Love Isn't Blind. Of all the decisions you make in your life, few are as important as who you choose to marry or live with. Make a bad choice and you can spend your days and nights mired in unhappiness or consumed by anxiety or depression, conditions that not only rob your mental health but undermine your physical health as well. You might be consigned to economic instability or subjected to physical or verbal abuse. Or you might find yourself struggling as a single parent. The consequences of a poor choice, and of marital dissatisfaction or even disruption, are far-reaching, extending even to the next generation. So do yourself a big favor and make sure you choose a mate wisely. Yes, you need some basic relationship skills like communication, problem solving and conflict resolution.
But you also need a partner who's willing to engage in all of them with you and create what most of us want more than anything—a sense of closeness to someone else. Love isn't blind at all. Know Trust Rely Commit Touch. Excluded by Grown-Up Mean Girls. Hello, I am looking for some advice on adult female friendship cliques. I have mixed with a group of 7 or 8 women in my hometown since my oldest child was at kindergarten and she is now nine. I have been closer to some more than others and fluctuations in the intimacy of these friendships have occurred, which is probably normal. Recently, however, I have felt excluded by multiple members of the group. For example, this is what's happened: Having to have own room on recent girls weekend; everyone else was paired up Conversations going on around me based on previous chats that I'm not aware of (with no attempt by others to involve me in the discussion) Ignoring me when I try to initiate discussions Waking up on a girls’ weekend to a friend knocking on my door telling me the others were all were ready to go for walk (while only inviting me at the last minute.)
Sitting at dinner feeling distanced by people's body language and verbal communication. I could go on. Any advice? Signed, Sharon. Generation Tech: The Good, Bad, and Scary. There is a growing debate in the world of technology. It has nothing to do with the development of fancy new e-gadgets, computer games, or apps. This debate cuts to the core of who we are as individuals, families, and communities. It asks the question, “How does technology affect the healthy development of children and teens? " Of course, no one really knows the answer.
But the question is an important one. And depending on which studies and authors you read, there is evidence to support the positives, negatives, and downright scary aspects of how technology may impact healthy development. A new book by Jim Taylor, Ph.D., Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World provides some fascinating insights on the debate. Who Am I? Young people normally answer the question, “Who am I?” As a developmental psychologist, I was particularly intrigued with Taylor’s chapter on self-identity. Who will influence whether technology is good or bad for kids? Parents. Secrets to a Strong, Successful Relationship. Relationships are an important part of life. They are a way to connect, feel understood and be loved. Because of their significance, it is necessary to make an effort to create a strong bond. Relationships require work, patience and understanding . Above all, they need true commitment, good communication, mature love and lessons learned from past mistakes.
Relationships can be weakened when these aspects aren’t fully understood or are taken for granted. Commitment It’s essential to truly understand what it means for partners to make a commitment to each other: Commitment: A statement of my intention to remain constant in belief and action to a single ideal without entertaining other options regardless of appearances, difficulties or conflicts which will arise in the pursuit of that ideal. Communication Communication is key to a successful relationship: Mature love vs. A relationship requires mature and healthy love.
Understand Past Mistakes. You Can Be a "Simple" Leader. Complexity seems to increase each year. Yet leadership is built on simple, timeless principles. Structure your leadership around the dynamic tension inherent in the Basic Accounting Equation: Assets=Liabilities + Owners Equity. The rest of this essay describes the implication of this simple framework for recruitment, having conversations, and evaluating opportunities.
In the early 1970’s, Arthur F. F. Snyder said these two words were more than the fundamental building blocks of the Basic Accounting Equation. Some people gravitate towards asset enhancement as a way of providing value to organizations. But liabilities reduction is also a critical value in any enterprise. Snyder’s philosophy about making credit decisions was to use the two concepts of Asset Enhancement and Liabilities Reduction as a framework to look at financial structure and power. He saw the CEO as defining his role as being the final arbitrator between two powerful and conflicting forces. “We Are All Aligned.” </i>*} Polish Off Your Personal Space. You know that creepy feeling when the guy standing behind you in line gets a little too near to you.
So near that you can even hear the music pounding through his headphones. You try to shift forward a bit but then realize that you’re making the person in front of you feel uncomfortable. What to do? According to research on the psychology of personal space, the distance around each of us can be divided into 4 zones . The one closest to ourselves is the “intimate” space, and only goes to about 18 inches away from our face. Next out from this central zone is what is technically called the “personal” space, which covers about another 2-1/2 feet to reach a distance of 4 feet away from the tip of the nose.
We admit the people we love into our intimate zone, but we’re bothered by friends and strangers who venture too near or even over that border. As culturally and situationally relative as they are, the zones of personal space may have a biological basis. References: Kennedy, D. Kujala, M. When a Friend Goes AWOL. Dr. Levine, I have a friend whom I met in college. We have been close friends over the past 20 years—or so I thought. When we were single, we would take a lot of fun beach trips. We have both gotten married over that past 6-8 years. I look back now and realize that whenever she was in a relationship (which wasn’t often) that her friendships went to the backburner. I have a very busy life with a career and a family but I guess I am better at balancing my life.
We never had any kind of disagreement that I know of and I am not a “needy” friend at all. I feel like I need some type of closure here. Signed, Bridget Hi Bridget, This sounds like a long-standing and meaningful relationship, but both your life and your friend’s have changed substantially since you were footloose singles. Sometimes, people get so caught up in the minutiae of their current lives that they don’t think about or make the time to catch up and stay current with old friends, even ones they feel close to. Hope this helps. Brain Basics, Part One: The Power of Visualization. My last article focused, oddly enough…on focus—namely, how to help gifted students who are easily distracted by outside stimuli.
Those of you with easily distracted students or children of your own know what I am talking about: you ask him to get out his homework papers and, on his way to the backpack, he finds the cat who simply has to be held. You ask her to help you unload the dishwasher and, midway through the top tier, she has noticed a chip on one of the bowls and is soon sketching a “dish protection system” on a spare napkin. I received quite a few emails regarding this article (most of them in the “Amen, can I get a witness!” Category) but several readers wanted to better understand why these sorts of distractions occurred. They were interested, as one reader put it, in precisely “how the brain works so that these outside stimuli become so distracting for some, but not for others.” This is a topic that fascinates me and has for some years. So what? Creativity, Puzzle Games, and Brain Damage.
Have you ever encountered a puzzle in a game that utterly stumped you, then wondered why it seemed so trivially easy when you stepped away and came back to it after doing something else for a while? I have, especially on a recent playthrough of an indie puzzle game called "QUBE" ( ). For those not familiar, QUBE is a first person puzzle game (kind of like Portal) where you manipulate special blocks in the environment to solve puzzles and exit testing chambers. Different colored blocks do different things, and once you enter a room where multiple blocks come into play, the puzzles can get really tricky and require some real insight to solve. For example, in one area you cause a clear globe to roll down a slope towards a purple receptacle, and when the ball passes through a blue field it turns blue. Lehrer argues in his book that this is an illustration of how different parts of our brain work --or don't work-- when it comes to creativity and problem solving.
As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity. If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity . “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country. We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity. In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.
It is sobering, therefore, to read Kyung Hee Kim’s recent research report documenting a continuous decline in creativity among American schoolchildren over the last two or three decades.[2] Well, surprise, surprise. Insight, Creativity and Happiness. Made by Chloe Barron's Hand “To thine own self be true.” (Shakespeare) “The truth will set you free.” (The Bible.) “Be yourself.” (Your mother.) You have heard, but have you heeded? Insight is about knowing who you are and acting in accordance with your natural inclinations and abilities.
Some people maintain grandiose delusions and distortions about themselves. True Selves are usually happier than False Selves. Insight helps you know how to choose a suitable partner, friend, career, pastime or pursuit. Psychotherapy helps you achieve insight but if time and money prohibit this, here are ten tips you can practice on your own. Just be truthful with yourself about your inner responses, even if they make you squirm. Ten Tips for Achieving Insight: Listen to podcasts or radio shows. Insight empowers. 20 Things Everybody (Else) Has Done (Too) Just in case you believed you were the only one who ever had a particular idea or performed a certain behavior, be assured that (almost) everybody you meet has had a version of the following experience: 1. Googling one's self. For those of us over a certain age, this is a version of looking up your family name in the phone book.
Done as a child, and still occasionally practiced as an adult, this ritual serves to validate a sense of self. It is also the first experience many of us have of being "published. " For many of us, it is the most happy experience we have had of being published. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. The Art Therapy of Pinterest. I have a long history of tearing out pictures from magazines, collecting images for art projects or ideas for fashion and home décor. Some of these go into files or large plastic storage bags [mind you, not necessarily in any particular category]. Every so often I have to do a “purge” and I either bring boxes of these clippings to the curb for recycle or take some of them to the clinic to add to the collage materials for future art therapy sessions. Then there is the virtual hoarding —all those links, digitally scrapbooked pictures or screen shots of images and articles that catch my fancy.
I admit that I have a hard drive and a binder full of CDs full of digital illustrations and photographs. Honestly, I don’t really know what I actually have squirreled away. So then Pinterest came along, providing yet another way to collect images and links of potential interest. But maybe, in the social media wisdom of Betty White, this sounds like yet another incredible waste of energy. How to Plant Ideas in Someone's Mind. Dream Apps. Ever since the discovery of rapid eye movement or REM sleep in 1953, research on sleep and dreams has grown tremendously but it has also been hampered by two persistent problems: numbers (lack of studies with large numbers of participants from varying cultural backgrounds) and the inability to experimentally manipulate dream content. The rise of the smartphone and its associated apps will potentially solve those two problems so we can expect a real revolution in sleep and dream research in the near future!
With respect to the numbers issue a sleep and dream app can be downloaded in two minutes on literally millions of phones. Even if 2% of a million users actually record their dreams in association with the app (and record how the dream was altered by the app activated external stimuli) we will have tens of thousands of experimentally altered dreams from people potentially distributed all around the planet!
Is all of the above scientific wishful thinking? Not at all. Dream Decoder - What Your Dreams Mean at WomansDay. We’re all fascinated by our dreams, but most of us don’t have a clue what they mean. And the rest of us can’t even remember what we dreamt about. Well, consider this: Experts say that keeping a closer eye on your dreams can actually help you improve your life. “Every night when you dream, you subconsciously assess what’s going on in your life,” says Gayle Delaney, PhD, author of In Your Dreams.
“And if you pay attention, you can use it as a way to solve problems.” What Happens When We Go to Sleep In the first 90 minutes of sleep, you go through deepening stages—ranging from light sleep to deep sleep. But here’s the fascinating part: During REM sleep, the rest of your body essentially becomes paralyzed. So exactly what happens in our brain when we dream? If dreams are there to help file away memories for the long haul, why do they sometimes seem so surreal—not the literal way life happens to us? 6 Dream Mysteries Solved Why Can’t I Remember My Dreams? No.
Probably not. You’re not alone. How to Listen When Someone's Upset.