simcha's postings about love, connection, parenting & personal growth
A thought I want to share as the holidays approach: Your child owes no one a hug.
Insisting a child kiss or hug a relative or family friend Hello or Goodbye when s/he does want to, invalidates your child’s feelings by suggesting that external pressures (and Aunty’s feelings) are more important than his/hers. And it teaches them that consent can be manipulated, by cajoling or worse.
So many of the struggles of the couples I work with revolve around one or the other’s need to always be right, to hold on tight to ideas, beliefs or perceptions as if their lives depend upon it.
While possibly protecting us from our own self-doubt and uncertainty, this need to always be right “calcifies” our ability to listen well, to be flexible and open-minded, and makes us a lot less fun to be around to boot…. And by regularly dismissing our partner’s ideas and feelings, we are also inadvertently poisoning our relationship.
Some years back, I visited the Freud Museum in London, once the final home of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his daughter Anna Freud, a pioneering child psychoanalyst. (The Freud family had come to England as refugees, following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938.)
On Freud’s desk in his study stood a metal figure of a porcupine with quills, a figure he apparently kept there all the time. Why a porcupine?
Many of us have had the experience of saying something we thought was innocuous, only to have a friend or partner interpret it as a veiled accusation or an attempted guilt-trip. Or the reverse — an innocent comment by the other is perceived as a slight or criticism. Each party experiences and interprets the same situation in very different ways.
A growing number of young men are struggling with depression around the time of the birth of their first child. Many first-time dads would rather stifle their feelings than talk about them, making the home situation more heated and fraught, and their sense of helplessness exacerbated.
With no socially acceptable forum where they might share and explore some of these feelings, male postpartum depression is easily eclipsed by its maternal counterpart, and often missed altogether. The following is abridged and edited from an article that appeared in Parents Magazine.
America is a rather prudish society, with sex still largely closeted, and sex education absent, limited or whitewashed. And yet, with many kids having free and unsupervised access to the internet, the average age for watching pornography online is getting younger and younger.
A steady rise in the number of young men experiencing erectile dysfunction has spurred a series of research studies about how frequent exposure to porn from a young age may be affecting their psychosexual development; a body of opinion is emerging linking such exposure to this steady rise in ED.
Why is it so hard to understand our partners? Why do they continue to astound us with their feelings, reactions and desires, even decades down the road? Why is understanding so elusive?
In his 2014 book Mindwise, writer, scientist and (University of Chicago) behavioral psychologist Nicholas Epley explores the ways in which we routinely make inferences about what others think, believe, feel, or want, and in so doing, routinely misunderstand them.
It has been said that a good artistic or literary creation is one that can be enjoyed differently at various stages of life. Recall a book you read or a movie you watched as a child, and consider how richly different the experience was when you repeated it as an adult.
Yesterday I sat down to read the beloved children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real), in preparation for an outing to Seattle’s Children’s Theatre with my six-year-old grandchildren. Written by Margery Williams and first published in 1922, the book chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit’s desire to become real through the love of his owner.
