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August 29, 2018 By Susan O'Grady Leave a Comment

Micro-cheating’s Seductive Quick Fix … and why it’s a bad idea

In a committed relationship, cheating comes in many forms. It can be as big as a long-term affair with one’s best friend. It can be as small as texting a co-worker. “Micro-cheating,” as it’s called, can include:

  • Keeping an active dating profile
  • Poring over an ex’s social media
  • Dressing up for someone not your partner
  • Sending flirty texts that your partner doesn’t know about
  • Keeping a secret Facebook account to exchange hot photos with an ex
  • Flirting with a co-worker
  • watching porn via Skype

It’s easy to see how the lines get blurred in a world where we advertise our every move: the airport we just checked into via Facebook, the food we’re eating sent by Instagram, or the random thoughts we tweet without the benefit of thoughtful reflection. When we constantly expose our private selves indiscriminately, we become emotionally desensitized.

Meanwhile, our actual relationships have to compete with smartphones,  addictive video games, and online pornography to suit every taste. Social media’s quick boredom fix is always within reach; micro-cheating is another such fix, and secrecy is part of the thrill. And kissy faces and hearts, or playful comments, can give way to romantic fantasies.

That’s the problem with flirting via text message. Some may justify it as just one screen talking to another, but secret flirting is an unhealthy way of growing our fantasies about someone outside of our committed relationship. And those musings sometimes don’t feel unhealthy; in fact, these fantasy relationships can actually feel closer to our authentic selves (or the selves we think we should be). New love makes us come alive again; it’s risky and exciting, pushing our established boundaries.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with some fantasy and flirtation. You don’t have to tell your partner every romantic idea that crosses your mind. That would stifle fun and creativity—qualities that we can take back to our partner because we feel good about ourselves and our desirability. But with micro-cheating, the fantasy is based on something other than the trust, commitment, and intimacy of a real relationship. It’s easier to exchange sweet talk and confidences with someone we barely know (or more likely, think we know) than it is, for example, to have an intimate and difficult discussion with a spouse of 10 years about unhappiness in the bedroom. But it’s in just such ways that real love is made.

Even new relationships are not immune to the need for self-disclosure and uncomfortable discussions; most people get on each other’s nerves after two weeks of being alone together. Maintaining romance is tough when we become acutely aware of our partner’s belches and farts and annoying habits we didn’t notice when we were dating. It’s easy to see why the new, mysterious other person is alluring and fascinating, and why we can more easily present a self-flattering front, especially when nothing much is required of us but sending a sexy text when and as we please. It’s a low-cost endeavor because it exists in fantasy—but no real person can compete with a fantasy.

Originally published on WebMD

Filed Under: Affairs, Blog, Couples & Marriage & Family, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Relationships

June 17, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 6 Comments

Using Softened Startup in Conflict Discussions

Dirty Dishes in the Sink, Smelly Socks on the Floor

Sometimes the things that drive us most crazy in a marriage are the most mundane and trivial: dishes piled up in the sink, socks dropped on the floor. We may complain, criticize, and yell, but the end effect is that the dishes don’t get done, the socks eventually migrate back to the floor, and we end up feeling even more distanced and angry toward our partner. If complaining doesn’t work, neither does ignoring what drives us crazy. Over time, a couple can see their relationship with what John Gottman describes as “negative perspective.” We get so focused on the negative that we become unable to recognize even neutral or positive actions from our partners, snowballing our unhappiness.

As a couples therapist for many years, I’ve seen the situations that bring clients to treatment range from catastrophic events like affairs and severe illness to the mundane, like smelly socks and cluttered countertops. A sampling of conflicts:

 

  • An older couple squabbles over the bedcovers: the wife says her husband hogs the blankets, leaving her freezing much of the night; she feels her husband is selfish and inconsiderate, while he thinks she should just tug harder on the covers.
  • A young husband says that his stay-at-home wife leaves dirty dishes in the sink for days on end and he ends up cleaning the kitchen every night, even if he made the meal; he feels his wife is lazy, and she feels he’s ignoring the work she has done.
  • A couple complains that they’ve stopped sleeping together because their child is too afraid to sleep alone and needs to be consoled, even at age eight. The father, now sleeping on the couch, feels left out of the closeness and warmth that mother and child enjoy, and soothes himself through weed, drinking, and internet games or porn; the mother feels she must put her child’s needs first and co-sleeping is best.

 

Without help, such situations can drive a wedge between couples that can go on for years. Research has shown that couples wait an average of six years after becoming aware of problems in their relationship to seek counseling. That’s a lot of water under the bridge, and a lot of built-up hurt, anger, and distance. By the time couples do come to counseling, their relationship has usually crumbled, with deeply entrenched negative thoughts about the marriage. Fighting about the dishes is no longer about the dishes–it’s about a partner’s poor character. “She is so self-centered”; “He is so lazy.”

How does a couples therapist help when each partner blames the other and feels like the victim? Taking sides is not an option: the partner who feels ganged up on will bolt from therapy, and nothing will change. There may occasionally arise a need to confront one partner about issues that are causing harm, such as abuse, but in my practice, that is rarely the case. That said, helping untangle years of accumulated misunderstandings is not an instant fix. Everyone becomes invested in seeing things our own way, so opening our eyes to a partner’s viewpoint is something that takes time and skill. The good news is that these skills can be taught by a therapist who helps change the dialogue.

Softened Start-up Rather than Harsh Start-up

One of the most useful and yet seemingly simple skills to teach is to complain without blame and to begin a conflict discussion with a softened start-up.

How does this look? Well, take the older couple who fights about the blankets. With a harsh start-up, the freezing wife might say “You have no idea how selfish you are! You take all the covers every single night, leaving me with just the sheet—and a thin sliver of a sheet at that!” Her husband becomes defensive: “Well, what a complainer. Just tug on the blankets, and quit blaming me! I’m asleep, I can’t help it.”

It may feel momentarily satisfying, but coming out swinging engenders a harsh reply and an unhelpful one at that. A seemingly small squabble becomes gridlocked. A softened alternative might go like this: “I realize you’re asleep and unaware of my getting cold at night when I have no blankets. It probably happens as you roll over several times during the night, leaving me uncovered. When my sleep is disturbed, I get grouchy the next day, and unfairly blame you for something you’re unaware is happening. I wonder if we can come up with a solution?”

Of course,  her partner might try to laugh it off with  “Why don’t you just sleep in the guest room?”  But, soothed by a soft start-up, he could reply sincerely, without defensiveness: “I know this has been a problem for you for awhile, and I’m sorry. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable and cold at night. Maybe we can devise a way to fix this together. Let’s go to Target and see if there are blanket fasteners or something, and if not, let’s buy a fluffy down comforter and duvet.”

It would be misleading to suggest that this conversation can happen during the first few sessions. To change the way you talk about the blankets, it’s important to realize that the blankets aren’t really the problem. A skilled couples therapist will further the discussion so that each partner feels heard and understood. By uncovering what’s underneath the blankets, so to speak, the couple can see what’s really been covered over.

For the wife in my example, blankets were just one of many ways she felt her partner had been selfish and uncaring. When we discussed some of the feelings that surrounded the blanket-stealing, she was able to see things in a new light. She took ownership for communicating this and her other needs, and responsibility for doing it in a better, less judgmental way. As for her husband, he was able to see that he had in fact been acting with self-interest and ignoring his wife’s needs in many situations. But—and this is equally important—they were also better able to see each other’s good attributes once negative thinking wasn’t squeezing out relationship-enhancing thoughts.

When the concept of a softened startup is introduced in therapy, many partners will exclaim, “But that’s not the way I talk, it isn’t me!” or “Won’t I need a frontal lobotomy to talk this way?”

I chuckle, saying, “No, nothing that drastic.” It takes practice, but eventually, this way of bringing up conflict becomes second nature and feels good. A partner who joins in with a positive response helps to sustain and reinforce this healthier way of handling conflict.

What I love about doing this work with couples is the ripple effect. Not only does the couple change the way they talk to each other, but they model this better communication for their families and children. It’s important to remember that kids pick up both the good and bad things we do in front of them.

The first workshop I took with Dr. John Gottman was in 2000. I began practicing this softened startup with my husband before trying it with couples. We had a CD with practice prompts, and listened to it on a long car ride, with our kids in the back seat. Eventually, our twin daughters began answering the prompts with the softened alternative. We made it a game—yet it became a powerful tool for dealing with conflict. When the girls left home for college, they noticed that most of their dorm-mates were not able to handle conflict so well. The techniques work beyond the family setting.

You don’t have to be a psychologist (or have psychologist parents) to practice these techniques yourself. Take the dirty-dishes example—a frequent conflict for roommates as well as couples. You come home from work and see the dishes stacked high in the sink, overflowing onto the countertops. You think your stay-at-home partner should have done them. A harsh startup would be, ” I can’t believe you still haven’t done those dishes! You’re such a lazy slob.”  To that startup, a defensive comeback would be,  “Well, look at you! You’re not doing them either. So you devalue what I do all day long just because you work outside the home? I work too! You’re so full of yourself!”

You can imagine how the rest of that conversation goes—but it doesn’t have to. Practice coming up with a softened startup for this situation from what you’ve learned so far—try it out!

____________________________________

____________________________________

____________________________________

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I’ll give you one way to do this, but it’s not brain surgery; you’ll find many ways to phrase a soft startup in your own words:

“You know I tend to be a neat freak. When the kitchen counters and sink are dirty, I feel uncomfortable. I know you work hard and having clean counters isn’t as important for you, but I wonder if we can together find a way to stay on top of it, as a team?”

The key to all this is to know yourself, take responsibility for your feelings and reactions, and speak about your needs and feelings without leveling a global character assault on your partner.

Now, imagine one of your ongoing conflicts, and try out in your mind a way to communicate using a softened alternative. It’s a surprisingly powerful technique.

 

 

Filed Under: Couples & Marriage & Family, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Relationships, Well-being & Growth Tagged With: Conflict Management, Couples Communication, Dealing with Conflict in Marriage, Gottman Couples Counseling, Relationships, Softened start-up

May 11, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 5 Comments

Anxiety Knows No Age Limits: Each moment is all we really ever have

We all get anxious from time to time. Even mild panic that’s morphed from mere anxiety is normal. Most often, though, anxiety will peak right before an event that makes us worry, such as an exam or dinner party—a kind of anticipatory anxiety—and then fade 10 minutes into the event. The ebb and flow of anxiety can be unpleasant but usually isn’t a major concern.

But the usual ebb and flow can worsen. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), normal anxiety becomes diagnosable as generalized anxiety disorder when:

  • Excessive anxiety and worry occurs more days than not, for at least six months, about several events or activities (for example, performance at school or work)
  • Controlling the worry is difficult
  • The anxiety/worry includes at least three out of six symptoms (in diagnosing children, just one of these symptoms is required): restlessness or feeling on edge; being easily fatigued; difficulty concentrating, or the mind going blank; irritability; muscle tension; sleep disturbance
  • These symptoms cause significant distress in functioning
  • The disturbance isn’t related to medication, drugs, or a medical condition
  • The disturbance isn’t explainable by another mental disorder

I recently saw an 88-year old woman who was referred by her internist for anxiety. Her primary symptoms were her mind going blank, trouble letting go of thoughts, and agoraphobia (the desire to avoid leaving her home). The usual culprits were ruled out: hyperthyroidism, a medication side effect, or, given the client’s advanced age, dementia.

Composedly, my client said her anxiety came from feeling pressured to do more, and a sense of failure for not being good enough. This surprised me; I had expected her to talk about a fear of approaching mortality.

It’s a psychologist’s job to ask the hard questions, the ones that seem most obvious—the ones most friends and family wouldn’t touch for fear of making the person feel worse. So, I gently inquired if some of her anxiety could be related to thoughts about aging and death. But my client was quite definite that that was not the case! Her physician had assured her she would live to be 94 years old. I did a quick calculation—math was never my strength as I still count in my head with little dots—and determined that would give her five more years. Wouldn’t such a short countdown to death be enough to bring about anxiety, I still wondered?

Another job of a psychologist is not to jump to conclusions or make assumptions. Using inquiry, we ask for further thoughts, feelings, and associations. Some of her anxiety, she acknowledged,  was longstanding, but a new worry was that she was no longer as interested in venturing from home. What was this about?  Was she worried about taking a fall, breaking a bone, and ending up in the hospital? Again, no, it wasn’t fear that losing her balance and falling would lead to death because she knew that it most likely would. Anyone who reaches the age of 88 has seen in their own peer group how a broken hip can spiral downwards to a skilled nursing facility, with all the loss of dignity that brings.

Perhaps the most important part of our job as a psychologist is to trust that our clients know what they’re talking about. That trust is huge because it eventually leads us to an understanding of what is going on inside, in the deeper places we can touch if given time and attention. It turned out that my client’s anxiety was about just what she’d said it was. She was feeling like she should be doing more, going out more, and accomplishing more. Until she retired 23 years ago, she had been very productive in her job as an accountant. She loved her work, and she loved her retirement. She hadn’t slowed down in retirement until recently. She couldn’t understand the desire to just stay home. It was unlike her, and she felt she should be keeping up the pace she was accustomed to.

We discussed her symptoms; a mind going blank can be due to anxiety, and also to what my neuropsychologist husband refers to as benign senescent forgetfulness. (He tells me I have a mild case of it—our brains shrink as we get older, it’s entirely normal.) I also recommended that she turn off CNN. I wasn’t being flippant: Non-stop watching the news these days is making a lot of us anxious. Being bombarded with daily images of worldwide pain and suffering pervades our senses and creates disturbances that go deep into our unconscious minds, harming emotional health.

What about not wanting to leave the house? She wasn’t worried about going outside, but rather, as we figured out together, she desired to retreat from the world, to reflect and take time to appreciate her many gifts: a life well lived, a 65-year marriage to a good man, and her overall sense was that she had had a good, if not perfect, life. It was time to turn inward a bit more and let herself off the hook. Over the next several weeks, we explored how she could do just that.

Acceptance of who we are, imperfect and flawed, allows us to live more fully each moment, for as is said in mindfulness practices, each moment is all we really ever have.

Filed Under: Couples & Marriage & Family, Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Health Psychology, Mindfulness & Meditation, Relationships, Self-care, Stress, Uncategorized, Well-being & Growth

February 28, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 2 Comments

Sex and Romance in Long Term Relationships

Harboring fantasies about someone else while happily coupled isn’t unusual. In most relationships, whether of two years, 20, or more, one or both partners will likely experience fleeting moments of imagining how exciting life would be with a different person. This could begin innocently while flirting in the break room, or having coffee with a co-worker, or reconnecting with an old lover. Such moments provide a sweet, brief ego boost. But when short-lived fantasies take hold, moving from transient to obsessive, we should take heed.

When Erotic Fantasies Cross the Line

Fantasies are significant as a precursor to affairs because imagination is a precondition of desire, which awakens our senses. Though we’re pretending, a fantasy can actually feel closer to our authentic selves, or the selves we think we should be. That is why we come alive again when we encounter new love. Risky and exciting, it pushes the boundaries we have established in ourselves.

In such reveries, we imagine how much more fun, sexier, and passionate we would be in this other relationship. The key here is how different we would be. For although partners play a role, it’s usually not the marriage that has grown stale, but how we see ourselves. Although we cherish marriage’s safety, permanence, and predictability, these qualities can also be deadening. In my psychotherapy practice, I have seen time and time again how couples lose their connection by trying to live as a perfect couple, then a perfect family. The struggle to earn a good living, make a good home, and raise a strong family takes priority. Children claim much time, space, and emotion. Sports, band, scouting; daily squabbles about homework, screen time, and chores—all these issues squeeze yet more time from romance.

Because we do long for the continuity and safety of togetherness, the lack of romance feels okay–until one day, we realize it doesn’t. But it’s this gradual erosion of intimacy that can lay the groundwork for fantasies of another partner that then play out in meetings, confidences, and intimate details of mutual marital disenchantment. Soothing support from an attractive other can be intoxicating. In an emotional or physical affair, we feel young. Our old boredom falls away to reveal a passionate, sexy person. We blame the spouse for our dull lives. The new love gives us the illusion that we are different, and we don’t need to look at our well-constructed fortification against insecurity.

If you’ve lost your Self through trying to be a perfect couple or family, addressing this problem is a worthy goal. But running to the novelty of a new partner is a feeble way to do it. It’s true that marriage requires surrendering parts of our Self  in the service of the relationship, and many people feel regret about their choices, often triggered by a crisis or major life shift (such as aging or retirement, giving up their career to raise a family, or the loss of possible adventures in favor of marriage’s security.) But we should remember that surrendering the Self can be tremendously valuable to growth as long as we don’t give up too much– and also that disowning responsibility and projecting our unhappiness onto a partner is a set-up for an emotional or physical affair.

Understanding Your  Role When Romance Leaves the Marriage

If excitement has disappeared from the bedroom, leading to fantasies about someone else, the best next step is to understand our own role in the situation rather than giving up on the marriage in search of novelty.  When we marry, we make vow, implicit or explicit, that issues are to be faced together and worked through, not evaded. James Hollis writes in The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other (1998) that the greatest gift to others is our own best selves. Our marriage may have met our need for grounding—to be known, and to know our partner, with a comfortable predictability. But this devotion to security and familiarity eventually collides with our need for breaking established patterns so that we can encounter something unpredictable and awe-inspiring. Romantic passion can indeed be the chariot to take us there, but not if it is the creation of an affair, no matter how compelling.

And the irony is that if we do take up a new relationship, we are still ourselves, and over time, that relationship will lose its allure. I have seen countless clients on their second or third serious relationship who privately admit that they made a mistake. They realized too late that they, too, had a role to play in what was missing in the relationship. Often, the same issues come up with the new partner. They feel deep regret for breaking up a good thing in favor of an illusion, however intoxicating it is. There are exceptions: sometimes an affair is a stepping stone out of a bad, unfixable marriage and that new relationship can bring happiness and healing.

Averting an Affair

Averting an affair is doable, but it takes work from both partners, because talking about dissatisfaction with our love life is scary. It requires partners to look, unflinchingly and together, at just where we’re most vulnerable—our sexuality.

Couples therapy is often about helping partners understand that what they think are impediments to their sensual pleasure and satisfaction, and out of their control, are in fact, their constructions. Through all the travails of marriage, when we can still embrace and encourage individual growth, and not have to sacrifice the security and safety our relationship provides, our love deepens. And that makes room for romance.

Filed Under: Affairs, Couples & Marriage & Family, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Infidelity, Relationships, Sex and Intimacy, Uncategorized Tagged With: Affairs, Couples Communication, emotional affairs, Intimacy, Love, Relationships, Romance

February 7, 2017 By Susan O'Grady 4 Comments

Working with Emotions: How mindfulness and awareness help

hiding from emotions is never a good strategy
Hiding from emotions is never a good strategy

Bringing the hidden to light is an important part of psychotherapy, sometimes achieved through focus on intellectual reflections. But in recent years, mindfulness-based therapies emphasize awareness of how feelings and physical sensations are related. It is enlightening to notice what happens in the body when we feel strong emotions.

As an example of how lack of mindfulness can hurt, I would sometimes react with anger at my husband when he disagreed or corrected me. But rather than seeing my point of view, he only experienced my anger as defensiveness, while I experienced him as overbearing. The result was that I felt worse.

This pattern continued until I learned to slow down my automatic reaction of anger, by becoming aware of the physical sensations that accompanied my feelings. This allowed me to become aware of the small, fleeting, and easily overlooked span of time between my internal commentary about his comment and my emotional reaction.

What was surprisingly helpful in doing this was to become aware of physical sensations; in mindfulness practices, we call this “mindfulness of the body.” Sleuthing out my emotions when corrected by my husband, I could actually feel my hackles go up. It was subtle but unmistakable.

Sensing our Hackles Before a Fight

When a dog’s hackles go up, the hair between their shoulder blades becomes erect as an automatic reaction to feeling threatened. As Adrienne Janet Farricell, a certified dog trainer explains, special muscles attached to hair follicles “are innervated by the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and are therefore not under conscious control. The function allows the dog to appear larger, taller and therefore more intimidating than it is. This is a ‘fight or flight’ response triggered by adrenaline.”

Paying attention to my physical response after my husband criticized me, I began to sense that distinct feeling of my hackles going up. But what surprised me even more was what followed:  I felt myself contract, my shoulders dropping and my chest becoming slightly concave. I submitted instead of fighting, just as a dog lies submissively on the ground. In the animal world, cowering is a useful and self-protective signaling “I am not a threat to you, so you don’t need to attack me.“ But when we humans do that, we lose some of our power.

Paying attention to this small and subtle sequence of physical sensation help us notice the physical reactions that often precede the ultimate expression of strong emotion. Without being aware of how we succumb to our initial reactions we are unable to address the problem that’s making us react.

Making the automatic conscious is liberating on many levels. First, we gain some control over our automatic responses—something dogs cannot easily do. Second, greater physical and emotional awareness lets us link direct relationship to felt experiences. Being able to name an experience or find an image for it, as I did with the hackles example, opens our understanding, bringing meaning to what on the surface looks like plain old anger.

It is important to know that an angry outburst is not always a bad thing. Anger is a reaction that often stands in for other feelings that are less available to us. Let’s imagine a typical couple’s situation of the sort I see in my practice.  When Jill got angry at Sam, she didn’t always stop to feel what that anger signified. Their arguments escalated as they each get more flooded with emotions. But when Jill reflected on her anger, her felt-sense was of being small, childlike, and without a voice of her own. Childlike? Sure enough, just as she’d felt in her family growing up with three older brothers, she experienced Sam as being dismissive of her opinions and dominating her in a situation where she was powerless.

Sam, meanwhile, had no idea she was feeling this way, because all he saw was her childish, to him, outburst. He tagged Jill as being easily out of control, making him feel all the more self-righteous toward her, which further reinforced Jill—and Sam–feeling like Jill was the problem in the relationship. Sam was off the hook, and did not have to look at his role.

Pausing Before Reacting

As this example shows, our reactions and feelings may mean more than we consciously know. In some traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism, mindfulness translates as “to remember.” This process of witnessing our emotions and our physical sensations requires remembering to push the pause button before our automatic reactions take hold. In a disagreement between couples, this may mean agreeing to a time-out, or the pause may be as subtle as one breath—a period between two sentences. Pausing gives us the space to be aware without becoming stuck in automatic reactions, attacking back, or inwardly growing smaller and losing the essence of our feelings, which are usually quite valid.

This pause also gives us time to consolidate our understanding of our self. Jill recognized an old memory: that of being discounted, unheard, or dismissed. She also understood that when anger dominates, the more important issues get lost.

Being Alert to Underlying Emotions

Of course, staying calm while having hard conversations can be challenging. It helps to recognize the early and subtle signs that you are becoming flooded. Once flooded, meaningful conversations come to a grinding halt or turn into a yelling match. Be alert for automatic reactions. Remembering to pause before automatically reacting allows us to tune into the deeper, less conscious feeling: what emotions and what physical sensations are triggered?

At this point, we have a choice. We can either use our awareness to ask directly for a bit of time to get back in emotional balance before continuing. Or, we can use the pause to go deeper into what may be coming up from within. This doesn’t have to be a lengthy process; with practice, that pause can take mere seconds for insight to come.

And in that pause, when we bring awareness to physical sensations like raised hackles or a churning gut, we can use these as signals to look more deeply into our role in what is getting triggered. Too often our automatic response is to assume fault lies outside us, not within. As Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

While taking responsibility for what is arising in us, we also need to be aware of its impact on others. When we do this, hackles go down and the back and shoulders lengthen, bringing real power, liberating the Self to be more fully alive and present. Our defense mechanism was only masquerading as power, and that briefly.

What is Your Role?

Taking responsibility does not result in guilty self-recrimination but liberation and power. Once we take ownership of our contribution to conflict, we can more readily bring insight and thus control over our automatic reactions. It may reveal qualities within us that are active and useful in opening us up to be freer, more whole in ways we‘ve barely glimpsed.

Being aware of our default defense mechanisms can help us deal more effectively with difficulty. While many defenses help us cope—psychologists call this defense in service of the ego—they can backfire and hurt us. Because defenses are unconscious, it’s difficult to be aware when they emerge. The best clue that our defenses are lurking is when we react with strong emotions or behaviors, such as rage or sharp criticism.

Some of the most common defenses are projection and denial. They are related in that both mechanisms protect a person’s sense of self by attributing to another (projection) or rejecting (denial) their own unacceptable impulses or feelings, which are made unconscious. Let’s see how that worked with Amie and Jon, who were locked in a cycle of blame when they came to counseling. Amie saw Jon as extremely self-centered, and Jon felt Amie was too emotional, always criticizing him and trying to control him; meanwhile, each felt innocent of playing a role in this cycle.

With therapy, both Jon and Amie could see how they projected unacknowledged parts of themselves onto the other. Amie never gave herself permission to ask for time to be with her friends or to play. She then criticized Jon for taking time for himself instead of spending time with the family. Further examination revealed that Amie’s mother was a martyr and never let anyone in the family forget it. Amie grew up feeling that taking time for herself was selfish. She denied feelings of wanting to take time for herself and projected her anxiety about selfishness onto Jon. Meanwhile, Jon disowned his own anger by projecting it all onto Amie.

This dynamic created misunderstanding and distance. Once both Amie and Jon saw their role, they not only reduced conflict but had more access to dormant passions. Replacing anger with understanding brought new ways of relating. Sex reentered the marriage, along with play and a deeper acceptance of each other.

When your hackles go up–whenever you have a strong emotional reaction–you have an opportunity to learn something new. By pausing and paying close attention to your bodily sensations and your thoughts, you can discover something unexpected, something that ultimately empowers you.

Filed Under: Couples & Marriage & Family, Depression & Anxiety, Dr. Susan O'Grady's Blog, Mindfulness & Meditation, Psychotherapy, Relationships, Stress, Uncategorized, Well-being & Growth Tagged With: Conflict in Marriage, Couples, Couples Communication, Dealing with Conflict in Marriage, Flooding, Mindfulness, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

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Dr. Susan J. O’Grady is a Certified Gottman Couples Therapist

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