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Steven StosnyPsychology Today |
Guilty feelings are pervasive, lurking beneath resentment, anger, or depression.
Disappointment doesn’t have to augur emotional divorce.
The perception of “emotional needs” can make us manipulate, control, or abuse.
Blame it on habits.
Personal Perspective: It’s not easy to be consistently humane these days.
It says more about us than whomever we're angry at.
Contempt puts relationships in the intensive care unit.
Emotional reactivity can turn you into someone you’re not.
In the quest to get—and keep—a partner, this brief experiment might be revealing.
Attempts to avoid what we dread underlie most relationship conflicts.
In the sea of emotions, we drown on the surface and breathe in the depths.
All feelings are real, but not all of them express the authentic self.
A subset of depression results from lack of meaning and purpose.
Addressing biases and prejudices can improve your relationship and your life.
It can happen even with the best of therapists.
Defending the ego tends to diminish hope.
It gets easier to create meaning from experience with practice.
The self has stabilizing components as well as those more amenable to change.
If we don’t choose, resentment wins by default.
Chronic resentment can suck us into victim identity.
Relationships work best when these three are developed.
When feelings, attitudes, and values go together, life is better.
We either control relationship dynamics, or they control us.
We can't improve structure without improving the agency.
It’s hard to know what you want when focused on what you don’t want.
The way you experience love depends on what it feels like to be you.
Overemphasis on the former can ruin the latter.
Believe it or not, we can make our partners less selfish.
Do you try to negotiate, persuade, manipulate, or coerce?
You don’t have to go back to square one.
Choosing to act on just one or the other fails in the long run.
To like yourself better, be kind.
Just understanding them increases hope and meaning.
Without meaning and purpose, burnout is inevitable—at work or in relationships.
When we have to reflect on well-being, it’s sometimes too little, too late.
Fooling ourselves is easy but costly.
Humans did not evolve an internal punishment system.
The path to success is lined with many small mistakes and a few big ones.
To put out the fire, we need to turn off the gas.
The use of labels in a complex, high-stress world furthers cultural divisions.
The only way to change a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.
These must play in harmony for love to thrive.
These are linked emotions and interactive processes.
First, change the childhood echo, “It hurts when I try to love.”
Don’t fear a better life.
Evict all squatters.