feel perpetually stuck (a clear sign that true empathy hasn’t occurred).

Relationship and Marital Workbooks

Don’t forget to spend some time looking around on my website—there are hundreds of free marriage and relationship articles that cover a wide range of issues that matter most to couples.

I’ve brought together my top 3 selling relationship workbooks (including my popular communication workbook) at a 25% discount. Click Marriage Enrichment for information about these workbooks.

Here’s to strengthening your relationship!

Dr. Rich Nicastro

In a previous relationship help article, we focused on the idea of reminiscing as a pathway to nurturing your relationship—in particular, making a conscious effort to remember and share the positive memories that you and your spouse/partner have created and stored up over the history of your relationship. Bringing the positive-past into the present moment gives couples the opportunity to recapture and savor emotionally pleasurable, bonding experiences that can be used (and re-used) to feed and deepen emotional intimacy.

In today’s relationship advice article, we’ll briefly explore how you can strengthen your marriage or relationship by making a conscious effort to be more mindful and savor present-day experiences with your partner.

Savoring Present Moments for a Stronger Relationship

For the last week or so, Lisa and Jerry haven’t stopped talking about a recent movie they saw. They talked about their favorite scenes of the movie, the characters they liked and didn’t, who they identified with, possible motives for why characters did what they did… In short, Lisa and Jerry savored their experiences of the movie with one another.

Whenever you savor an experience, you place a mental thumb-tack in the experience so it doesn’t slip away from consciousness too quickly. Once the experience is identified and “held” in the spotlight of your focused awareness, it is allowed to take center stage in your mind. An opportunity is created where you can intensify and/or expand the positivity the experience has given you. Said differently, you create moments where you (and your partner) are able to relish more fully in the experience (as it is happening or after the actual experience has ended).

When you savor an experience with your spouse/partner, the positivity you experience separately becomes a shared event, one that fosters mutual delight and pleasure. The wisdom of the Swedish proverb is relevant here:

“Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.”

Don’t Let Positive Experiences Escape Too Quickly from Your Awareness

Like all of us, the stage of your mind has a limited amount of space to hold experiences, so only a select few pieces of information can occupy your mind’s center stage. New, incoming information and experiences are constantly competing for a placement on our mental stages, and once new information is let onto this stage, what previously existed on the stage is brushed aside and potentially lost from consciousness.

In our frenetic, information-saturated lives, the relatively small stage of our conscious mind is constantly being flooded and overrun—what was once center stage a moment ago, vying for attention, is quickly replaced by the newest information influx. The danger is that certain internalized experiences are often short-lived and in some cases, may go totally unnoticed because of the incoming competition for stage space.

You (and your relationship) lose out when positive experiences aren’t allowed to occupy your mental stage for extended periods of time.  

In order for positive, pleasurable experiences to take hold on your mental stage, you must shine the spotlight of your attention onto this particular experience.  When you focus on an experience, in essence, you are carving out a mental space on your psychic stage, a space that gives the internalized experience the room to exist—a place to stand without crashing into the next bit of incoming info.

In short, when you deliberately allow a pleasurable experience to occupy the center stage of your mind, you take a front row seat to this experience and an opportunity for savoring is created. This is what Lisa and Jerry were doing when they mentally revisited their experiences of the movie. They each temporarily cleared their mental stages (cleared away their work and financial concerns, and the stress of raising a newborn), which allowed mental space for the continued savoring of their experiences of the movie. And, unbeknownst to the couple, they were strengthening their marriage in the process of savoring this experience.

Are you and your partner/spouse ready to make savoring a regular part of your relationship?

Marital Relationship Resources

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Here’s to creating a meaningful relationship!

Dr. Rich Nicastro

About once a month, Pete and Naomi spend a designated amount of time reminiscing about their marriage—in particular, they each recall and describe a positive experience they shared together over the course of their relationship (after being married for twenty-three years, they have a large pool of memories to reflect upon).

These “reminiscent moments” (as Naomi and Pete like to call them) may seem simple and sweet, but these moments aren’t just about sweetness. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that these moments of sharing  serve a very important function for the couple and for the health of their relationship. As Naomi described, “Our friends ask us all the time, ‘You’ve done this once a month for how many years? Why?’ My answer is always the same: It makes us feel better about our relationship, it makes us feel closer, it makes us feel better about ourselves. It’s that simple.”

Reminiscing for a Stronger Marriage/Relationship

When Pete and Naomi recall parts of their relationship history, they aren’t just exchanging factual information.  In essence (and most importantly), the couple is recapturing pleasurable experiences they shared and created together—this recapturing includes remembering the specific details of an event, their individual feelings and sensations associated with what happened, their feelings toward each other as a result of the shared experience, the vivid mental pictures stirred as the couple relives the experience together.

This type of shared remembering re-awakens what has occurred long ago as if it is actually happening all over again.

Such reminiscing requires a particular mindset, an openness and attentiveness to the process of reliving a once-lived experience.  Couples do this all the time, but sadly, they typically do it with painful events—a repetitive reliving of the painful past that involves conjuring up all the pain, frustration and alienation they once felt, only to relive an argument again and again with absolutely no benefit to their marriage or relationship. This is reminiscing gone awry.

But when you and your partner make the conscious choice to reminisce about positive, pleasurable, satisfying experiences you co-experienced (like Naomi and Pete), you end up enhancing the emotional foundation and bond of your relationship. Reminiscing about positive events is like feeding your relationship an emotional multi-vitamin.

In their book, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, researchers Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff state that to savor a positive experience, one must have or learn the capacities to “attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences of their lives.” The authors also highlight that “attentive and appreciative awareness of the pleasure must also occur or we would not consider the experience to involve savoring.” 

It appears that an essential ingredient in the savoring process is the ability to be mindful of the pleasurable experience, to acknowledge and observe your positive experiences. Clearly Pete and Naomi are savoring parts of their relationship history—they are mindfully reawakening past events that have occurred and savoring the present day pleasures that are stirred while looking back on these experiences. In the vivid recalling of the positives of their shared past, the couple is keeping certain experiences (along with the positive feelings connected to these experiences) alive in the present (so the positive-past becomes the positive-present).

Of course you and your spouse/partner can savor present day experiences as well (shared laughter and silliness, vacations, social events, parenting joys, sexual-sensual experiences), but the important point to realize from today’s post is that you may have an untapped warehouse of mentally-stored experiences that you and your partner are not accessing; experiences waiting to be remembered and mentally relived in as much vivid detail as possible—a sharing that can strengthen your marriage or relationship by bringing to life the positive experiences of your relationship history.  

Are you willing to try savoring the good times that you and your partner have shared?

Relationship and Marital Resources

Don’t forget to spend some time looking around on my website—there are hundreds of free marriage and relationship help articles that cover a wide range of issues that matter most to couples.

I’ve brought together my top 3 selling relationship workbooks (including my popular communication workbook) at a 25% discount. Click Marriage Enrichment  for information about these workbooks.

Here’s to strengthening your relationship!

Dr. Rich Nicastro

The following article is a companion to my recent article, Is Passion Possible in Long-Term Relationships?

In my work as a psychologist and couples counselor, I’ve observed the tendency for some couples to think that their marriage or relationship should be a certain way, somehow other than it is: “We should communicate more”; “We should spend more time together”; “We should have more shared interests”; “We should be having more sex”; “We should…”; “Why aren’t we…?”

When couples present with the beliefs that their relationship should be a particular way, I often ask them, “Why?  Why do you believe that things should be different as you’re suggesting?”; “Who said you should be having more sex?” “Why do you want more passion, and what would that look like for you and your partner?”

These questions get to a particular issue that is important for all of us to consider:

Do you want a more passionate relationship (or more specifically, a more passionate sex life) because not having passion is causing you distress and you feel that something important is truly missing, or do you want more passion because you think you’re supposed to have more passion?

Whose Passion Standards Are You Trying to Live Up to?

Thinking that your relationship/marriage should be or is supposed to be a particular way can arise when you: 1) Compare your relationship to other couples or some external standard that you are allowing to dictate your relationship reality; 2) You compare the current reality of your relationship to something that might have existed in your relationship history (for instance, thinking that the passion and excitement you had when you first married should be achievable today).

Assessing your relationship by someone else’s reality can cause problems because in doing so, you are more likely to interpret any differences that exist between your relationship and this external standard as an indication that your relationship is somehow amiss. In short, you end up judging your relationship as not right or broken, and, in the process, you fail to recognize the unique circumstances of your life and the particular rhythms that may work for you and your partner.

The truth is that not all couples seek or need sexual passion, nor do they feel that something important is missing from their relationship because their union might be described by an outsider as passionless or mundane. When you come to believe that you “should” have a more passionate marriage or relationship, when you tell yourself that passion is a necessary ingredient to relationship fulfillment (without taking the time to reflect upon what is your particular truth and your partner’s truth and what brings meaning and fulfillment to your lives), then you are doing your relationship an injustice. You just might be over-idealizing the notion of passion at the exclusion of what works for you and your partner.

For many of the couples I’ve worked with, what matters most is a sense of safety and security with one’s spouse/partner, a security that allows them to express their deepest longings– even if the predictability and familiarity that allows for emotional security and stability comes at the cost of passion.  For these couples, emotional transparency and intimacy is prioritized over the sensuous fires of intense passion. And this works well for many couples.

The Complexities Of Passion

Passion, I believe, has become one of those terms that conceals just as much as it reveals. The experience of passion is layered with meaning—the sexual-passionate experience exists at the intersection of the psychological, emotional, physiological, interpersonal and cultural—all powerful influences that continually shape and color our experiences, including passion and sexuality.  

For some, passion is about abandon and escape from the confines of domesticity; for others, it is the selfless giving to another that is passionately restorative and enlivening; for some, passion, power and control go hand-in-hand; for others, feeling sexually alive is about being “bad” and getting caught; yet for some people, passion awakens when tinged with aggressiveness and the need to push oneself and one’s relationship beyond certain limits without worrying about the other’s feelings…and so on.  What is passionate for one may appear subdued and highly ordinary for another—we are indeed varied, complex and layered beings, and our turn-ons and turn-offs reflect this complexity.

But whether acknowledged or not, the need for and experience of passion (in whatever shape and form it takes) is a highly personal experience that rests on the desire to express our deepest selves and vulnerabilities with a partner who will fully accept and love us (foibles and all). 

So do you really want more passion in your relationship? Or do you tend to idealize passion, thinking that your relationship should be more passionate for reasons that do not truly reflect what you want or need? 

Marriage and Relationship Workbooks

Is passion truly important to you and your partner?

If so, for information about how to make passion a regular part of your marriage/relationship, click Passion, Sex and Intimacy.

And to receive a 25% discount off my top 3 selling relationship workbooks (including my popular communication workbook), click Marriage Enrichment special offer.

Until next time,

Dr. Rich Nicastro

“We’re so comfortable with each other, and that’s great—I wouldn’t give that up for anything. But sometimes I wish there was a little more spark in our marriage, a little excitement. Do you know what I mean?”  ~ Marianne, married nineteen years

“Our relationship was so intense, probably too intense, maybe that’s why it ended. But you couldn’t say we didn’t have passion. But it somehow got the better of us…I’ve learned firsthand that a relationship isn’t just built on adrenaline rides.”   ~ Dwayne, discussing a five-year-old relationship that ended

In the above quotes, Marianne and Dwayne are talking about passion—in one example, a marriage devoid of passion’s charge and, in another, a relationship overrun by passion’s fury without a stable foundation to contain the passion. 

Can Passion Be Created?

Typically when people talk about passion, they are referring to sexual passion: A strong sexual desire and/or an intense sexual experience—one that is exciting and enlivening.

While you might make the argument that some people are inherently more passionate then others, passion doesn’t simply exist inside a person, isolated from the circumstances of his/her life—passion (particularly passion in long-term relationships) requires certain external conditions in order to exist.

Passion often exists at the crossroads between our seemingly contradictory human needs for novelty/ discovery/excitement and our needs for security/stability/predictability.  Often new relationships involve higher levels of discovery (self- and other-discovery), excitement, and newness, ingredients that seem to invite passion, or make us more open to exploring and expressing our passionate selves.

But as the newness wanes and predictability takes over the relationship landscape, feelings of excitement and mutual discovery give way to familiarity and emotional security—essential conditions that bring a deep sense of emotional connection and stability.  It has been argued, however, that when couples become too comfortable with each other (when comfort becomes complacency), when you can predict each other’s every move with remarkable accuracy, when what you see is what you get (total transparency without any surprises or mystery), then passion’s potential is lost, and if passion can be achieved, it’s muted at best and needs ongoing resuscitation.

If this is true, then many couples in long-term marriages and relationships face a challenge—they need to deliberately set up passion-friendly conditions. Long-term lovers must break out of deeply-held, routinized patterns of relating to each other in order to create something new, an ever-changing relationship playing field that allows for surprise and that allows for continued self/other discovery (no matter how well you think you know each other).

In addition to doing something different (different from their predictable norm), couples in long-term relationships must perceive each other differently, seeing one another (even temporarily) with new eyes rather than familiar eyes (that is, the eyes that only see what they expect to see).

Is Passion Overrated?

We will explore this important question in my next blog post.

Did you know that many couples describe their marriage or relationship in very positive terms, even though passion is not a central feature of their relationship?  So while some couples see passion as essential to a healthy relationship and feel distressed when it is missing, the “passion equals a healthy relationship” viewpoint doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.

For more information, check out my “Is Passion Overrated?”  blog post.

Sex, Passion and Intimacy Resources

If you’d like more information on how to increase passion in your marriage or relationship, check out my comprehensive, easy-to-use Passion, Sex and Intimacy workbook.

Effective couples communication and a fulfilling sex life go hand-in-hand. To add communication strategies and skills to your relationship toolbox, check out my communication workbook.

Here’s to increasing passion and intimacy in your relationship!

Dr. Rich Nicastro

Whether we like to admit it or not, couples hurt each other from time to time and often, in emotionally significant ways. There is an element of truth to the cliché, “You always hurt the one you love.” But not all wounding that occurs in marriages or long-term relationships is alike. Some relationship upsets are transient and leave little to no lasting residue, while other types of emotional wounding reach deep, leaving psychological scars that continue to impact the course of the relationship long after the painful events have occurred.

It’s important for couples to understand the nature of relationship conflict and the emotional wounds that occur—to become more fully conscious of which misunderstandings and arguments have the potential to do irreparable relationship damage.  Let’s turn our attention to why certain misunderstandings and conflicts seem to easily roll off your back, while others are more likely to take up a long-term residence in your psyche.

5 Reasons You (Or Your Partner) Can’t Get Over an Argument

1. Unintentional Versus Deliberate Wounding

It’s common for people to attribute motivation to other people’s behavior—to ascribe “why” the other person did what s/he did. And one dimension where this occurs has to do with intentionality: Did your partner mean to be hurtful, or was the hurt s/he caused unintentional? Not surprisingly, deliberate actions of malice are more likely to shatter trust than accidental wounding. 

2. Episodic Versus Repetitive Wounding

We all argue occasionally with our loved ones (episodic arguments) and the research has shown that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—in fact, trying to avoid conflict at all costs turns out to be detrimental to one’s marriage or relationship. But when periodic marital or relationship conflicts are replaced by repetitive arguing/wounding, couples have little chance to recover from the emotional fallout of previous fights. No mutual understanding and closure over what happened takes place. This cumulative impact of negativity can make couples feel beleaguered and, ultimately, disengage from one another.  

3. Acknowledged Versus Disavowed Wounding

When you acknowledge that you have hurt your partner (even if you do not fully “get” why your actions might have been experienced as hurtful by him/her), you’ve taken a big step toward ownership of your behavior. The message is sent: “I realize my actions caused you distress, and I’m sorry that you were upset.” Such a message can go a long way toward healing the inevitable relationship wounds that occur. Disavowing responsibility creates a relationship environment that is unpredictable and emotionally unsafe, and healing cannot take hold in such an unfriendly atmosphere.

4. Validated Versus Minimized Wounding

Validating your partner’s hurt goes one step further than acknowledging that you’ve caused him/her to be upset (as discussed in number 3). Whenever you validate, you send the potentially healing message that you understand why your partner is upset, that his/her reaction makes sense to you (the message being: “Of course you’re upset, why wouldn’t you be?”). The opposite position, of minimizing or ignoring your partner’s emotional pain, is likely to keep the flames of hurt smoldering indefinitely. When you invalidate your spouse’s/partner’s emotional wounds (wounds that you might have caused), you are adding layer of hurt on top of layer of hurt. Talk about a one-two punch to the emotional gut!

5. Superficial Versus Core Wounding

For a hurtful comment or action to cause wounding, it has to have a place to land—in other words, the more your partner believes and accepts your hurtful comment as truthful, the deeper the pain will be. The most lasting effects of wounding occur when your statements/actions trigger your partner’s core emotional wounds—wounds that were created in childhood.  We all have core wounds from our pasts, and these emotional wounds reflect our deepest sensitivities and vulnerabilities, and when these are awakened and agitated during conflict, the wounding that occurs is more likely to be more intense and lasting.

When couples struggle to make sense of and shake off the mutual hurts that have occurred over time (or that may occur), it’s important to understand why certain emotional wounds rock you at your core, while others seem relatively insignificant and easy to move past. If it turns out that you (or your partner) seem stuck in the quicksand of past misunderstandings and hurts, it may be that one or more of the above is at work and needs addressing.

Marriage And Relationship Workbooks

1) Healing emotional wounds and forgiveness go hand in hand. I’ve created a workbook for couples on how to make forgiveness a regular part of your relationship or marriage. Click love and forgiveness for more information about this forgiveness resource.

2) Special workbook offer: I’ve brought together my top 3 selling relationship workbooks into a special bonus offer (this offer includes my popular effective communications workbook). Click Marriage Enrichment for more information.

Until next time,

Dr. Rich Nicastro

To differing degrees, we all feel lonely from time to time. It’s an experience that is a natural part of our existence. And often, feelings of loneliness act as a signal that lead to some type of change in one’s life. This change might involve the decision to start dating (if you’re single), or reaching out more to others already in your life (your spouse/partner, a family member, friend, etc.), or getting involved in some community or social activity (joining a book club, volunteering).

Such a course change is often enough to satisfy the hunger that we know as loneliness.

But to satisfy the pangs of loneliness, you have to know that you are indeed craving connection with others. This might seem straightforward, but for some, the experience of loneliness isn’t that easy to identify; loneliness can have a shadowy, ill-defined quality that is obscured by our busy, externally-focused lives.

And while it may sound like a strange paradox to think that someone can actually be lonely yet not have full awareness of this painful experience, the truth is that many of the men I’ve worked with in therapy too often reside in a painful state of disconnection—a disconnection from others, and even more fundamentally, a disconnection from themselves.

Relationship Help for Men: You Just Might Be Struggling with Loneliness

“I’m a guy. Guys don’t get lonely…Do they?” ~Jim (At a men’s workshop)

Emile didn’t know he was lonely.

He knew he was “stressed”; he knew he was having trouble sleeping; he knew he was quick to anger; he knew his wife and son complained about him, about his emotional distance and impatience; he knew that even on a good day, he existed in a perpetual state of tenseness that bordered on agitation.  He knew what many men are able to acknowledge about themselves but, like many men, none of his emotional struggles suggested to Emile that he was lonely.

To understand loneliness, you have to acknowledge one of the most fundamental needs that people have: the need for emotional connection-closeness to important others. Psychologists talk about this need using different terms (relational needs, attachment, emotional intimacy or connection, interpersonal needs, dependency needs), all suggesting that others matter to our ongoing psychological, emotional and physical well-being, and in far-reaching and profound ways.

Of course,  people differ in the intensity of their need for connection, as well as in how they go about fulfilling these needs—for some, the need for connection may feel like a soft whisper that gives gentle reminders to reach out, while for others, this need may demand attention until attention is received. Either way, we must be attuned to the undercurrents of our need for connection, and when we fail to do so, it usually has far-reaching, negative consequences in our lives.

Men and Loneliness: Do Masculine Ideals Obscure Men’s Need For Connection?

Why was Emile struggling with underlying issues of loneliness? (A loneliness that manifested as agitation and “stress.”)

Like many men, Emile placed a high value on self-reliance, a sense of self-sufficiency that was handed down from his father and grandfather. And while this masculine ideal (the ideal of the independent, “strong” male) served Emile well in the world of business and supporting his family financially, it cut him off from his underlying need for emotional connection and his ability to be emotionally vulnerable with his wife in particular. To rely on others emotionally (even others he knew had his best interests in mind) violated a core aspect of his masculine identity.

Emile’s need for emotional intimacy-connection (which includes the need to be emotionally vulnerable at times) didn’t cease as a result of the masculine ideals he internalized. Instead (as is often the case), Emile’s attachment needs went underground, unseen and unacknowledged—stored in the cellar of his psyche where they continued to poke at him in an effort to be noticed. But rather than identify and ultimately integrate these needs into his masculine identity (where they might exist alongside the trait of self-reliance, offering balance depending on circumstance), Emile remained estranged from his own internal world, and as a result, estranged from others as well.

Although many men, like Emile, are committed to and love their spouses/partners, they remain lonely– a loneliness that arises from a disconnection with one’s most fundamental humanness, the need to share one’s deepest desire to feel understood and emotionally connected to a loving other. 

Male loneliness starts from within, and it’s here at its source where men must open themselves so that they can share themselves emotionally with the people they love.

Marriage and Relationship Resources

For information about how to make effective communication a regular part of your marriage/relationship, click communication workbook.

And to receive a 25% discount off my top 3 selling relationship workbooks (including my communication workbook), click Marriage Enrichment special offer.

Until next time,

Dr. Rich Nicastro

Today’s blog post is written by guest expert, Lisa Brookes Kift, MFT

A  recent article in ScienceDaily.com is titled, “Women Happier in Relationships Where Men Feel Their Pain.” Those of us in the field of relationship therapy have known that empathy is a cornerstone of a healthy, connected relationship. However, men and women actually want different emotional payoffs from each other. The study by the American Psychological Association demonstrated that, men like to know when their partners are happy while women want the man in their life to know when they are upset.

According to Shiri Cohen, PhD and author of the study, “It could be that for women, seeing that their male partner is upset reflects some degree of the man’s investment and emotional engagement in the relationship, even during difficult times. This is consistent with what is known about the dissatisfaction women often experience when their male partner becomes emotionally withdrawn and disengaged in response to conflict.”

Empathy doesn’t come naturally for everyone and there are many reasons for this including attachment trauma and other challenging family of origin experiences where you weren’t modeled empathy. Men are often not socialized to be empathic to the degree that women are. The bottom line is that if empathy is a struggle it can be practiced, learned and integrated into your relationships. If trauma is part of your story, you may need to begin with empathy for yourself before you can demonstrate it outwardly.

What is empathy?

Empathy is the ability to recognize another person’s beliefs and emotions; to not only put yourself in another person’s shoes but respond to their needs.

So men, we’re looking for behaviors that demonstrate empathy to your partners so they feel your emotional engagement. Let’s look at some of the ways you can do this:

• Follow up and ask her about something that was bothering her.
• Ask her about her day. Listen for the emotional content under the facts and dig deeper with her.
• During an argument listen without interruption and validate her feelings.
• Recognize that she is separate from you and is justified to have separate feelings and desires.
• Refrain from always having to be right.
• Let her see you practicing empathy in other areas of your life.

The presence or lack of empathy shapes all of us from our earliest attachment relationships with our parents or primary givers. It’s an important skill to hone in all of your relationships. Men or women can struggle with empathy. It’s also important to note that the study findings also show that the more men and women try to be empathetic to their partner’s feelings, the happier they are.

Lisa Brookes Kift is a marriage and family therapist, and creator of The Toolbox at LisaKiftTherapy.com, providing tools for marriage, relationship and emotional health. She is a frequent consultant for the media and has been interviewed, quoted or has appeared in numerous publications and online news sources including CNN.com, HuffingtonPost.com and Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine. Lisa has an individual and couples therapy practice in Larkspur, Marin County, CA.

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Rich Nicastro, Ph.D. is a psychologist specializing in marital/relationship issues and creator of www.StrengthenYourRelationship.com. If you’d like to become a guest expert on his website, please feel free to contact Dr. Nicastro.

Trying to find specific relationship help tips that are relevant to your marriage/relationship is no easy task—sometimes it’s even difficult to find what you’re looking for on one website. And my website, strengthen your relationship, is no exception. With hundreds of marital and relationship advice articles to sort through, finding the one or two articles that seem to speak directly to the issues of your marriage or relationship can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The “blog topics” and “recent posts” sections on the right side column of my website can help direct you to specific marital and relationship issues that may be of interest. In addition to these navigational tools, I’d like to point out three articles that many couples have told me they find particularly helpful.

1) Emotional Intimacy

Emotional intimacy (the emotional closeness that you and your spouse/partner feel toward each other) is often considered the sine qua non of a healthy relationship. But finding ways to feel that deep sense of connection isn’t always easy. For strategies to deepen intimacy, check out my article:

5 Pathways to Greater Intimacy

2) Core Relationship Skills

A healthy marriage and relationship takes effort and work, but also knowledge and skill. There are core skills, what I call relationship fundamentals, that can help couples keep their relationship moving in the right direction. Too many couples never learned (or they start to overlook) the core building blocks of a healthy union. For a list of the fundamentals of a successful relationship, check out my article:

Relationship Building Blocks

3) Protecting Your Marriage/Relationship

I often tell couples that all relationships are vulnerable to the dangers of infidelity and therefore, we should never become complacent and believe our relationship is immune to certain realities that need to be monitored. Understanding the relationship conditions that can lead to an affair (or potential affair) is one way to protect your marriage/relationship.  To learn more about how to protect your relationship from an affair, check out my article:

5 Danger Zones That Can Lead To An Affair

These three relationship advice articles are a great way to get started down the path of relationship wholeness—each article covers essential relationship issues that are important to couples. But reading about different ways to protect your relationship shouldn’t be just a purely intellectual exercise; incorporating the information into your marriage or relationship is the real gift to a lasting, loving union. To this end, I encourage you to share this information with your partner so you can both develop a  plan on how to keep your relationship in top form.

Other Marital Relationship Resources

Special workbook offer: I’ve brought together my top 3 selling workbooks into a special bonus offer. Click Marriage Enrichment for more information.

Couples get stuck. Marriages get stuck. Relationships get stuck.

I think it’s fair to say that at some point in the history of every relationship, some level of stuck-ness is to be expected. The possible reasons why a couple might get stuck vary, and it’s important to know that not all stuck-ness is alike. Sometimes all your relationship might need is a little push to get things moving in the right direction, while at other times, it might be a  more serious issue that is causing your marriage or relationship to falter.

In either case, it’s important for couples to identify that they are indeed stuck (whether one or both partners feel this way) and to identify what changes might be needed to shake the relationship out of its inertia.

2 Levels of Relationship Stuck-ness

1) Benign Stuck-ness

Couples get stuck in this way when their relationship routines become so ingrained and rigid that there is little room for spontaneity, playfulness and mutual exploration. Under these conditions, the danger is that familiarity and a lack of variation move the relationship from the plane of comfort to the plane of boredom.

And while boredom is a part of life (and a part of any marriage/relationship), couples need to make sure that their relationship doesn’t sink into a lifelessness that ultimately leads to  disconnection and a parallel existence.

What’s needed?

With benign stuck-ness, identifying that the relationship is indeed stuck is half the battle. This will allow you and your partner to develop some type of plan to create a slight change in the course of your relationship routines. This is often enough to resuscitate the relationship’s pulse.

2) Malignant Stuck-ness

Couples in this level of stuck-ness are distressed.

Couples in distress are usually mired in defensive, attack-counter-attack and emotionally closed-off interactions. They feel hurt, helpless and angry. And depending on the extent of the problem, there may be little neutral communication ground where these couples can come together and freely talk without the expectation of something going terribly wrong.

This level of stuck-ness has the power to pull apart couples who feel deep love for one another.  The problem is that negative interactions involving hurt and anger tend to grow like weeds that can overtake anything positive that might exist in your relationship garden.

What’s needed?

Changing and reversing the course of negative patterns into positive, relationship-affirming connections takes perspective-taking and a willingness to change your behavior (even when you feel justified in your defensiveness). The ability to identify how you are triggering each other’s hurt and anger without blame is a good starting point. If you find yourself unable to extricate the relationship from these dysfunctional patterns, consulting with a marriage or couples counselor can give your relationship the shot in the arm it needs.

Remember, feeling stuck isn’t a sign that major marital or relationship problems are inevitable. But the stuck-ness you and/or your partner might be feeling (even if it’s benign stuck-ness) shouldn’t be ignored or minimized at the expense of your relationship’s health. Stuck-ness is a source of information that can help you and your spouse/partner come together and work for the good of the relationship.

Marriage/Relationship Workbooks-Resources

Do you need help getting (or keeping) your relationship un-stuck?

Special workbook offer: I’ve brought together my top 3 selling workbooks into a special bonus offer. Click Marriage Enrichment for more information.