But mindfulness is not just solitary meditation. The practice of mindfulness helps you connect with all living beings – including your partner.

Mindfulness benefits couples, both when practiced separately and together. A University of North Carolina study found in 2004 that mindfulness for couples improved “relationship happiness” and reduced relationship stress as well as overall stress.

Mindfulness exercises for couples

Basic mindfulness exercises center around the breath and the connection to your surroundings, using all of your senses.

Try to practice the breathing exercises together, to slow down, relax, and connect in a different way.

First, you need to find a quiet space where you will be undisturbed for about 20 minutes–or longer, if you like. Your relationship space needs to be safe and protected.

Then sit down opposite of each other in a comfortable position and close your eyes.

Pay attention to how your breath moves in and out of your body. Don’t force it in any way, your breath is doing what it does best. Just pay attention. With the breath you come alive.

After a minute or so, start slow breathing exercises, for example following the 5 – 5 — 7 method, where you slowly breathe in to a count of 5, then hold your breath for a count of 5, and then breathe out for a count of seven – the out-breath should always be longer than the in-breath.

If you really focus on your breath, your mind will automatically focus on the present moment. Distractions, worries, fears, and negative feelings will fade into the background.

The next step is to be open to the world and any way in which the world connects with you. Listen without judgment to any sounds you can hear, just notice them. You may hear your partner’s breathing and the small sounds she is making as her body shifts around on the floor. Don’t look yet! Stay relaxed, breathe deeply, smell the air around you, sense how your body feels inside.

Give each other the space to practice this first part of mindfulness at your own pace. When you are fully connected to yourself and to the present moment around you, open your eyes.

Mindfulness connection

Look at each other.

Not in the way you usually look at each other, with all the baggage of memories and expectations. Look at each other in the same way you listened to the sounds of the world around you right now – with an open mind, without preconceptions. As if you were seeing each other for the very first time.

You don’t have to speak at all. Just be aware of each other’s presence.

(Just a word of warning: mindfulness for couples can lead to renewed and very enjoyable intimacy! Certainly a good way to relax and connect.)

Mindfulness conversation

If you speak, try to take the “open mind, no preconceptions” attitude into your conversation.

Try to get the essence of your partner’s words, don’t judge.

Mindfulness leads to good, deep conversations. Or you could just laugh together, or break into song…

Mindfulness in conflict – compassion and self-compassion

If you are in the throes of a relationship conflict, mindfulness can also be of great benefit.

As you connect with your own self, you will realize that you are a small person in a big universe, and you have suffered. Have compassion with yourself!

Look at your partner – he is also a person who has suffered. Self-compassion leads to compassion with your partner, something that is often missing in interaction between distressed couples.

With compassion, you can see that conflict is often a desperate attempt to connect. But if you don’t feel compassion, you see each other as enemies.

Mindfulness can help you realize that the enemy you sometimes see in your partner is really an unwanted aspect of your own self. In other words, you will recognize some of the patterns of your own mind.

20 minutes of mindfulness for couples doesn’t seem like much, but it can change your entire relationship dynamic.

For further information, please take a look at my specialty page on couples therapy.

The post Mindfulness for Couples: Slow Down, Relax, and Reconnect appeared first on Compass Counseling.

But what if our coping strategies fail us?

What if we are not prepared for this particular challenge, or if this is just one problem too many right now?

One of the games or unconscious strategies people sometimes fall back on when they feel lost and overwhelmed is what has been called “hide and drink,” a play on the well-known children’s game of “hide and seek.”

Hiding

“I don’t want to face this.” “I don’t want to know.” “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

These are the thoughts that run through our minds when life gets overwhelming. Sometimes it can be important to take a little bit of time out and acknowledge that it is all too much right now.

Sometimes we wake up the next day and are ready to re-engage.

But at other times, we have no answer to the questions. We feel we cannot possibly win, and there are no options left.

Except to hide.

Fear

The main motivation for “hide and drink” is fear.

And in a way, that makes sense.

Our autonomous nervous system responds to danger (or perceived danger) with a fight or flight response. You can either fight the tiger or run faster than he does. However, if you feel you have no chance, the reaction of last response is the freeze response. You don’t move, you hope that the overwhelming danger will pass you by.

But unfortunately, most crises are not like tigers who sniff at you and turn away if you just hold still long enough.

And if you allow fear to paralyze you long enough, your entire outlook will be distorted by fear.

Depression

And then you give up.

You experience extended periods of low mood, feelings of hopelessness and dejection, reduced ability to function, decreased energy, feelings of helplessness, and even “emptiness.”  These can all be symptoms of depression. (Please note: Clinical Depression is a major mental health disorder and can only be diagnosed by a mental health professional.)

Drinking

All of these feelings, probably enhanced by the very act of hiding from the life issue in the first place, are overwhelming. Is there a quick way to forget it all and feel better at least for a short time?

Well, for many people, it seems that there is.

In a desperate attempt at self-medication, many choose the most widely available psycho-active (consciousness altering) substance world-wide, alcohol.

Depression and alcohol – hide and drink

Many people who play hide and drink use alcohol because it makes them temporarily “feel better.” Alcohol lowers inhibitions and affects our perceptions. Problems can temporarily feel less overwhelming. When we drink more, we feel less anxious (i.e. less fearful) and relaxed or rather more disconnected. But, unfortunately, this relaxing effect is the beginning of the depressant effect of alcohol, the main effect it has on the human brain.

As alcohol consumption increases, all those feelings of depression that the “hiders” were trying to escape, return even more strongly.

Hide and drink can start a vicious cycle that adds yet another serious problem on top of the original issues that the hider was hiding from.

Better strategies

So, as a coping strategy in times of crisis, hide and drink is not very successful.

However, it is usually a method of last resort when other options appear to have failed.

The crisis needs to be taken seriously and the reasons for hiding and drinking need to be investigated.

Face and acknowledge your fear

One of the best strategies is to intervene as early as possible in the hide and drink process. Try to look at your fear and acknowledge that, maybe, this time you can’t cope on your own. Sometimes just analyzing the situation can help you to put it in perspective.

Seek help when you need it

And there is one coping strategy that many hiders don’t even consider: seek outside help — from a friend, from a family member, or from a counselor. You don’t have to do this on your own.

That way, you can turn “hide and drink” to “seek and find.”

For further information, please take a look at my specialty page on individual counseling.

The post Hide and Drink: One of the Games We Play when Life is Overwhelming appeared first on Compass Counseling.

The family is at home together.

But only in body – minds are flying everywhere and nowhere.

Because everyone in the family is staring into a separate screen.

Occasionally, if you are lucky, some family members are staring into the same screen together, watching a TV series or football game.

But otherwise, the closest you can get to spending fun family time together is to join your kids in an online game. There’s nothing wrong with that, and you might even learn something! But how can you unplug and reconnect in ‘real time,’ also called real life?

Here are 9 fun family activities that don’t involve screens.

1. Create a treasure hunt in house and yard

Kids get easily involved when there is a goal — something hidden that can be found (most video games follow this narrative) — and when they can release their physical energy. Treasure hunts create a great team dynamic that can be fun for adults too, so maybe one of the parents can join the searching team!

2. Baking

Considered a calming or even meditative activity, baking is fun for all ages. Everyone can join in at different skill levels, there is scope both for creativity and a more scientific approach, and at the end you have a product that the whole family can enjoy together (and funny memories you will never forget in case something goes wrong).

3. Sports activities for the whole family

Another way to release pent up energy and work towards a common goal, sports provide an almost endless list of fun family activities from going on a bike ride together to playing tennis. Presidents have found time to play sports with their kids in the White House – you can too!

4. Short trips

You don’t need to wait for a full-fledged vacation to enjoy a fun family activity based on travel and discovery. If you want to make it even more special, why not take the bus or the train and go on a hike? Children love things that are different and will talk about them for a long time. (For a really special treat, why not go horseback riding?)

5. Games (non-virtual, you may have to explain the concept)

Yes, there are games that don’t involve screens and not just the sporty kind. Board games and card games from Monopoly (a great opportunity to playfully learn how to manage conflict!) to Crazy Eights and Concentration (that’s the one your kids will beat you at every single time!). Board games combine elements of competition and team spirit. You will find the whole family completely engaged.

6. Coloring

Coloring books for adults are trendy right now. Don’t forget that kids love coloring even more. Coloring together can be an especially fun family activity – depending on the age of the children, either the same picture or a different picture for everyone. Conversations become calm and focused, and parents might even find themselves continuing on ‘their’ picture after their kids have gone to bed.

7. Building Something

Whatever you build with your family, whether it is a Lego tower, a doll house, or even a tree house, it cannot be done anywhere else but in the real world. And it has to be done together. Apart from being a fun family activity, building something together teaches many new skills.

8. Creating a project together in many stages

The best fun family activities are not just a one-time thing.

Some can become family rituals, repetitions that make us feel safe and connected. But there are other, more complex projects such as writing, rehearsing, and performing a piece of music or a simple theater play; making a patchwork quilt; or repairing a vehicle that have an inbuilt need and inbuilt rewards for returning to them many times. They also all have a tangible result that the whole family can be proud of.

9. Sharing stories and food

Last, but not least, simply sharing a meal together (and if there is time, preparing it together) and sharing the stories of the day among the members of the family is a great daily ritual that helps you unplug and reconnect.

Screens and screen entertainment are here to stay. Maybe you even enjoy them yourself.

But fun family activities are everywhere. The trick is not to preach to your children and denigrate their contemporary communication skills, but to make it feel natural to play together off line.

For further information, please take a look at my specialty page on family counseling.

The post Unplug and Reconnect: 9 Fun Family Activities That Don’t Involve Screens appeared first on Compass Counseling.

So why do married people cheat?

It turns out that answers can be confusing and contradictory.

Cheating statistics

Even the statistics about infidelity are confusing.

Over the last 25 years there have been many studies, all of them based on what people report about their own behavior – reports that seem to vary wildly depending on how the questions are asked and the setting in which they are asked (presence or absence of family members, face-to-face, or anonymous questionnaires). It also depends, of course, on how ‘cheating’ is defined exactly.

The most comprehensive study by Blow & Hartnett, 2005, puts the ‘cheating over the lifetime of a marriage’ figure at around 25% or less, while a more recent study by psychologist Julia Omarzu only found 10 – 13%.

Often quoted rates of over 50% don’t seem to be verified by recent studies.

And at the same time, 70-80% of Americans repeatedly state that cheating is wrong.

Here are some of the most commonly quoted reasons why married people cheat:

Reasons related to dissatisfaction and disconnectedness in the marriage:

1. Sexual unhappiness

The most common reason for cheating is related to sex. Sex in the existing marriage relationship.

Feeling sexually unfulfilled and unwanted (or even rejected) can be very painful. The sexual relationship is at the core of a couple’s connection to each other and it is what makes marriage different from friendships and all other kinds of relationships, so it is not so surprising that dissatisfaction with sex would be the main reason why married people cheat.

2. Emotional needs are not being met

Almost as common as sex is the feeling that emotional needs are not being met.

People report feeling ‘lonely’ inside their marriage, disconnected, not understood, and, above all, not validated as a person by their partner. People report considerable emotional suffering, and if it cannot be expressed — or not healed if it is expressed — some turn to someone outside the marriage. Sometimes this leads to falling in love with someone else.

Reasons related to personal issues of the cheating partner:

3. Curiosity/boredom

Some married people cheat not because they are unhappy — they are generally quite content in their marriage. They report feeling curious about sexual activities that don’t happen with their partner, or bored with the repetition of daily life.

4. ‘Revenge’

On the other side of the scale, some married people cheat because their partner has cheated on them or hurt them in some other, major way. Research is unclear as to whether this helps them heal or not.

5. Low self-esteem/ego boost

An affair can boost your self-image, if not always your self-esteem. If you have a tendency to feel that you are not good enough, feeling desired by a new person can have a big effect. Some people actively seek out ego boosts as often as they can get them.

6. Sense of entitlement/having it all

Not all cheaters act from a position of deficit, sexual or emotional.

Particularly for those who have long term affairs or serial affairs, cheating can become a lifestyle that allows them to have more than one partner. Statistics seem to suggest that most of these affairs are never discovered and never communicated which makes this ‘double’ lifestyle possible for some and they often have no desire to change it.

Cheating as an extreme form of communication

7. Exit affair

If couples catastrophically fail to communicate, an affair can sometimes be a desperate strategy to end the marriage. The partner who cheats can come to understand that the marriage is not what he or she wants by having a relationship with someone else, and can sometimes even end the marriage through ‘discovery.’

Overall it seems that married people cheat because they experience their marriage as painful and unfulfilling, because they have a pre-existing issue with self-esteem or were never truly monogamous, or because they actually want a way out of their marriage.

Marriage counseling can help to uncover what the underlying reasons are and how the partners can heal their marriage. Provided, of course, that both of them want to!

The post The 7 Most Common Reasons Why Married People Cheat appeared first on Compass Counseling.

If you are not working, are you useless? Who will miss you? How are you going to stay connected with the rest of humanity? Will you be left behind?

Before the advance of the welfare state with pensions and improving life expectancy through affordable modern medicine, retirement was the privilege of the rich and those lucky enough to still be alive at retirement age.

For quite some time, people retired at 65, and many died at the age of 70. ‘Retirement’ meant something else entirely. It was much more frightening to those on the approach.

But all that has changed now. Life after working age is, for most of us, a new and potentially very fulfilling, even exciting phase of life with unprecedented freedom and personal choice.

Explore your unfulfilled dreams – with a lot less pressure

Perhaps you have put your dreams aside for a stable job you didn’t enjoy as much? Now is the time to explore those dreams! Creative writing, painting, making movies, singing, playing in an orchestra – all of these activities are open to you now.

Do not be intimidated by the conventional idea that you must be young to practice an art form. Many of the creative arts, such as writing books and playing music, are age neutral and are become more so as societal prejudices adapt to active retirement. There are even professional ballet dance performances by all-senior troupes!

Continue with a profession you love – at your own pace

Many people now ‘stagger’ their retirement.

The old system, 40 hours a week until the day you retire, is giving way to a slower and more productive transition. If you love your profession, you may be able to continue part time or work as a consultant. This will also ensure that you keep your social work contacts active.

Volunteer, and volunteer abroad

Retirement has traditionally been a time to travel. It is great fun to see the world, to choose the climate you prefer. But now there is another, even more fulfilling option: volunteer your skills! Learn new ones!

45% of healthy retirees in the US volunteer, a much higher figure than that of those still at work.

And why not see the world while you are volunteering? Many overseas organizations are actively recruiting retired experts all around the globe.

Volunteering allows you to make an extremely useful and much-needed contribution, without the long-term commitment.

Family

Retirement affords you the opportunity to spend more time with your family, especially with grandchildren(if you have any). A great opportunity to engage with the future! But be careful – younger people know even less about retirement than you do, and their expectations of how you should feel and behave may not always be helpful.

Love and retirement

The fear of a ‘useless’ old age extends to love, intimacy and relationships.

Maybe, somewhere in our heads, we still have the image of grandfathers who are ‘past it’ and old ladies who have long given up on romance.

But right now, there is a real boom in ‘senior dating’. Divorce rates in retirement are also up, perhaps indicating that older people have in fact not given up on finding a more fulfilling relationship and feeling the freedom to finally pursue love.

If you are fortunate to be with the partner you love, you now have much more time for each other again, maybe more than ever. You will now be able to enjoy many more adventures and pleasures together, and reshape whatever is less than perfect.

To touch on one of the biggest fears of retirement, according to a 2011 US survey, 54% of sexually active seniors between 75 and 85 were intimate with a partner at least twice every month. Some retirement homes have become dating hubs.

A new word for retirement

In her book ‘It’s your time’, Donna McCaw suggests that we might need to find a new word for retirement altogether.

With retirement now lasting up to four decades, and with more and more of that time spent in reasonably good health, you have up to 40% of your life ahead of you. This is the time to create meaning for yourself and others!

For further information, please take a look at my specialty page on individual counseling.

The post Retirement is NOT Another Word for Useless! Find Joy in This Transition appeared first on Compass Counseling.

Counseling, medication, and coping skills play an important role in managing the often complex symptoms.

But you may be surprised to hear that there is a simple and very effective tool to ease your mind – and the good news is, it is completely free!

This tool is the activity of ‘journaling’ — writing down your feelings, thoughts, and experiences as they arise. This tool is personal, it is available any time, and all you need is pen and paper or your iPad or laptop.

So how does journaling work and what are its benefits for those who are living with an anxiety disorder?

1. Become the author of your own story (again)

Whether it is a book with a precious key or a file on your laptop, your journal is there to ‘listen’ in the sense that it receives and preserves the thoughts that you write in it. Many people write a little bit in their journal every day (morning or late at night is most popular), which gets them into a soothing routine. Others write when they are upset, or when something happens that disturbs them. Writing, putting your feelings into language, forming sentences and paragraphs, structures the processes in your brain. They are immediately less chaotic and overwhelming.

You are the author of the journal entry. You can also become the author of your life story (again), something that anxiety may have taken away from you.

2. ‘Better out than in’

It may sound counter-intuitive, but writing down your fears or other ‘unwanted’ emotions like anger is actually the beginning of a healing process. These feelings already exist inside you. Instead of suppressing them, don’t be afraid to put them into words – one of the benefits is that you don’t have to carry them around anymore exclusively in your head!

3. Just write

At the same time, writing is a release of excess energy, another symptom of anxiety in the form of an elevated stress response. The main point is not to think too much and certainly not to put yet more pressure on yourself by trying to write perfect prose. The more you allow yourself to ‘just write,’ the more it will ease your mind by processing your memories and emotions.

4. The flow state

If you get into the habit of journaling, you may even sometimes enter the so-called ‘flow’ state of mind when you are fully engaged with your writing and focused on something positive outside yourself. In this state you literally forget your troubles because your mind is engaged with something more important. Long term research by world famous Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chicago) even suggests that the flow state is the path to human happiness – and happiness is the opposite of anxiety.

5. Different writing methods

Some people use the journal to try out different ideas, different ways of looking at their own story. You can try to explore a new ending to an old, fearful tale. Or you can acknowledge the reality of what is happening. Journaling often provides a new and sometimes surprising perspective.

6. An ‘anchor’ in times of trouble

Your journal is always there for you.

Whatever you feel, whatever you think, even if there is no one else there to share it with, you can share it with your journal.

If you are living with an anxiety disorder, you know how important it is to have an ‘anchor,’ something that can stabilize you, available to you any time you need it.

7. Express yourself without fear of criticism or rejection

Your journal is not just always there for you, it is also a safe place where nobody will attack you. There are no overwhelming demands. There is no suggestion that you are not good enough. Your journal is your witness, and your unconditional friend.

8. Physical health benefits

The health benefits of journaling extend to your physical health as well. James Pennebraker from the University of Texas in Austin has found that journaling can improve your immune system by strengthening your T-lymphocytes by reducing your stress levels. Other research suggests an improvement in auto-immune conditions like asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

If you have a few minutes, why don’t you try journaling right now?

Write whatever is on your mind – after all, nobody but you will ever read it!

For further information, please take a look at my specialty page on individual counseling.

The post Living with an Anxiety Disorder? 8 Ways Journaling can Ease Your Mind appeared first on Compass Counseling.