Relationships Monroe MI

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Good relationships with others, be they with your kids, your spouse, or anyone else, are vital to our happiness. Read on for tips on how to get through difficult times and find your way to happy and healthy relationships with all the people in your life.

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Women's Clothing Stores

See below for women's clothing stores in Monroe, MI that give access to clothes for women like women's pants, women's jeans, women's blouses, women's skirts, cashmere sweaters, evening dresses, and Bermuda shorts as well as advice and content on women's accessories and plus size clothing.

Marriage Counseling

Marriage counseling in Monroe, MI can help couples with marital problems to strengthen their marriage and ultimately stay together. Marriage counselors help couples improve marital communication and practice fair fighting. Read on for more information and to gain access to marriage counselors around Monroe who provide marriage counseling and other counseling services.

Mindfulness and Cash Flow

Holding on to my money didn't mean stopping my breath or my heart. But it did mean finding a way to give from a state of abundance. I had to offer something that didn't make me feel depleted, and yet something exciting and enjoyable to create and present. When I received something that reciprocated the thoughtfulness, it was pure joy for both the giver and me.

How Indifference Can Kill a Relationship

What a relationship has real difficulty surviving is when two people have gone into "autopilot" mode and become indifferent toward one another. When you've given up on emotion entirely, when you feel nothing toward the other person, that's a difficult thing to come back from.

Four Steps to Better Personal Boundaries

The great task is to claim yourself for yourself, so that you can contain your needs within the boundaries of your self and hold them in the presence of those you love. True mutuality in love requires people who possess themselves and who can give to each other while holding on to their own identities.

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‘Marriage Checkup’ Works

An annual “marriage checkup” can keep relationships healthy. Marital satisfaction improves for couples who have been through the Marriage Checkup and control couples aren’t improving. Read on.

10 Reasons You Don’t Listen

You may need to practice “active listening” skills as well, and spend some time and effort in re-learning your normal listening behaviors. Being there when a person is talking to you can be a very rewarding experience, and often can enhance an existing relationship with friends, family, or your significant other.

10 Tips for Dealing with Procrastination

Procrastination is something most people have had to deal with at some point in their lives. We put things off, especially things that are boring, lengthy, drudgery, or might challenge us in some unexpected or unforseen way. However, procrastination can be beaten through some simple tips. Read on to get the tips.

10 Tips When Ending Psychotherapy

The end of the psychotherapy relationship is a difficult phase of therapy . Perhaps the second most difficult one, next to actually making the decision to try out psychotherapy in the first place and pour your heart out to a complete stranger. No matter what reason the relationship may be ending — the natural end of a course of therapy for a specific mental disorder, you or your therapist moving, a change in insurance coverage. Hare some tips to make the transition easier for you.

10 Ways to Make Friends

Maybe the first trick to finding friends is to befriend ourselves, and to become comfortable with silence, because no one has the power to make us feel okay with ourselves but us. But, lest we stay quiet for too long, here are 10 techniques to meet new friends.

11 Things I Learned in High School

Although I look back and snicker at all the keg parties I threw at my house when my mom was away, and how I always seemed to pass out in someone’s closet, what I remember most were the wise words of a few teachers who took me under their wing and asked me to probe deeper … to think long and hard about who I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m still not totally sure, but here are some of the nuggets I most appreciate.

12 Most Annoying Bad Habits of Therapists

Therapists, alas, are just as human as the clients they see and come with the same human foibles. They have bad habits, some of those habits have the very real potential of interfering with the psychotherapy process and the unique psychotherapy relationship. Here are twelve things the clients wish their therapist didn't do — some of which may actually harm the psychotherapeutic relationship.

12 Steps Programs & Divorce

How many times would you jiggle a locked door before you gave up and went out a window? 12 Step Programs have done lots of good for a lot of people. But these programs don't work for all of the people all of the time.

5 Ways to Practice Gratitude

Gratitude is one key component of happiness, and so as to keep a gratitude journal, where you regularly write down the things for which you are thankful. But are there other ways of practicing gratitude? Read the following article to get some ideas.

6 Steps to Better Communication

Growing up is hard to do. Especially if you're speech delayed ... meaning that you like to bolt before the tough conversations happen. In their book, "Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High," the authors offer several tips to help guide the communication-challenged folks among us so I’ve condensed and excerpted their advice below.

7 Signs of Unfriendly Fighting

Roger and Robin have been married and fighting for 8 years. They both say they don't like it. They both claim it's the other's fault. They both say they love each other but they can’t stand the fighting. On the brink of divorce, they’ve made the first agreement that either can remember, to come to therapy.

7 Ways to Give an Apology & 4 Ways to Accept One

When I was seven and preparing for my First Communion, we were expected to go to Confession first. Have you ever apologized for your wrongness? Or in the opposite situation? Both are not easy. Here are ways of giving an apology, as well as receiving one.

8 Steps to Closure When a Friendship Ends

Friendships are like marriages. Some evolve to become mutually supportive and life-giving bonds while others grow more and more unhealthy, or even toxic. When a friendship ends, it needs to be mourned and processed in the same way as a terminated marriage.

8 Tools for Happiness

As someone who suffers from manic - depression , I have a box of tools that I use to help me stay on the path of recovery and get as far away as possible from the black hole of despair. However, they are not all that different from the eight tools that blogger/author Gretchen Rubin uses in her happiness project. Now Gretchen offers a website, The Happiness Project Toolbox, where she helps you tailor the tools to your own life and, in the process, see what others have to say about them.

9 Steps to Better Communication

Relationships don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist between two emotional human beings who bring their own past experiences, history, and expectations into it. Two different people also have different levels of skill when it comes to communication. But better communication, because it is a skill, can also be learned.

Active Listening

While therapists are often made fun of for engaging in active listening, it is a proven technique that helps people talk and feel free to continue talking even if the person they are talking to doesn’t have a lot to offer the other person (other than their ear).

Adult Dating: From Attraction to Commitment (Part 1)

Attraction can get going rather quickly, often in the first contact, and often in a “split second.” Contact is made and then lost and then reestablished. Eyes meet briefly; smiles are exchanged, as are some anxious, non-verbal courting gestures. Animation increases. Approach is made and allowed. Dialogue follows. Body language becomes coordinated. Rapport is established. Touch is ventured and gazes lock.

Adult Dating: From Attraction to Commitment (Part 2)

Faced with disappointment and the vicious circle, the positive love fantasy usually teeters and collapses. What emerges is a negative fantasy that is usually composed of memories and fears, the residue of painful previous relationships. All of a sudden, it seems like this new relationship is perversely turning into a replay of previous relationship disasters. “I am not being listened to — again”; “I am being smothered — again”; “My needs are not being met — again.”

Adult Dating: From Attraction to Commitment (Part 3)

Relationship disappointments are experienced, at least initially, “in the present” (“You are my problem.”). However, as the crisis plays out, the “past” begins to make an appearance: “You are just like my ex-husband”; “My mother treated me the same way you are treating me now.”

Building Resilience

Resilience is not a quality only some people are able to develop. Instead, it’s a way of behaving and thinking that anyone can learn. Essentially, it involves an openness to finding your way through a situation and the determination not to see yourself as a victim.

Coalition for Patients' Rights

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Dr. Katherine Nordal from the Coalition for Patients’ Rights . She has also been the Executive Director for Professional Practice at the American Psychological Association (APA) since April 2008. She talked with me as a spokesperson for the Coalition for Patients’ Rights.

Commitment Issues due to Abuse

It sounds like you would benefit from some counseling to help you examine how and why you were hurt, how you can forgive him and yourself, and how to move on with your life separate from him.

Compliments & Self-Esteem

Why is a compliment almost as hard to take as criticism? Embracing a geniune compliment means belieivng in yourself enough to trust the sincerity of the compliment giver. Here are seven steps to accept a compliment with grace.

Couch Surfing: When a Therapist Says It Isn’t a Good Fit

There are multiple reasons why a therapist may not believe it is a good match, and unfortunately, we often don’t offer detailed explanations to clients. Sometimes there are good reasons for being less specific about it.

Couples Therapy

Tia and Miles met when they were each new grad students at the local university and have been together ever since. Now, with each of them close to graduating, they are talking about getting married. They are also fighting. One of their housemates, sick of their squabbling, told them to see a counselor or find another apartment.

Courtship to Marriage

In Greek mythology, there are some marvelous stories of marriage. Here, for instance, are two tales about how Zeus and Hera tricked each other into marriage and the inevitable disappointments that follow such chicanery. These stories are wonderful parables for the present.

Dealing with Passive-Aggressive In-Laws

Some women are trying to manage a very difficult situation, and feeling the struggle of trying to provide balance in the family. While it is hard to know for sure, their analysis of why mother-in-law is like this is certainly in keeping with relevant theories on this type of passive-aggressive behavior. This is difficult, but there are strategies that might help.

Forgiving Your Ex

You’ve been spinning around this problem for so long that you can’t seem to find your way out. With a counselor’s support you can get beyond this traumatic event. With time and attention, you can feel safe opening yourself up to love again. There are good men out there. Really. You deserve the chance to be loved, cherished, and respected in a relationship with a man you love, cherish, and respect.

Fostering Relationships Between Disabled Children and Their Grandparents

While the relationship between a child and his grandparents usually develops naturally, that relationship might take some extra work and fine-tuning if your child has a disability.

Four Steps to Better Personal Boundaries

Gender Disagreement On Attractiveness

A new study suggests there is much more consensus among men about who are attractive than there is among women. This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa.”

Going Back to Your Ex

For some people, being in an unhealthy relationship is better than not being in a relationship at all. Those same people, if they met someone new and felt that relationship had promise, would then and only then break off the old relationship. If the new relationship failed then they might attempt to reconnect with their ex, even if it meant being treated badly again.

Guidelines for Good Listening

Listening is a core component to a healthy relationship. Many relationships fail simply because one or both partners in a relationship aren't taking the time and effort to really listen to what their partner is saying. You can keep banging your head against the wall, or you can learn and practice good listening skills.

Harming Children by Giving Them too Many Responsibilities

Many parents may think it is good for the child to learn to take up the responsibilities as early as they can. However, by turning your child into parent can cause harm. Keep reading.

Healing Your Relationship

To begin with, we come into relationships from different families, different backgrounds, and with different experiences from childhood. How we experience love as a child provides us with the series of love lessons we carry into adulthood. Perhaps, as a child, Earl saw constant fighting, screaming, or crying in his family. What he learned is that love is all about suffering and unhappiness.

Healthy Study Habits for Students

The following tips are some ideas that have been found to be important to maintain and improve your mental and emotional health. There are five main areas to keep in mind: Social, Physical, Cognitive, Emotional and Motivation.

How Indifference Can Kill a Relationship

How Our Social Network Helps Us Thrive

One way that your attitude can affect your health is that a bad attitude can drive other people away. And interaction with other people is vital for your health. Human beings are social creatures. So it’s no surprise that people thrive when they have good relationships with friends, family, and people in general.

How to Create a Healthy, Adult Relationship with Mom and Dad

The problem is as old as time. It’s the stuff of which Greek myths, novels and screen plays are made. I’m referring to the love/hate relationship between parents and their adult daughters.

How to Distance Yourself from a Sociopathic Partner

I’ ve been going with my girlfriend for about 5 months now. Recently, she has began to steal from me. This is especially disturbing knowing that the closest person to me is the only person that has ever burned me. We live apart, but have been spending every weekend together for the past 5 months. We were planning on moving in the second she found a job in my city. But not anymore. Please read on.

How to Tell if Your Partner is Thinking about Cheating

My husband, Dan, have been together for 12 years. He has recently has been communicating with a former female co-worker by email. He has not actually spoken to or seen her in over 4 years. In the past his emails with her have occurred 2 or three times a year. He recently asked her to meet him for lunch, and they made plans to meet. I was not aware of any of this at the time. Please read on.

Hugging Your Therapist

To hug or not to hug a client — that is the question that can haunt therapists. When a client is so distraught and you have no more words to offer, is physical contact a good idea? Most therapists will ask clients if hugs or other touch, even something as small as a pat on the shoulder, would help or upset them.

Husband's Ex Keeps Calling

If I'm on to something, the solution is to help your husband talk with her about what she needs to do to feel more confident as a parent. It's unfair to him for her to rely so heavily on him.

I Want to Understand a Friend’s Motive

My new boyfriend of just a few weeks has always made me feel wanted and secure from day one. He was great at calling and seeing me often and not one red flag appeared. We grew closer with each time we saw each other. Without my even realizing he was concerned, he mentioned he was getting mixed signals about if I was still connected with my ex-husband. Please read on.

Increase Empathy

Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The researchers of the new study hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world — including our own bodies — would contribute significantly to our ability to empathize. Read on.

Keeping You Without Losing Him

We can’t change biology, but we don’t have to succumb to it, either. Fortunately, there is a way to maintain your sense of self and experience a fulfilling love relationship. Here’s how: Know who you are today. Make an honest appraisal of yourself. What are your interests, preferences and opinions? Your strengths and weaknesses? Enlist the help of a trusted confidante in conducting your appraisal.

Learning to Let Things Go

You need to learn how to let things go, and when it is appropriate to let things go and when it is not appropriate to let things go (believe it or not, it is not always appropriate to let things go; sometimes situations need to be "kept alive" until they are resolved).

Leaving Your Partner for Your Soulmate

Instead of dealing with whatever is going on with you that you can’t be happy with what sounds like a working and in many ways satisfying marriage, you are avoiding the issue by choosing to get caught up in the fantasy instead. Romantic emails are wonderful. Stolen moments can seem sweet, partly because they are stolen. The daily life of kids, bills, household tasks, and job can seem like a grind in comparison.

Legal Issues for Cohabiting Couples

You and your partner have decided to live together. Whether you see it as an alternative to marriage or as a temporary arrangement, it's important to understand your legal rights and responsibilities.

Making Relationships Work

Many couples go into a marriage thinking that love will see them through anything the future may hold. While this idea is romantically appealing and is fueled by the passion of love in bloom, it falls short of ensuring a happy and productive marriage.

Marriage Counseling

Meeting My Father for the First Time

Your wanting to punish your father, a man who has not cared what you did or felt or accomplished for 27 years, is leaving you with the hot coal, not him. You do not have to make your brother's nor father's quest yours, but you have to allow the choice to be one that genuinely suits your needs.

Mindfulness and Cash Flow

Miscommunications in Email & Egocentrism

People overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone–be it sarcastic, serious or funny–when they send an e-mail, as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them. The reason for this communication disconnect, the researchers find, is egocentrism.

Payoff for Your Emotional Choices

There really is a payoff for every emotionally-driven behavior and thought. And to a certain extent, these are controllable elements of your life. So when you behave or think in a way that is directed chiefly by emotion, what actually happens in your favor? Pouting, giving in, refusing to give in, self-pity, yelling – they all have payoffs.

Persuasion and How to Influence Others

Human relationships are based upon a largely unconscious system of give and take. I will do this for you even if I won't get something in return right now, because you will ‘owe me one’ for future redemption.”

Physician Attitude Important in Early Alzheimer’s

Here in this article are new research findings including a doctor's positive attitude to Alzheimer's diagnosis and their trusting, personal relationships with local dementia support service. Read on for details.

Positive First Impressions

Positive expressions, or expressions of approach, are perceived more quickly and more precisely than negative, or withdrawal, ones. So happiness and surprise are processed faster than sadness and fear. Read on for details.

Relationship Jealousy

However much you love your girlfriend, love without trust is no basis for a marriage. If you really want to give your relationship a chance, please get yourself to a professional therapist to figure out how to handle your insecurities. You both deserve peace of mind.

Relationships after Divorce

People often get into a new relationship during the painful ending of their marriage or soon after their divorce. How wonderful it feels to be desired and appreciated, to no longer feel rejected. What a welcome relief from empty weekends and lonely nights, from feeling so restless and so single. A spark of life replaces despair and self-doubt. There is even the return of romance and sex.

Reviving Your Marriage

Maintaining personal health requires work — exercise, good nutrition, rest and regular checkups. No one teaches us that the same kind of maintenance is also necessary in order to keep a marriage alive. Love between a parent and child is unconditional. Love between a husband and wife is not. As divorce statistics would indicate, an untended marriage falls apart too easily. The good news is that there are ways to make a marriage survive, and better yet, thrive.

Self-Abuse After a Break Up

If by this time she still has not returned your calls, perhaps you can try writing her a letter or sending her an e-mail. I am concerned with your self-abusive reaction to this split-up.

Sports, Hobbies, & Clubs

A new study has found children and young adults are more likely to pursue sports, music or other pastimes when given an opportunity to nurture their own passion.

Spouse Acts As Buffer Against Stress

A new survey suggests the benefits of a positive romantic couple relationship in our lives, and how it can help us manage stress from our jobs. It is also shown that people having a good relationship experienced that they enjoyed better health than those who had a more problematic relationship. Read on.

Stuck in an Abusive Relationship

You need more help than I can give you in an advice column. I don’t know the laws in your state or what resources are available. Fortunately, there is an easy way to get that information.

The 10 Secrets of Happy Couples

How do these couples stay in love, in good times and in bad? Fortunately, the answer isn’t through luck or chance. As a result of hard work and commitment, they figure out the importance of the following relationship “musts.” Because few couples know about all of the musts, I think of them as the relationship “secrets.”

The Challenge of Long-Distance Relationships

More and more young couples are struggling with launching two separate careers at the same time that they are launching a relationship or a marriage together.

The Enduring Influence of Family

How we act in our committed relationships is largely the result of how we experienced relationships in our families of origin. We often talk, walk, eat, think, and may even vote like our parents. We may not realize, however, how influential they have been. For some, it is only when dealing with their own children that they first recognize these similarities.

The Psychology of Groups

Jeremy Dean over at PsyBlog has a series of articles about the psychology of groups which are the usual great collection of nuggets of insight into how groups work. Why should you care? Because you’re a part of groups throughout different areas in your life. Here are the sum ups of his ideas.

The Rules of Love

Can a vicar's guidance on marriage from 1947 still help us today? We know that the desire to forge a relationship that lasts and provides happiness is still with us as much as ever, but what are the modern rules for a successful union?

The Seven Questions Project

Ryan Howes, a clinical psychologist and college professor, asked the field’s top authors, theorists and policymakers seven basic questions about their work, in order to flesh out differences between types of therapy. This Seven Questions Project illuminates both the personality and the technique of the writers, making interesting reading for clients and therapists alike.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by scientist Garrett Hardin in 1968 describing what can happen in groups when individuals act in their own best self interests and ignore what’s best for the whole group. Being selfish by using a shared group resource can hurt others. But it doesn’t always have to.

Therapist Bias

Therapists are all too human and come with a unique variety of potential pitfalls, not the least of which is trying to help too much, too soon, in an inappropriate way, or with too little information. Sometimes, in the effort to do what appears to be the right thing, the therapist can make a hasty judgment.

Tips for Communicating with Your Doctor

Many doctors lack good communications skills. But your doctor could be the most important person you ever talk to. You owe it to your health to establish and maintain good lines of communication. Here are some ways to start.

Tips to Find a Good Doctor

When you have a chronic illness your relationship with your doctor is second only to your spouse or your parents. Being honest (and you must be honest!) with that person means being able to trust them to hear you. Here comes with advices to help you find a good doctor.

Tips to Salvage Your Relationship

Mr. Real offers the following suggestions for how to deal with the unhappiness we may be experiencing in a relationship, instead of just exploding on our partner.

Trust and Vulnerability in Relationships

A willingness to be vulnerable is a significant feature of lasting relationships — ones in which partners are allies, not foes. The need to form a mutually protective alliance is innate, according to psychoanalyst John Bowlby. This need persists throughout life; the search to be both cared for and caregiver underlies falling in love.

Warning Signs of Suicide

Warning signs of suicide are not difficult to spot, but professionals differentiate between someone who simply has a passing thought of suicide or ending his or her own life, and someone who is more serious and has a definite plan. Friends and family who are close to an individual are in the best position to spot these warning signs. Here are common signs for you to consider.

What to do When You Suspect Your Partner is Cheating

An acquaintance of mine saw my husband having lunch one day last week. When I told him that she had seen him, he said he had not had lunch there that day or any other day in the last few months. I dismissed it at first thinking she mistook him for someone else. Then I came across a receipt in his wallet for the restaurant with the day in question, time , and amount ($50.00) which means more than one diner, and his signature. Any suggestion?