North Star Mental Fitness Blog

My Valentine

Today is Valentine's Day.  A special day to refresh our minds regarding how important our valentines are to us.  A special day to clear out the garbage that spoils are perceptions, thoughts, feelings and actions towards those we love.

How Can You Have a Good Relationship With Your Spouse?

Steven Stosny wrote about this dilemma in his post "How Can I Be Me, When You're Being You"? 

Perhaps you have experienced how difficult it is sometimes to be yourself, when you have to deal with it the personality quirks of your partner and your disappointments. 

We sometimes wish our partners would change so we can have a good relationship. 

It seems so clear that our partners need to change as we believe we can't change sufficiently to please our partners and find satisfaction for ourselves.

Steven shows the danger getting what we want by changing our partner.  He wrote:

If you do get what you want by changing your partner, your self-concept is reduced to:

"I am loving, compassionate, supportive, etc., as long as you do what I want."

Do you really want this on your tombstone:

"As long as I got what I wanted, I was great to the people I love?????"

Wow, Steven really called it the way it is.  We are very selfish, when we want to change others in order to have a better relationship.  You probably don't like what Steven said about trying to change others, but he does have a disturbing point.

The conclusion is inevitable, if you want to have a better relationship with your partner.  You need to change yourself or you need to be true to yourself and your values. 

When we focus so much on what is wrong with our partner, we fail to look at how wrong we are. 

We fail to realize how we have changed over time and are no longer communicating our love and values to our partner.  In order to have a satisfying relationship, we need to change and become authentic with our values and commitment.

Steven said this about successful relationships:

Successful marriage is not about getting your partner to do what you want; it's about being who you are, i.e., behaving according to your deepest values. For most people, this means being loving and compassionate to the people they love.

 In my e-book, I Live within the Environment Created by My Choices, I emphasized the importance of changing oneself and living by one's values in order to have satisfying relationships.  In my book I wrote:

In any interaction you have a choice to make.  The choice is to communicate values or feelings.  THE RELATIONSHIP CHOICE is the choice to communicate valuess....  THE RELATIONSHIP CHOICE is actualizing how you really want to be in your relationships with others.

If you are interested in learning more about integrating values into relationships or obtaining THE RELATIONSHIP CHOICE, please e-mail me at drhal@northstarmentalfitness.com.

Remember You Live within the Relationships Created by Your Choices!

Dr. Hal

Life and Mental Fitness Coach

I Am Loved

"I am loved" is a wonderful affirmation for the New Year.  What would the next year be like, if we thought about our relationships from the perspective of what is right rather than what is wrong.

I think it is human nature to become absorbed with feeling "unloved" when we experienced disappointment and failed expectations in our relationships.  We dwell on the hurt of feeling unloved and soon began to think that we are not loved. 

We look for the smallest indications that confirm that we are unloved.  We hoard the feelings and memories of feeling unloved.  We analyze our relationships with eyes covered with lenses stained by feeling unloved.  We live in a world of feeling unloved.

How much better could our life be, if we could remember to think and feel "we are loved"?

I found this inspirational writing

TO LOVE AND BE LOVED

"Do You Prefer To Love Or Be Beloved" ?  This was the question proposed by Beth from Living a Quotable Life.  In this article Beth revealed that she prefers to love.  She hypothesized that to "be loved" makes a person vulnerable.

Beth shared:

"Me? I’m a Lover. Why? It’s simple. I’m a coward. It’s easier to Love. It’s far simpler for me to give Love. What? It’s true. As long as I’m giving of my Love than the focus is on the individual who is receiving the Love … not me.....

"We all want to be Loved. However, to truly allow someone to Love you all barriers have to be dropped. Walls must be broken down. You must allow yourself to be vulnerable. I detest my vulnerability. Again, I am a coward. I don’t like to let people in. I am worn out. I am tired. I am jaded. I have been hurt one too many times".

After reading what Beth shared,

10 Relationship Values That Fill Me with Joy on a Daily Basis

Do you have joy in your life?

What do you think about that brings joy into you life?

Is it your accomplishments or successes in life?  Is it playful and fun activities?  Is it beautiful expressions of nature?  Is it your home?  Is it your job?  Is it your friends?  Is it your family?  Is it your beliefs?  Is it the purpose of your life?  Is it the ability to change?

All of the above can bring joy into life and specifically to my life.

When I thought about the question, I kept narrowing down the answer for me.  It became abundantly clear that relationships with others brought the greatest joy into my life.  Specifically, the relationship with my significant others and my wife brings the greatest joy into my life.  The more I thought about my relationship with my wife, I realized my joy was inseparable from 10 values shared most deeply with my wife.

I experience joy when I think of my relationship with my wife, because I know:

Dancing with Realism and Perception in Your Relationships

Understanding the dance (relationships) between realism and perception is necessary if you want to unlock the secrets for creating, restoring and maintaining satisfying relationships.

If you understand the relationship between realism and perception, you can

1. Create loving, sensitive and satisfying relationships with their significant other and family;
2. Restore loving, exciting and sensitive feelings in relationships bogged down with stress, problems, and emotional disconnect;
3. Turn around relationships heading for divorce into satisfying relationships;
4. Maintain excitement and loving emotions in long-term relationships;
5. Avoid and reverse problems such as midlife crisis, affairs, and divorces;
6. Create respectful and successful parenting relationships with children and adolescents; and
7. Have successful relationships and reduced or conflict in in work and business.

Here is The Secret:

Emotional and Social Prosthesis

New Scientist.com reported an article on the "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" device.  This device is to help people with autism improve their relationships. 

The device alerts the autistic user when the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

El Kaliouby and MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters are constructing the prosthetic device, which

"consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate."

What other uses are there for the "emotional social intelligence prosthetic' device?

We Create the World with Our Thoughts

Shama Hyder had a wonderful post on "I am Sorry, Please Forgive Me".

I liked this post, because it emphasized the importance of our thinking and creating our world.  She talked about an incident, where she had been rebuffed and she chose not to dwell on her negative feelings and anger.

With the words, "I am sorry, please forgive me," she wrote:

"It was my intention to clear any negativity in me that had caused the man's reaction. I realize now that we create the world with our thoughts.  Any negativity in the "external" is caused only by the negativity inside us."

I loved her validation and our shared awareness and  Insight.  One of my e-books is "I Live within the Environment Created by My Choices" and my signature on all of my blogs is "Remember, You Live within the Environment Created by Your Choices!

Read on to find out about Shama's blog and Ho'oponopono. What is Ho'oponopono? 

Ron Artest and Adam Mair on the Family

Two different sports personalities were in the news. 

Ron Artest, forward for the Sacramento Kings, made headlines again for violent behavior.  Sam Rubinstein of The People's Champ reported that Ron Artest was arrested for domestic violence.  Lang Whitaker of The Links also posted on Artest's domestic violence arrest.

In contrast to Ron Artest, I read an article on Adam Mair, a Buffalo Sabre hockey player, and his wife.  Adam and his wife, Alli, talked to a group of children about teamwork. 

What can we learn from these two professional athletes regarding mental fitness in the family?

Positively Satisfying Relationships

When I took English 101, I didn't realize I was taught one of the ways to overcome the communication chasm between men and women.

Women want to be important, respected, valued and acknowledged by men. Time and time again, I've heard women anguish over the insensitivity and put-downs experienced from the man in their lives.

Men too, are just as frustrated in trying to communicate with women.  Men also feel unimportant, taken for granted, and ignored in relating with the woman in their lives.

Different words are used, but the result are the same.  There is a disconnect or lack of connection between men and women. There is a lack of sensitivity and satisfaction painfully felt by men and women.

I am not kidding, when I wrote:  A solution to this age long, disconnect between men and women was taught me in English 101.