Often when people come seeking relationship advice in Portland marriage counseling, they want a quick fix. Some simple tips they can take home with them to make their problems better. Of course, many issues aren’t that easy to fix. They take time and require both partners to learn better communication skills. But there are a few simple tips I believe any relationship can benefit from that you can start putting into action today. Doing so can help ensure you give your marriage the time and protection it needs to go the distance.

Improve Your Marriage with This Relationship Advice

Schedule regular date nights. This is a piece of relationship advice I’ve offered on this blog many times before, and that’s because it’s so important to stay in touch with your partner. Remember, it’s not about what you do or how much you spend. It’s just about taking the time to be together and have a good time.

Take vacations just the two of you. Think of it is an extended date night. It doesn’t have to be long. Just a weekend will do, but make a point to spend some time alone, just the two of you, away from the distractions of daily life and the interruptions of your children. Plus, the grandparents will enjoy some time alone with the kids.

Schedule intimacy. This becomes particularly important if you have children. Maybe before it was not something you needed to worry about. You just made time when the mood struck. But once kids enter the picture, you may become too busy and exhausted to really notice how much your love life has suffered. If scheduling lovemaking doesn’t seem romantic to you, consider that you are making a commitment to keeping the love alive in your relationship. What’s not romantic about that?

Set boundaries with the opposite sex. Don’t spend time alone with members of the opposite sex, and step back from any relationships that get close to an emotional affair. Intentionally maintaining this distance, even when our relationship is strong, can help you to avoid temptation when you go through a rough patch.

Having a healthy marriage means investing time and making the right decision along the way. If you are having trouble or haven’t been taking these steps to protect your marriage, you can get relationship advice in Portland marriage counseling.

At my Portland marriage counseling practice, my clients often talk to me about the stress they feel around birthdays, anniversaries, and especially the holidays to buy gifts that their partner will love. Some even go so far as to say they are afraid a bad gift will cause relationship issues.

Sadly, they might not be too far off from the truth. Research into how gift-giving affects relationships shows it to be a bit of a no-win endeavor. When you know a person well (like, say, with a spouse), they expect a good, thoughtful gift, and if you get them something they don’t like, it reflects badly on the relationship. But good gifts do little for the relationship beyond affirming how similar you both are.

Portland Marriage Counseling Tells Us That It’s Not the Gift, It’s the Baggage

A particular gift, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. Negative feelings about gifts and gift-giving are what cause relationship issues, not the gift itself. And this can happen from both directions. If you really wanted to buy your partner an expensive gift but couldn’t afford it, you’re likely going to believe your partner is disappointed regardless of how they really feel. Or if you have spent a lot of money and your significant other knows you can’t really afford it, their reaction to the gift is almost guaranteed to be laced with guilt.

Other problems I’ve encountered in Portland marriage counseling include people not feeling worthy of expensive gifts or believing they can’t please their partners and giving up entirely because of this. But these fears – whether they be financial, related to self-esteem, or something else altogether – are preventing you and your spouse from having a truly connected giving and receiving experience, and there are things you can do.

Planning Gift-giving Together in Portland Marriage Counseling Reduces Stress

As with most relationship issues, the best way to reduce the stress involved in gift-giving is to talk it out and make a plan. This doesn’t mean that you have to tell each other what you’ll be buying, but oftentimes setting rules and boundaries together can help.

My clients have come up with a wide variety of stress-reducing measures. Some like to set dollar amounts for gifts that both have to adhere to. Others write down lists of things they want, and each partner is allowed to purchase only one gift from that list. This way there is still a bit of a surprise, but each person knows they will be getting something they want. And a few forego individual gifts altogether and instead purchase something that will be a present for both partners like a vacation or day at the spa.

If you and your partner are experiencing gift-giving stress and anxiety and feel like you need further help, seek out Portland marriage counseling today.

In-laws can be the cause a lot of relationship problems – especially for newlyweds who are also trying to learn how to live as a married couple for the first time. Perhaps your wife’s parents are always making cutting remarks or overriding the decisions you’ve made together as a couple. Or your husband’s mother is constantly around and doing things in your home that you feel are none of her business.

The best way to handle these situations is to talk about it. For many of my clients, this is the last thing that they want to do. After all, who wants to talk badly about the family of his or her spouse? But as a Portland marriage counselor, I can tell you that whether the relationship problems are between you and your in-laws or you and your spouse, they still have to be dealt with or they’ll just grow worse over time.

Relationships Problems: How to Talk about the In-Laws

So you know that you need to bring up your in-law issues with your partner, but you don’t want to exacerbate relationship problems you’re already having. Unfortunately there’s no guarantee that you won’t offend, but there are ways to approach the situation to minimize hurt feelings on both sides.

Show respect and appreciation. Let your spouse know that you are grateful for all of the helpful things your in-laws have done, and always be respectful when talking about them, even when bringing up the negative.

Don’t blame or criticize. Instead of complaining about how annoying it is that your mother-in-law is always cleaning your house when she’s there, tell your partner it makes you feel like the two of you aren’t doing a good enough job. Instead of yelling because your partner is always spending time with her family, explain that you feel like you barely see her and you miss her.

Set ground rules. Once your feelings are on the table, tell your partner that you’d like to set boundaries for your in-laws that both of you can agree on. Be willing to compromise. Instead of his family coming over four times a week, maybe it can be twice a week – but make sure that your partner understands that your feelings should come first (and vice versa) and create a password to end their visits should you become overwhelmed by them. This is also a great time to reciprocate, asking if your spouse has issues with your family and wants to set any ground rules for them.

Veto power. Even if you’ve agreed on something like two visits a week, there are days when it can just be too much. For these times, you need the power to say no. Likewise, there may be special circumstances beyond your agreement when your spouse simply needs to see his or her family.

You may want to seek out the advice of a Portland marriage counselor if you feel the discussion is becoming too intense, or your relationship problems don’t improve.

As a Portland relationship counselor, I’ve noticed that the recent high profile cases of sex addiction – David Duchovny, Jesse James, and Tiger Woods – have left people with more questions than answers about the disorder. Some falsely believe that simply having an affair means you are a sex addict, but that’s not the case.

Portland Relationship Counselor Helps Define Sex Addiction

Sexual addiction, which is also called compulsive sexual behavior, is actually pretty rare, affecting only 3 to 6% of adults in the U.S. according to the Mayo Clinic. The condition is not official recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Sexual addiction is “an obsession with sexual thoughts, feelings or behaviors that affects your health, job, relationships or other parts of your life.” This can include excessive use of pornography, having multiple affairs, having sex with prostitutes, and frequent masturbation. Many sex addicts grow to even dislike the act of sex but still cannot stop. About 80% of sex addicts have sexual abuse or emotional trauma in their past. Some people believe that the internet has caused an increase in sex addiction in recent years due to internet porn and cybersex.

But of course, people who are perfectly healthy have affairs, watch pornography, and masturbate. So how do you know when it’s become an addiction? When the person does not seem to have control over the behavior, can’t stop thinking about sex, and the behaviors starts to affect other aspects of his or her life.

Of course, as a Portland relationship counselor, I know that even one affair can significantly affect your relationship, and that alone is not enough to diagnose sex addiction. Just like gambling or alcoholism, sexual addiction can cause financial troubles, public embarrassment, damage to relationships with family and friends, job loss, and even health problems. It can affect all aspects of the addict’s life, but he or she continues the behavior.

Treatment for sexual addiction is long-term and requires working with a professional who understands the disease. Marriage or relationship counseling is an important part of treatment because the ultimate goal is not abstinence, but to learn to have healthy sex in a consensual relationship. If sexual addiction is affecting your relationship, I encourage you to talk to a Portland relationship counselor.

In a recent Portland marriage counselor blog, I wrote about how relationship education can help all of your relationships, not just your romantic ones. Relationship problems most often come from unrealistic expectations and a lack of understanding or communication between two people, and relationship education teaches you how to recognize this in your relationships and move past the hurdle.

But to most of my clients, relationship education means learning how to navigate the sometimes confusing waters of being married or having a significant other. These are people who want to approach their relationship in a conscious way to ensure its success. In cases like that, Imago training is especially useful.

Imago Tells Us Why We Connect, Says Portland Marriage Counselor

Relationship education tells us that the relationship problems we are experiencing are normal for most people and provides methods to move past those problems. An Imago trained Portland marriage counselor can take that a step further, detailing why we are attracted to certain types of people, and how that increases the likelihood of us experiencing the same kind of relationship problems over and over. By making you aware of this unconscious preference and describing how “love” works in the brain, Imago allows you to deal with it in the same way that relationship education has you deal with communication issues and other things that cause relationship problems.

A Portland Marriage Counselor Can Help You to Stay Connected

Relationship education with a Portland marriage counselor using the Imago model can clarify the evolution of your relationship in a way that makes sense of your current relationship problems. The troubles for most relationships begin when we move on from romantic love and infatuation to the “power struggle” phase of our relationship. It can be tough to fully give ourselves over to another person and trust them completely, and this is the stage where our natural instincts cause us to put up defenses and butt heads with our partners.

There is no way to simply avoid this phase of the relationship, but learning about it beforehand and recognizing it for what it is can be extremely helpful. Imago relationship education courses with a Portland marriage counselor also teach you to jointly create a vision of your relationship that you can go back to if either of you ever feel like you’re going off track, and provide each of you with a new way to talk and listen to one another that emphasizes understanding and acceptance.

If you’ve been experiencing relationship problems and would like to schedule relationship education using the Imago model, contact a Portland marriage counselor today.

Relationship issues change with the times, but perhaps never as fast as they have in recent years. Like it or not, we now live in an age where “private lives” is an oxymoron. The second anything happens to most of us, it’s been posted, tweeted, tagged, or blogged about – if not by us, then by a friend, or possibly even a random acquaintance. Social media has changed the way we look at what should be out there for public consumption and what should stay private. Nowhere is this more true than with our relationships with our significant others.

We update relationship statuses (good or bad) sometimes before we even tell people in real life. We post romantic messages for all the world to see. We make up (and sometimes break up) via social media. All of this made market research blog Lab42 start to wonder what our views are about relationships in general these days. To find out, they surveyed 500 social network users over 18 years of age on a variety of relationship issues and questions, and as a Portland relationship counselor, I thought some of the results were interesting.

A Look at Different Relationship Issues in the Relationship Status Update

33% of people said that they had broken up via text, email, or on Facebook, and even more – 40% – said that they would! Unfortunately, this is a trend that will likely only grow as more people become accustomed to using social media as a primary source of interaction, and it’s something we need to look at. Not because expressing ourselves through social media is inherently bad, but because in this case, it seems like a clear way to avoid conflict with our significant other – and that is not healthy.

In terms of changing their relationship status on sites like Facebook, people seemed to take more care (and time) updating the status for a new relationship than for a break up.  38% updated immediately for a new relationship, compared to 52% who updated immediately after a breakup. Looking at these together, both seem protective – the first of the new relationship (not wanting to go public with it until both parties are comfortable), and the second as a way to let everyone know without having to get too up close and personal with emotions that may still be raw and messy. Unfortunately, if the breakup was more one-sided, the changed status will merely serve as a painful reminder – and if one person updates before the other (which seems likely based on the results), you’re essentially outing your ex to the world.

A number of people also admitted to friending or doing online research in other ways on people they’d just met if they liked them, and almost a fourth said that they would use Facebook to ask people out on a first date – second only to asking them out in person. Despite all of this, however, a whopping 77% said they’d never used an online dating site because “people lie about who they are online.”

Technology is increasingly becoming an integral part of our relationships, and understanding its effect on your relationship and how to use it in a healthy way can be crucial to staying together. I encourage you to reach out to a Portland relationship counselor if you are having trouble navigating these new relationship issues.

As a Portland marriage counselor, I can tell you based on my experience that the first models we have for how relationships are supposed to work are our parents. If mom and dad have a loving, supportive relationship based on mutual trust, honest communication, and affection, we will have a healthier outlook on how a relationship should function. If, however, we witness our parents experiencing relationship issues – especially if they ignore those issues or deal with them in unhelpful ways – our sense of what a relationship is supposed to be will be skewed in ways that can harm all future relationships for us. I’ve seen this again and again.

Now, this isn’t to blame mom and dad for your relationship issues. Chances are, they were in the same boat you’re in, and they were just repeating a cycle because they didn’t know any better. As people, we get bogged down in what we want and often have a difficult time acknowledging the needs of others. But most of the time, this isn’t due to a lack of caring, but rather a lack of knowledge, which is why I highly recommend that everyone go through relationship education.

Portland Marriage Counselor: Relationship Education Will Help You Understand the Needs of Others

What I love about relationship education as a Portland marriage counselor is the deceptive simplicity of the idea. It teaches us things like the fact that it’s natural to have disagreements with our partner, and that it’s our responsibility to take a step back and approach tense situations as calmly and rationally as possible. That both people in a relationship need to agree to listen to each other and do their best to understand where their partner is coming from, asking questions and being willing to answer their partner’s queries without being combative. And simply letting people know that relationships, at times, will be hard, but that’s just part of the whole package.

The great thing about relationship education is that the principles you learn in it – ostensibly to interact with your spouse or significant other – apply to just about any relationship you’re going to have in life (friends, family members, coworkers, and random encounters on the street), and will make you better overall at simply dealing with other human beings. If you haven’t gone through relationship education yet, now is always the best time. Sign up for a Getting the Love You Want Workshop, or any of our other fine seminars, today!

Saturday January 7th 2012
Lead by experienced Imago Therapist
Norene Gonsiewski

Start your relationship off on the right foot in 2012.  Join us for this fun, positive and useful 3 hour workshop.  Couples will have the opportunity to do exercises that will take the best from the year that has passed and focus with optimism and intention on the year ahead.  You will leave the workshop with your 2012 Relationship Vision and your course set for a satisfying romantic connection.

The fee includes all materials, beverages and a light snack.  This workshop is suitable for couples who are familiar with Imago as well as though who with no prior experience.  So invites your friends, but register early as space is limited to 15 couples.

Fees: $99.00 per couple

Times: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM

Location: To Be Decided

Sign Up Here

Join Norene Gonsiewski, LCSW and Tim Higdon, LPC in this fun and eye opening
1 day workshop. The Money Habitudes workshop is designed to help you to engage in productive conversations about money and understand the habits and attitudes that influence your actions and decisions regarding money. This workshop is the winner of several national awards for excellence in marriage education.

When: Saturday January 28th  9-5

Cost: $79.99 per couple, $49.00 individual

Location: Portland, TBD based on enrollment

This workshop is for you if:

• You argue about money

• You struggle with setting and sticking to your financial goals

• You are sometimes dishonest about your spending

• You spend more than you earn

• You and your partner think and feel differently about money

To Register: Sign up Here
Or call our offices at 503 234-4440

Title: Getting the Love You Want; Bend, OR
Sign Up: Sign Up
Date: February 17th-19th
Description: Getting the Love You Want is a weekend specifically designed to help couples truly discover the joy of being together. You will learn how to:

• Successfully express your own desires.
• Get to the root of your problems and dissolve them.
• Create romance, fun and intimacy.

The workshop is kept small to allow for a safe and relaxed environment. Except for a brief introduction, you will not be required to share anything with the group unless you choose to.

The workshop is appropriate for you if:

• You are beginning a relationship you want to keep.
• You want to enrich and deepen an already good relationship.
• You are having difficulties in your relationship and want to resolve long-standing conflicts and learn to successfully repair your ruptures.
• You are undecided about continuing your relationship.

Tim and Norene are dynamic presenters who have both presented on numerous topics for the past 25 years. Together they provide many years of Imago expertise and are excited to provide this great workshop, created by Harville Hendrix.

The workshops are held Friday evening 6-9pm, Saturday from 8:30-6:30 and Sunday 8:30-6:30pm. The Bend workshop is to be held at the Phoenix Inn, 300 NW Franklin Ave. It is not necessary to stay at the hotels, but if you would like to book a room, please call (541) 317-9292. Lodging is not included in the cost of the workshop.

The cost of the workshop includes all course materials and snacks.

Contact: Norene at (503) 234-4440 or by email at portlandrelationship@hevanet.com
Cost: $700 per couple

Sign Up: Sign Up