Passion 101

When I’m counseling couples I always want to know how they manage conflict in their relationship. Couples come in all shapes and sizes.  Yet there seem to be three basic interactional styles. There are three basic ways that couples manage conflict.  Let’s find out which one you might be!   In no particular order, the [...]

Do you want to create more intimacy in your life?  It’s certainly one of the issues that many of my couples and singles want to work on when they see me for private counseling sessions.  The first thing I like to do is to define our terms.  When some people talk about having more intimacy, [...]

As a couples counselor for the past twenty years, I can safely say that the “Big Three” issues that couples see me about are: Money, Sex and Communication. It’s doubtful that any of you are surprised about this. PayPal conducted their “Can’t Buy Me Love” international survey about the role of money in relationships and [...]

I’ve posted a number of articles and videos on the psychology of how we come together to form relationships and the stages of relationship: the honeymoon stage, the power struggle stage and the conscious relationship stage.  Now I’d like to go a little deeper into the psychological processes that occur in these stages. Let me remind you [...]

I’m excited to announce that I just submitted a video audition to Oprah’s talk show contest (this is different than the recent audition I did for Oprah’s new television network, OWN.  This is a contest and the top five vote-getters will be on a reality show to GET a talk show on Oprah’s network!  So please, [...]

Couples enter counseling with me often with the question, “Should we live together or get married?” As a psychologist and couples therapist, I have been trained to explore questions first, prior to giving an answer. And the truth is, for this question, I don’t HAVE an answer, though I do have access to a great [...]

So what do I mean by the terms Maximizer and Minimizer?  Have you ever noticed that in your romantic relationships that one person usually plays the more active role and one plays the more passive role? Have you ever noticed that one person seems to be the “pursuer” and the other, the “pursued”?   And have [...]

I’ve been teaching a graduate class in Marriage and Family Therapy this semester and the focus of one class was on Virginia Satir, an incredible pioneer of family therapy.  She taught about the “Bill of Rights” for relationships and I feel that it is still quite relevant and appropriate to include on Passion 101 as [...]

People are always asking me for some easy tips to have a successful relationship.  I don’t know if anything is ever “easy” yet I’ve got some information that is certainly very straightforward to implement and very logical as well as intuitive.  I’m sure it will make sense to you and hopefully you will choose to [...]

It seems to me that for the most part, New Year’s resolutions focus on the tangible, focus on “stuff,” focus on material things. Or we focus on what we want to REMOVE from our lives – “I want to LOSE weight or STOP smoking or STOP fighting with my spouse. And we have differing levels [...]