Thank you to the person in our amazing group who requested this important topic. Your spouse walks in the door and before you can breathe, boom! They knife your heart. What do you do? Nothing works. Everything is collapsing. There's a part of you that wants to...

Well, let's start with a couple questions that need to come first…. What Is Intimacy? "I know that town intimately well," Bob said. "After all, I grew up there." That is clearly not about sex, right? People - mistakenly - think intimacy is the sex act. It isn't. Think...

 Here's my question back: How do you feel? And an even better question: Why do you feel as you do?  See, the worst feeling a person can have when a marriage ends is like you’re a failure. That's an awful thing to carry around for the rest of your life. So, if you're...

 Thank you for the suggestion of this topic!! You know who you are! If you've been in this group or reading my blog somewhere else for a while, you know to expect the unexpected. So I'm going to do just that. And it will be hard. Very hard. And I cannot guarantee if...

 "Wait a minute, DrDeb. I object to that title! I AM an objective person! I'm very rational, logical, analytical. Of course I'm objective!" Um…. I appreciate that, but our brains aren't built that way, my friend.  Here's a little lesson in neurobiology: The neocortex...

"DrDeb," Kenny was complaining, "it's only my wife that triggers me! I have lots of relationships - from work to my religious community to my kids' schools where I'm very active - and I get along well with everyone else…. ….so it must be that I married the wrong...

 Gaslighting was actually the title of a movie from 1944. In it, the protagonist wants his wife to think she's going crazy, so he moves the furniture around just enough for the room to feel wrong but not enough for her to consciously notice what happened. The term is...

 This woman was talking to me about her daughter's atrocious acting-out behavior. "True," she said, "my husband was verbally abusive to her. But it didn't happen every day. She should move on!" I was in shock for a moment.  Then I came to myself, and asked her...

Really. I'm not kidding. Self-control is that gritting your teeth, tightening your fist kind of thing. It's that pushing down of all your feelings until you don't have them. Or at least don't know what happened to them. That numb kind of thing. Or else that...

 "We could never have a peaceful discussion." "Every time I want to talk about my feelings, I get accused of picking on him/her"  "No matter how many pleasant requests I've made to stop [ X ] it doesn't stop. I get no respect." "We haven't slept together in [ Y ]...