It’s Saturday evening and you are getting ready to go out. You and your partner had agreed to go out to your favorite restaurant for dinner because it’s been a long time since you had been out on a date together. Your relationship was starting to get routine and the two of you remembered how much fun you used to have, so you have been looking forward to this all week long. You take a nice long shower, shave your legs, put on makeup, put on a flattering dress, spray your favorite perfume, and slip into some nice heels. You are all dolled up and ready to go…

If you’ve been in a romantic relationship for any length of time you are probably familiar with the feeling of shifting from being lovey-dovey with your partner to thinking he or she is completely out to get you—and that shift can sometimes happen in a split second.  

If you’ve ever had this experience, you’re not alone.  

Almost everyone who has ever been in a romantic relationship has experienced this at some point in their relationship. When it happens, it’s usually related to the some issue you’ve had before:
Your partner didn’t put the cup in the sink, again!
Your partner left their socks in the middle of the room, again!
Your partner didn’t take the trash out to the street, again!
Your partner was out with their friends all night long, again!
Your partner’s mother invited herself over without letting you know, again!

One of the reasons we love working with relationships here at the Center for Soulful Relationships is because life is all about relationships. 

Relationships have the power to lift us up and bring us great joy. And, they also have the power to bring us down into the depths of despair. 

Our intimate romantic partnerships, especially, is where all the magic happens. 

If you feel like your relationship started off filled with love, you had an instant connection with your partner, the sparks flew, and it felt like you had known one another for years, the reality is: You probably have. 

As you prepare to celebrate the 4th of July, celebrating our independence as a nation, your heart might be feeling the balance between the celebration and the heaviness of how can we allow ourselves to celebrate when our country is in such deep turmoil?

Children are still being torn from their parents and detained in detention facilities reminiscent of concentration camps and internment camps... Roe v Wade might be overturned... California might separate into two different states... race relations continue to be slow in improving and divisiveness continues to prevail. 

That's why today I want to share with you this video about what you can do to make the changes our country and our world so badly need right now. 

In my almost 15 years of working with clients one thing has become very clear to me: most people today experience deep grief about losses unseen.

When most people think of grief, they think of a physical death: A family member or friend died and then a grief process begins.

Most people don’t realize grief is a process that arises from more than just death.

Death is simply the most tangible way we can conceptualize grief. When a person dies, they are no longer with us in body, and therefore, we believe we have experienced a loss. There is a direct, tangible, and measureable loss.

However, our lives are a constant series of losses:
Loss of a dream
Loss of a desire
Loss of our innocence
Loss of our hopes
Loss of our health
Loss of our child’s health
Loss of who we used to be
The list can go on and on.

As you watch the news, read headlines in the papers, and scroll through your Facebook feed, you might be feeling sad, hopeless, and angry and afraid at what is happening in our country today.

Children are being separated from their families, sometimes taken from their parents arms, and placed in modern day internment camps. Children and families are being traumatized. Families are being torn apart. Innocents are being hurt, both in the short and long term.

If you feel sad, angry, hopeless, and afraid, you are feeling the emotions which are appropriate for a terrible situation such as this.

 And while there is external work in the world to be done, I want to invite you to consider the internal work that needs to also be done within each one of us as well.

If your relationships feel strained, difficult, or leave you feeling less than pleased, this video might offer you some answers.

Watch the video on this blog to learn how your relationships are really mirrors for you and what that even means...

Many of the clients who reach out to us for either individual therapy or couples counseling here at our San Jose psychotherapy office do so because they feel lonely in their lives and their relationships, despite being surrounded by loved ones.  

In our Get Acquainted Calls women seeking therapy share with us they have an intimate romantic partnership, yet for whatever reason, they feel lonely and disconnected. They describe a sense of feeling like their lives are on auto-pilot and the love and connection they once used to experience in their marriage or partnership feels like it is missing. These women crave the feeling of connection and intimacy they once shared with their partners.

Relationships are great. They serve a wonderful purpose in our lives. Relationships help us feel like we are connected. They help us feel we are loved and we belong. Our relationships help us to feel good about ourselves…

That is, until they don’t help us feel that way anymore. 

When your relationships start to lose a sense of meaning and it feels like the love is lost, all of a sudden it can start to feel like life is losing its sense of meaning too.

There was a time in the therapy world where we used to say people were “self-sabotaging” when they would do something to mess up life when it was going well. Over time we have begun to see it differently. Today, most people in the personal development and growth world would call these self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviors either limiting beliefs, or the upper limit problem.