So, one group of people I consistently deal with is professionally successful men who are unaware of how their natural way of being, which created their business success, is negatively affecting their marriage. They are married but primarily live in their all-consuming businesses. They are laser-focused on where they are going and the life all their efforts will bring. When I question these men about what all this effort is for, a significant number of men tell me he is doing this for his wife and the family’s future. So, he has great intentions, but these men keep missing a critical fact: The ..read more

The challenge we all face is that, on some level, we all have some unhelpful emotional patterns that we learned growing up. It’s nothing to be ashamed of because, growing up, we all learn to create different coping strategies for the challenges life throws at us and to be fair, there are a lot of challenges. The problem is many of our emotional patterns are not helpful today because they were created in our childhood for our childhood situations. Some of us had to cope with extremely tough situations, and some of us learnt how to respond to life’s problems by mirroring how our parents coped. S ..read more

Why did my partner have an affair? Why does my partner want to leave me? Why has our love died? Sometimes, the reason someone would break their promise in a relationship can seem impossible to understand why. This post provides a few examples of the cost of a shallow connection. Weak emotional foundations can create shocking behaviours, ranging from happy people having affairs to 70-year-olds looking for a divorce. So many people come to me seeking answers to lift them out of their despair. One of the most confusing problems is when a person seems to be happy yet decides to break the trust. I ..read more

Can a couple really recover from an affair? The answer is “…it depends!” Affairs and the fallout from affairs make up a significant part of my work with couples in crisis. Dealing with couples in marital crisis needs a very different approach to traditional couple’s work because motivation reinvestment combined with fear and limiting beliefs can significantly hamper progress. The reason so many couples fail to recover from their affair is they see the affair as the primary problem. If they see the affair as the problem, they will try to do anything to protect themselves from the affair and the ..read more

One of the most critical parts of any long-term relationship is understanding how to keep the attraction alive. It’s one of the most misunderstood parts of the relationship building process which is why so many fail. A relationship without attraction means the couple end up like friends or siblings, and most at this point are not very good friends due to stacked resentments. This for most people is an untenable situation. The most common ways attraction dies are when a person needs to protect themselves from their partner on an emotional level constantly. That process can take many forms, such ..read more

If you want to save your marriage, you must fight for your relationship the right way… When I first meet a person or a couple, I usually see the way they are fighting for the relationship, is making matters far worse. This is usually the case because the way they are fighting to save the relationship has foundations in the reason the marriage failed. They can see what they are doing isn’t working, but confused and afraid, they will battle on eroding the very thing they want to keep. You see many people fail in their fight to save their relationship because their focus is on themselves. They ar ..read more

If I distil all the problems that men and women have in their years of time together. It boils down to some fundamentals. These are fundamentals for wives and fundamentals for husbands. So, the title may suggest today’s post is just for women. It’s actually for men, too. You see, the basic skill that everyone must possess is the ability to trigger their partner in a way that gets the best out of them. Most people in relationships run patterns that consistently trigger their partner to be the worst of themselves. Triggering a person to become a worse version of themselves is a bad practice for ..read more

Helping people create secure, lasting marriages out of crisis is about two critical fundamentals. It’s about stopping them from doing what will never work and helping them to see what will. In essence, a relationship is about a trend of energy over time that can go one of two ways. The relationship is helping each person to feel good about themselves when they are with each other, or it’s not! The basic premise sounds simple, so why do so many struggle? The answer is they assume their partner is a version of them, which can lead them to struggle to keep their connection alive. They think what ..read more

If a woman in a relationship cannot connect to herself in her marriage, she can feel the marriage is wrong for her. This problem is compounded by cast iron proof that she can connect to herself outside of the marriage. The basics of this problem is she likes herself outside of the marriage, but she doesn’t like herself in the marriage. This disconnection to herself has foundations in emotional security, emotional connection, and this is what makes or breaks trust. If she cannot connect to herself when she is with him, mechanically, she cannot love him. In 99% of women, this switches off her at ..read more

Today’s post is about a topic that some are not going to like, but this understanding will help many couples start the process of avoiding destruction they won’t want. The clients who are consistently the most resistant to what you will read are the ones who are the most fearful – I see this in my sessions. Over nearly two decades of seeing couples in crisis, it’s easy to see the patterns of destruction and the patterns that create success. People who practice these problem behaviours usually communicate feelings of resentment, fear, and loss of trust. Many will feel alone and unloved. The pro ..read more