What about you? If you are reading this blog, you probably feel that your relationship is in danger of falling apart, simply because you and your partner don’t know how to handle conflict well.

Some of the things you may be experiencing are:

Having unrealistic expectations – yes, it’s true; when we first meet each other, we are always trying to make a good impression and be the best we can be. Healthy relationships, however, are ones that realize that when you’ve been together for a while, flaws are a normal things that we all have. As such, we handle them with grace. Are flaws handled with grace in your relationship? Are you constantly feeling like you’re being let down, or letting your partner down?

Lack of trust – this one says it all. Do you feel like you can’t trust your partner? Are broken promises the rule, not the exception, in your relationship? Trust is an integral part of mutual support and understanding – without it, the relationship is lost.

You don’t spend time together – if you isolate yourselves from each other to avoid conflict, you are only creating feelings of mistrust and miscommunication.

Miscommunication – does it feel like the two of you can’t talk without one taking something the wrong way, or the other saying something they didn’t mean? The solution is not to avoid each other; it’s learning how to communicate effectively.

If you are experiencing any or more of these situations, we now offer an immediate, lasting solution that works: Conflict Coach.

With Conflict Coach, you will learn that any conflict situation can be turned into a learning experience. We want to teach you the skills you need to do this, in a healthy way. We offer privacy and convenience, with one on one phone and online sessions at a low rate.

Please visit http://conflictcoach.me to get started.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: aggression, appreciation, coach nora, conflict coach, conflict nora, conflict resolution, confrontation, feelings, forgiveness, negative emotions, relationship conflict, Relationships, verbal abuse

No more family anger explosions leaving a sour taste in your memory, and in other’s memories for ever? Having the peace of mind that all family gatherings will proceed smoothly and that the little ones will not have an opportunity to feel scared again?

To be a safe and predictable person for those around you at home, it is essential that you are able to maintain your composure when you feel like your ‘buttons’ are being pushed. This strength will help you to achieve your goals in your personal life as well as your goals for your personal relationships.

1. If and when you feel some negative reaction, store that emotion and don’t act out on it. Force yourself to think: “I’ll deal with this tomorrow; not today!” So you can give yourself time to examine all aspects of the “offense” and verify if they are true…and if you need to respond. Some offenses are best left unattended and ignored.

2. Pay attention to others. Whatever they are telling you, make a purpose to send the message: “I understand what you are saying” and say it frequently, before (or instead of) offering advice.

3. Watch your emotions and make a point of not feeling immediately attacked or victimized. probably the other person doesn’t mean the comment in that way? It’s better to ask questions from the other person: “Is it true that you feel upset with me”

4. Take responsibility for your feelings, and don’t blame other people. It is not what they did to you, is your reaction to what others did….so watch this difference. So many times they are not doing things to aggravate you, they can be simply confused or distracted or careless…..

5. Take a playful attitude towards your angry persona…you can give it a name as in: “When I’m in my “Angry Joe” mode, I tend to think that everybody conspires against me, but afterwards I can see that it’s only my imagination…”Angry Joe” is very active paranoid self of mine, but I can control him…”

As time passes, you will be able to be more objective about your needs, your reactions, and learn that it is always a choice to get angry at others. You can choose instead to control your reactions, calm yourself and see this “Angry Joe” part of you as an old response that now needs to be excluded when answering to present challenges.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today, by offering you this ebook about how you can recover from anger explosions.

Technorati Tags: anger, angry husband, attitude change, control, emotions, feelings, forgiveness, healthy relationships, hidden anger, resentment, respect, Self-Esteem, verbal abuse

To immediately ask yourself, “Do I abuse my partner?” may cause you to panic. It may bring feelings of denial and shame, forcing you to shut down before you’ve really started.

Sometimes it is easiest to work from the outside in – start with those you have small affections for, and analyze how you treat them. As you consider your actions towards others, and the results of those actions, move farther into the circle of people you love. Think about your friends, your extended family, your parents, and finally your partner. Don’t think only about what you do, but what feedback people give you. Is there open communication, or do they ignore or submit? Are you often told you need to work on something, and usually just ignore it?

Confronting your own shameful actions can be hard to deal with, like watching a soap opera of your life. We try to deny that our relationships are often full of drama and little subtleties that can throw a wrench in things and make us hurt one another.

Learning to handle relationships in a healthy way cannot begin until we confront these bad memories – either ones we caused or ones we were subject to. In thinking about your relationships with others, try not to focus simply on what they do to you, but how you react and what you do to them in return. Are there patterns that seem to emerge? Do you handle many situations in the same way? How do people react to you when you act that way?

If you have trouble finding a start, watch someone else’s drama unfold – either on TV or in real life. How do they interact? As they hurt each other (as people in dramatic situations are prone to do), do they retaliate in anger, turn away and withdraw, avoid it by doing something else, or blame themselves and become a trembling mass of nerves?

Once you begin recognizing these harmful traits in others (and their consequences), you can return to an analysis of your own actions. Without doing this, it is impossible to determine which attitudes need to change in order to preserve the relationships that are most important to you. Once you recognize it in yourself, you will also be able to recognize it in the people who hurt you.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today, you can get your own copy of the ebook: Healing Emotional Abuse.

Technorati Tags: abuse, appreciation, critique, Emotional Abuse, feelings, Healthy Marriage, humiliation, loneliness, Relationships, resentment, verbal abuse

Overt abuse is the more obvious form of abuse. The abuser is often aggressive and physically and/or psychologically violent. They may employ vicious name-calling, act with subversive behaviors like spying or phone-tapping, use sex as a tool for manipulation and self-satisfaction, spend large amounts of money without respect for the victim’s needs, and deny love, affection, and warmth to the victim or the entire family.

Often, through coaching and the victim’s own commitment to change, overt behaviors will cease. In some cases however, the abusive mindset is so deeply rooted that an abuser will switch from overt abuse to covert abuse.

Covert abuse is well-disguised and hard to pin down. It manifests in manipulative and sneaky behaviors. One such example is a line like, “I can have anybody I want, but I’m with you.” Or leaving the house but denying an explanation of why or where, leaving the victim open to doubt and insecurity. The abuser may give subtle hints about the victim’s inability to do something right or their inability to understand the abuser, and turn the conversation around and insist that they are the misunderstood victim. Other mind games might be a denial of compliments and affection, but will talk about other women/men constantly. They may forget important dates and treat the victim differently from friends, co-workers, and other women/men.

Covert abuse creates a harrowing relationship for the victim, one seeded with doubt, insecurity, and feelings of foolishness and jealousy. Some victims may experience the abuse and wonder if abuse is occurring at all, and whether they are just blowing things out of proportion.

Don’t get locked in that trap. If the situation was the other way around, how would treat your partner? Would you take the time to reassure, comfort, and explain in situations that could be taken the wrong way? If you’re willing to do that to preserve a relationship, and your partner is not, you have a problem. It isn’t about something you did – it’s about what your partner isn’t doing.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today, by buying the ebook with solutions for healing emotional abuse in your life and having a happier love relationship….

Technorati Tags: abuse, aggression, appreciation, conflict, control, critique, Emotional Abuse, feelings, Healthy Marriage, hidden anger, rejection, verbal abuse

It had a dirty secret….if the wife would have different takes on a situation she would have to sneak her views into a conversation, because her husband was the one supposed to do decision-making.

She could suggest, but the final decision (and credit) was not hers. Even if she had, God permit, some really good ideas…she needed to take care of her husband’s face by attributing such ideas to his creation.

And when she felt entitled to some decisions of her own? Several heavy weight traditions would discourage her. Church would preach submission to husbands; society would control her by ridicule. There was little a husband needed to do to “keep her in her place.’’

Even if we accept the benefits of sustaining this state of affairs, times have changed, and this hyerarchical marriage order has disappeared. Has it?

Sometimes I doubt it, because we can see that this male superiority marriage model persists. How? It has taken a different form now given that it’s the husband’s job to enforce her obedience, because society and church have abandoned preaching about wife’s submission to husbands.

It’s left in the hands of a husband to make his wife comply and obey, and to support his authority in the home. How does he do it? Lacking divine authority, there is the tool of emotional abuse to help him make his wife to feel inferior.

How? How come I’m linking persistent male authority with emotional abuse in marriage? Very simple: now, the way to have her humbled and in her place is to make her feel diminished and wrong, being always corrected because being criticized by a higher authority. I know a couple, now in their seventies…she has been all her life a stay-at-home wife and mother. He stills walks into the kitchen and announces to everyone: “she is always burning the food, what is she burning today?”

Is it true? Even if it is, what is the need to shame her in front of her relatives or friends? To prove male superiority, of course! After all those years of marriage, his instincts as the last word, judge and executioner are prevalent. Could he had learned to see her skills with more love and compassion? Could he appreciate more her positive aspects? Of course he could!

What he is doing is using snide comments to inflict public humiliation on her…leting her know who is still the boss. The harsh critiques, negative comments and complaints about her only role are the ways in which she is told to keep her place; if she protests, more abuse will be coming.

Why men do this? They don’t have any obvious need to continuously prove superiority…right? Or is it perhaps their insecurity that forces them to nag, criticize and demean the people who love them the most? So they can show who is the boss?

This attitude is really pathetic and has no place in a healthy marriage… How many divorces do you know, caused by her fatigue at being treated as a lesser, never equal partner?

If you married expecting that your partner would be the person accepting you warts and all; love you and admire you even beyond what you yourself know about your skills…then this is fraud. It means that you can’t trust the person you promised to love above others, because this person is reducing you to a lesser place below him.

Emotional abuse in marriage intent is to support male superiority, but ends up destroying the relationship. Are you in a marriage damaged by emotional abuse applied to support his dominant role? If so, how do you manage to keep your self-esteem alive?

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.creativeconflicts.com.

Technorati Tags: abuse, appreciation, Emotional Abuse, emotions, feelings, frustration, Healthy Marriage, humiliation, negative emotions, recognition, verbal abuse

Unlike physical abuse, emotional abuse may not heal by itself over time. Given that its impact targets more the psychic areas than the body, you could be unconsciously scarred for a long period of time.

Because the damage is on the self-esteem and identity areas, healing emotional abuse means healing primarily both your mind and soul, not your body. Healing an emotionally abusive relationship can only take place once you realize that you are indeed in a power grab, abusive control style of relationship, not an egalitarian one. Prior to this, you need to do the following:

Accepting the sad reality that you are in an abusive relationship is hard and painful, but necessary. You can’t continue thinking that he is “too tired” or “making jokes but not seriously making fun about you.” This is for real a sad place where he tries to humiliate you to keep you under his control.

Being with both feet on the reality ground will give you a good reason to fight back. At this point, the unequal relationship between you and your husband is already twisted. Whatever the explanations he would give about abusing you, he still has no right to humiliate and insult another person…

Want to read more? Here

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: anger, appreciation, Emotional Abuse, humiliation, Self-Esteem, verbal abuse

“Can a Passive Aggressive Marriage Be Healed?

and can be found here:

Can a Passive Aggressive Marriage be Healed

Enjoy, and post your challenging comments!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: appreciation, Emotional Abuse, passive aggression, passive aggressive, passive aggressive husband, Relationships, verbal abuse

A new study by Florida State University researchers has found that people who were verbally abused as children grow up to be self-critical adults prone to depression and anxiety. Of the whole sample population, an staggering 30% reported that they were often verbally abused by their parents. What kind of abuse? Insults, negative comments, swearing, and threats of physical abuse, all determining an unhealthy doses of self-criticism in the children.

What happened with the people who were abused as children? We know already that it has negative effects on the personality of grown up people. Professor Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, the study’s lead author, says that the results are on the area of depression and anxiety: “People who were verbally abused had 1.6 times as many symptoms of depression and anxiety as those who had not been verbally abused and were twice as likely to have suffered a mood or anxiety disorder over their lifetime.”

Now we know for sure: parental verbal abuse is toxic, and it not only affects the emotional stability of children, but follows them as a shadow in their adult years. We are forever paying the consequences of abusive parenting. Negative self-criticism generated by parents’ comments continues into adulthood and has been shown to make an individual more prone to depression and anxiety.

Why is this? Aren’t parents the ones supposed to take care, love and protect their children? We have been silent for a long time about noxious parenting happening almost in every household.

Either it is that parents have been themselves traumatized by abuse when children or that they got to believe that stern discipline and fault finding is the best way of raising their children, this has to stop. We need more public advocacy about negative parenting, more role models for positive, self-esteem building child-raising styles and in general a deep transformation in the way we treat children.

It’s no surprise now that adult children of abuse sometimes decide that they need to separate from their parents, when the parents continue the abusive and denigrating commenting about their adult children’s lives they did in the past.

We need more public comments on how abuse from the past re-appears in the present and keeps doing psychological damage. We need to say clearly that we are only going to interact with healthy people who would not use destructive comments to hurt other people’s self-esteem. Perhaps now we can go around even feeing appreciated and loved, for a change?

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: aggression, appreciation, domestic violence, Emotional Abuse, feelings, humiliation, isolation, passive aggressive, reconciliation, resilience, verbal abuse

If the abuse didn’t succeeds at isolating the victim and condemning her to a life of solitude and mistrust, the accompanying anger will. It will manifest in opportunities where it’s not right, will destroy whatever relationship she is able to sustain attacking people who love her, and in a general sense will separate her from the very people who could help her heal. Sometimes people are more afraid from the anger than compassionate seeing the hurt produced by abuse. Even when the anger is adequate as a delayed reaction to the previous abuse, it lashes out at the wrong targets, so alienating her from the necessary support.

People process their righteous anger in a variety of ways. Some people yell and shout, while others surpress their anger and sulk, often expressing their anger in a passive aggressive way. When coping with anger, it is important to realize that it is impossible to suppress and deny the emotion of anger. It is normal and healthy to feel angry, even angry at situations already in the past and never compensated or healed. However, not all people know how to cope with anger in an effective way.

When coping with anger as an aftermath of emotional abuse, many people like to use different relaxation techniques. Relaxed, slow breathing and yoga are examples of such techniques. They are good because they allow the angry person to take a step back and clear their mind of the situation. Detaching, and staying calm allows the person to cope with the hurt from abuse and then react to its anger more efficiently.

Sometimes you may find it difficult to mentally remove yourself from the abusive situation in order to calm down and regain self control. If that happens, it is good to physically remove yourself as well. Simply find somewhere else you can go to have a few minutes to yourself, and detach from people who would remind you of abusive situations from the past.

The next time you are angry, stop and ask yourself exactly why you are angry. Be as specific as possible, and don’t lie to yourself. You may find that you have no real actual reason to be angry after all. A lot of times we get caught up in our own feelings coming from abusive situations from the past, that we experience again as if happening today. When you are in this kind of past anger, connecting it with the sources of the past before letting go is helpful. Perhaps telling yourself: “This is old anger produced by the abuse I received in the past…I will calm myself down and the anger will recede into the past.”

You may notice that there are also several physical changes that happen to you while becoming angry. This can include clenching your jaw or fists, an increased heart rate, and even body shaking. Being aware of how your body reacts is extremely important for coping with anger. If you feel yourself reacting to anger, try taking deep breaths to calm down. You can also close your eyes and think about the distance between your defenseless past situation and now. Imagine yourself rejecting the abuse in a firm way: “I will NOT take this abusive situation, STOP!” Most people raise their voice as they get angrier. Instead, lower your voice to calm yourself down, and repeat the “STOP” enough times to recover self-control.

Emotional abuse has the power to control lives way beyond the time it happened. It can flare unexpectedly when situations of today connect with abuse of yesterday… By learning that healing past abuse demands a caring attitude and a patient observation of our reactions, then anger will be accepted, integrated by breathing and let slowly disappear by itself.

If you feel that anger is taking control of you it is important to connect present anger with past abuse and have a compassionate attitude towards the abused person we were in the past. Both are parts of our lives and need to be accepted and integrated into a larger whole of our present happier life.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: frustration, negative emotions, passive aggression, verbal abuse

Sometimes couples have an implicit contract by which they will allow the other to “keep them in their place,” so stifling their own creative thinking and initiatives.

Why do people need to control each other? Because we want to support the structure of interpersonal relationships that was offered to us when we were born: patriarchy. We feel cosy and secure in it, because this is the pattern of our lives. We run our own perceptions of who we are, and we keep our loved ones in the same pattern.

When we are doing the role of the abuser, we tell the other from the outside how to be, and the person has to comply or feel inadequate. When we are performing the abused role, we need to accept other person’s perception of us, as more accurater than the ones we have of ourselves! And so the chain of control is perpetuated.

We get a premium for being here: we never feel alone, because there is always someone telling us what to do. Eternal dependency and childhood, anyone? this is the way: let someone tell you when you are inadequate, and follow external advice as more legitimate than what your gut is telling.

When we begin to realize how many ways of interaction are really covert attempts to control us via our feelings of inadequacy, the machinery gets clear and clearer.

If you want to stop, what to do? there are defensive ways, of course…the first step, however, is to give up the comfort of this emotional jail….it’s not easy to decide not to play the game. Better to begin doing appreciation immediately, so we know this time again who we are: we are the person setting the others free! Free of our unwanted advice, free of our constant evaluation of them.
Isn’t that great?

Neil Warner

Technorati Tags: critique, emotioanl isolation, Emotional Abuse, freedom, put dowm, verbal abuse