Becoming a couple is one of the most complex relationships in adulthood. It is also well known that being a couple can contribute to personal growth and self awareness (Long & Young, 2007). Romantic couples are a unique type of relationship that is different from friendships and family bonds because it is based on romantic love. The triangular love theory aims to define romantic love on the basis of three key characteristics being present. These three characteristics are: intimacy, passion and decision/commitment (Hendrick, 2004).

The intimacy component of the romantic relationship refers to feelings of closeness and connectedness. The passionate component refers to the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and other such related phenomena in loving relationships. The decision–commitment component refers to, in the short term, the decision that one loves someone else, and in the long term, the commitment to maintain that love (Hendrick, 2004).

Like most interpersonal relationships, most romantic couples experience some challenge at some point in their relationship. Some of these common challenges may include infidelity, loss of intimacy, communication difficulties, coping with stress challenges, financial pressures, boundary violations, difficulty balancing individual and couple expectations, divorce, separation and breaking up. Whatever the challenge, it is important to note that all dyadic relationships will experience some kind of distress at some point.

Below is a collection of articles that provide useful information for couples who wish to enhance their romantic life and avoid common pitfalls of an intimate relationship. We encourage you to share these resources with friends and loved ones.

1. Relationships: Needs, Wants and Expectations
2. Languages of Love
3. Love Is All You Need
4. The Meaning of Intimacy
5. Three Steps For Better Verbal Intimacy
6. 7 Ways to Improve Intimacy in Your Relationship
7. Listening: The Key to Effective Communication
8. How Collaborative Parenting Can Save Your Relationship
9. Romance, Intimacy and Conflict
10. Coping with Relationship Breakdown

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Good relationships don’t just happen. Many people have the attitude that, “If I have to work at it, then it can’t be the right relationship.” This is not a true statement, any more than it’s true that you don’t have to work at good physical health through exercise, eating well, and stress reduction.

There are choices you can make that will not only improve your relationship, but can turn a failing relationship into a successful one.

Accept personal responsibility

It may not seem like it, but this is an incredibly important choice that you can make to improve intimacy in your relationship. This means that you learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings and needs and refuse to blame your partner for not making you feel happy and secure.

It means learning to treat yourself with kindness, caring, compassion, and acceptance instead of self-judgment. Self-judgment will always make you feel unhappy and insecure, no matter how loving your partner is.

For example, instead of getting angry at your partner for the feelings of rejection you may experience when he or she is late, preoccupied and not listening to you, or not turned on sexually, you would explore your own feelings discover how you might be rejecting yourself.

When you learn how to take full, 100% responsibility for yourself, then you stop blaming your partner for your unhappiness. Since blaming your partner for your own unhappiness is the number one cause of relationship problems, learning how to take loving care of yourself is vital to a good relationship.

Compassion, understanding and acceptance

Treat your partner the way you would like to be treated. This is the essence of a truly spiritual life. We all yearn to be treated lovingly – with kindness, compassion, intimacy, understanding, and acceptance.  Relationships thrive when both people treat each other with a deep intimacy. While there are no guarantees, sowing intimacy often reaps intimacy in return.

If your partner is consistently angry, judgmental, uncaring and unkind, then you need to focus on what would be loving to yourself, and loving to the other, rather than reverting to anger, blame, judgment, withdrawal, resistance, or compliance. Kindness to others does not mean sacrificing yourself. Always remember that taking responsibility for yourself rather than blaming others is the most important thing you can do.

Seek further help such as counselling or coaching if your partner is still not able to treat you with kindness, or as a very last resort you may need to leave the relationship. You cannot make your partner change – you can only change yourself!

Be open to learning

When conflict occurs, you always have two choices regarding how to handle the conflict: you can become open to learning about yourself and your partner and discover the deeper issues of the conflict, or you can try to win, or at least not lose, through some form of controlling behaviour.

We’ve all learnt many subtle ways of trying to control others into behaving the way we want: anger, blame, judgment, niceness, compliance, caretaking, resistance, withdrawal of love, explaining, teaching, defending, lying, denying, and so on. None of these promotes healthy intimacy within the relationship and in fact they create even more conflict. Remembering to learn instead of controlling is a vital part of improving intimacy in your relationship.

For example, most people have two major fears that become activated in relationships: the fear of abandonment – of losing the other - and the fear of engulfment – of losing oneself. When these fears get activated, most people immediately protect themselves against these fears with their controlling behaviour. But if you choose to learn about your fears instead of attempting to control your partner, your fear would eventually heal. This is how we grow emotionally and spiritually – by learning instead of controlling.

Make sure you have regular dates

When people first fall in love, they make time for each other. Then, especially after getting married, life happens in all its busyness. Relationships need time to thrive. It is vitally important to set aside specific times to be together – to talk, play and make love. Intimacy cannot be maintained without time together.

Gratitude instead of complaints

Positive energy flows between two people when there is an “attitude of gratitude.” Constant complaints create a heavy, negative energy, which is not fun to be around. Practise being grateful for what you have rather than focusing on what you don’t have. Complaints create stress, while gratitude creates inner peace. Gratitude creates not only intimate, emotional relationship health, but physical health as well.

Fun

We all know that “work without play makes Jack a dull boy.” And so too does work without play make for dull relationships. Relationships thrive when people laugh together, play together, and when humour is a part of everyday life. Intimacy flourishes when there is lightness of being, not when everything is heavy.

Service

A wonderful way of creating intimacy is to do service projects together. Giving to others fills the soul and makes the heart sing. Serving moves you out of yourself and your own problems and supports a broader, more spiritual view of life.

If you and your partner agree to these 7 choices, you will be amazed at the improvement in your relationship!

Source: www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au

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Below is a list of descriptions that Cognitive Behavioural counsellors can use to categorise automatic thoughts. These are descriptions of the common types of faulty thinking.

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolours the entire beaker of water.
4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
1. Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don’t bother to check it out.
2. The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
9. Labelling and mislabelling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, “He’s a damn louse.” Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

Modified from:
Burns, D. D. (1989). The feeling good handbook. New York: William Morrow.

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There are some recurring principles in time management that are worth considering:

The 80/20 rule - The 80/20 principle is also known as the Pareto principle. It is based on the ideas of an Italian economist called Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was a French–Italian economist and philosopher who lived between 1848 and 1923.  Initially his observations were based largely on the distribution of wealth.

In other words, he saw that 20 per cent of people owned 80 per cent of wealth. The remaining 80 per cent control only 20 per cent of the wealth. Over time it was realized that the same principle could be applied to many areas. In time management this can be applied in a number of ways. One of these is to say that 20 per cent of what you do accounts for 80 per cent of your results (Koch, 1997).

Prime time - In line with the 80/20 rule is the idea of ‘Prime Time’. It is found that not only do 20 per cent of your efforts account for 80 per cent of your results, but also that your best efforts occur in 20 per cent of the day.

In other words, most people are found to be somewhat inefficient for 80 per cent of their time. If someone is found to have a time in the day that is more productive than other times, this is when they should carry out their priority work and this is the time of the day they should protect themselves against distractions and diversions.

Don’t try to change everything at once - Also following on from the 80/20 principle, it is best to help a client to focus on certain areas of their life, and set tasks that gradually help them to build from one success to another.  For example, if a client is simply not sleeping well and their average day is a disaster due to exhaustion, then we know that a very large result can be obtained by working on this one problem.

Similarly, if we go to a client’s workplace and observe them spending 5 out of every 15 minutes looking for something, then we know that helping them to reorganize their work area will give them an immediately significant result. From each success we can go on to the next area, rather than adding to their overload by trying to do too much at once.

New habits take time to form - It can take 21 days to learn a new habit (Tracy, 2007). Therefore clients may need coaching, may need to do homework exercises and may need to repeat basics many times before they will really get a grasp on what they need to do.

Tasks take up available time - When clients are attempting tasks they should keep in mind an old truth about time keeping; that a task will tend to fill the time allowed for it. We have all experienced this. If we think that we will stay up all night if necessary to get something done, often that will be the case.

If we think that a chore will be done some time on the weekend, often we are racing to finish it on Sunday night. This is important when setting goals and deadlines. If people give themselves limitations on the time they are willing to allocate to tasks, they can quickly become more efficient.

What are we going to stop doing? Time is a limited commodity. Management of time is partly looking at what can be done better or more efficiently, but it is of course also going to consist of finding things that should not be done or that no longer need to be done. 

Work efficiency and family time - Tracy (2007) makes the important point that what people require of their business and work time is efficiency, whereas family and personal life tends to come down to quantity of time.

Taking a broad look at the problem - If a client wants to manage their time more efficiently, we (as counsellors) have to be able to look at their life broadly and see what may really be going on. As counsellors we might detect some discontentment with life; hidden standards about what people think their life should be or underlying repressed emotions that are making them want to squeeze more out of every moment. People are complex so we have to expect anything. For this reason, this course will focus on a variety of approaches to time management.

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The following tips can be used with clients who are highly stressed or experiencing anger management issues. If you’re under unusual stress, you can also take benefit from strategies such as relaxation and mindful thinking. 

Everyday Demands

Everyday stressors, such as work, children and tight schedules can heighten anxiety and contribute to feeling overwhelmed. When we are stressed, we are less likely to respond in a measured and considered fashion to provoking situations, choosing instead to respond with impulsive expressions of our immediate feelings.

To avoid this result, it can help to be mindful of your schedule. Avoid taking on responsibilities or favours that you don’t have time for. Use spare time to pursue leisure and relaxation activities. Prioritise your self-care and maintain a balanced lifestyle. Of course, the achievement of these aims can be difficult when the demands on our time are so great.

Nonetheless, without paying careful attention to our lifestyle habits, we are vulnerable to the effects cumulative stress can have on our ability to manage expressions of anger. 

Thinking Only of Short-Term Gains

A confrontational or provoking situation can ignite reactions in individuals that have far-reaching and long-term effects on relationships. This often occurs during the heat-of-the-moment as tensions and anxieties blind us to the longer-term consequences. It can therefore be highly beneficial to plan, plan, plan for an anticipated encounter.

An awareness of likely triggers enables you to predict which situations are likely to be challenging or confrontational for you. Imagine, for example, that you have just received another credit card bill in the mail - you have overspent and know that your partner will not be pleased. Instead of waiting for your partner to react before formulating your response, you could spend a few moments considering how you could best respond to this likely future event.

You may, therefore, decide it is best to take accountability, to apologise and offer a commitment to lessen spending in the future. This, of course, is preferable to a response made in haste that is defensive, attacking, or derogatory.

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