Help Advice Support & Guidance
One of the life’s’ fundamental secrets to a successful life is fulfilment. Fulfilment is the power that sits behind adding value and growing what’s important in your life.
After working for 15 years with individuals and couples from all walks of life, I can tell you that successful people think differently.
So if you want to be successful in your relationship and you’re currently not. Now might be the time to work out how couples in successful relationships think differently. [Read more...]
One of the most challenging parts of building a successful marriage is when one or both people are living, or are focused in such away they have become someone they are not to cope with their relationship or their life.
This is most apparent when couples misunderstand each others words or actions and they move to protect themselves. They can become frustrated, angry, shut down, sad, depressed or lonely to name a few.
For example:
When a relationship goes wrong a person will naturally move to focus on protecting themselves, the problem is, if this focus is practiced enough that person can become stuck in becoming someone they are not and living that way in their relationship. [Read more...]
We all have fears that hold us back, fears that keep us stuck, fears that limit our quality of life? Fears that stop us earning more, or having rewarding relationships, fear that stop us growing.
Are you aware of what you really fear, or have you chosen to bury it?
Most people do all they can to move away from their fears, but without realising their fears then control their lives.
When recently working with a client, I asked him a question. “If I asked you to walk on a plank of wood 1 foot wide, 12 foot long that was 1 foot off the ground, would he do it for twenty british pounds?” [Read more...]
You and your partner are designed by nature to act and work together in a certain way hence the term chemistry usually associated with the automatic feelings a couple experiences when they first meet.
When you first met this is likely to be the reactions you had to each other. You both felt great, and it took little effort, those amazing feelings were automatic. When you were with your partner you felt great about you.
These automatic feelings are proof of natures’ power of attraction in action. It created chemical reactions in you both to feel an intense attraction to each other.
When you feel this way, the drive towards intimacy is very powerful. [Read more...]
What’s interesting about the couples I see is they really only have to do a few key things to make a massive difference with each other combined with a little nudge from me…
These few key things make up about 80% of what’s really important/critical.
I wonder how your relationship would be different if you knew about these few key things and applied them?
This couple did and this is their result…
…We couldn’t believe that in one two hour session so much could change. My husband learnt what to do when I became upset, he felt important in our relationship for the first time in years and I felt so much safer with him. Stephen also worked on my depression of 9 years in that same session and it just went. I even had a little panic when I tried to get my depression back and couldn’t.
We are so excited about each other and our lives again!
There were a few things that were amazing about this couple. Firstly despite their frustration with each other they were eager to learn. They wanted to fix this but were clear very frustrated with each other.
He had no idea how to make her happy and was giving up, and she was too depressed to respond to any good deed which further renforced to him she could never change and he could never make her happy.
She also repeated the same message to him over and over hoping in vain he would understand her and of course he didn’t.
Now I had a big challenge. I could see they were on the edge and I knew her depression of 9+ years was going to hamper our effort to rebuild the trust in the relationship and with no trust their wasn’t going to be growth.
Of their first two hour session, I had to understand their story and teach them how to understand why it had gone wrong and give them the plan rebuild the trust, understand the importance of meeting each others needs before igniting the passion and then create goals for the future.
So I had 40 minutes left to rid her of this depression. I told her this was my plan and she agreed to go for it.
After 40 minutes of very fast intensive work she stood standing facing me after a rollercoaster of emotions, tears, shock, laughter, she went through it all. Her pale worried face had now been replaced with a healthy glow and a confident smile.
Seeing the massive change in her I asked her to turn to face her husband, as she turned and look straight at him, in an instant he broke down. I rushed across the room just to check his tears were relief, they were!
I had a good feeling her change was going to stay by the way she responded to the session however I waited to see them a week later.
They walked in to my session all smiles and upbeat, always a good sign in my world.
She told me that after the session she had experienced minor panic attacks. What was interesting is her attacks were because she was so used to being depressed, when she couldn’t get depressed she felt lost, amazing! Of course this desire to become depressed was short lived and she embraced the new calmer her and so did her husband.
What he did was grab the opportunity to give her what she needed, through his strength he met his own core needs and hers. She explained how through the changes we had put in place he was becoming far more attractive to her and he felt in a position of power in a caring loving way.
The attraction was returning and the trust had been rebuilt.
We all have patterns of behaviour, these are our habitual patterns of behaviour that come up automatically to cope with our lives.
These patterns are learnt and are our core mechanism to keep us safe. However if they are out of date they could be destroying your life without you knowing.
If you are having problems could destructive patterns be the root cause?
You see the patterns you have learnt growing up may not be supporting your growth in your life or work,or relationships. The reality of this will be reflected in your life today. If you feel stuck in your life, maybe in a job or in an unhappy relationship you might be running patterns to keep you here or fuel the problem.
The first pattern to look for is your core driver: It might be to create security, it might be to feel important, it might be to feel love.
Your core driver will create behaviours that reflects your core need. For example as a child a boy might use significance to get what he needs, he might use it to get love from his mother. So he may have become a great student, or be funny to please her, or become naughty because at least it gets her attention.
So as an adult he may run the same pattern, by thinking that if he does an amazing job at work his wife should see him as wonderful just like mum did. However he becomes confused when he doesn’t get the love he expects back.
In fact he feels her pulling away. Just doing a good job at work does not meet her emotional needs and so she becomes distant, or gets upset. In response he becomes angry at her lack of appreciation at how hard he works.
His behaviours to her feel selfish and immature and needy.
If he discovered how significant he could become by understanding what she really needs then they would both be successful through his behaviour and he wold feel happy and successful again and more masculine.
A woman could have a desire for certainty, what she learns without knowing is that she can get love through depression. Every time she is feeling well everyone gets on with their lives and she feels lost and alone. When she becomes depressed everyone pays her attention and loves her.
Even though she hates becoming depressed she is certain she can do it and so becomes stuck because it actually meets her core needs, but in destructive ways for her and those she loved.
If she discovers there are ways she can be certain of love through giving she will open up a free and lighter world.
Do these behaviours create love, growth and a rich life, or do they cause unhappiness, resentment and a lack of respect?
We all have positive intentions to meet our needs when we act, it just maybe that the behaviours are out of date and are likely to hurt those you say you love.
Including yourself
These are just a fraction of the messages that come into my sessions each week, and I just wonder if you can explain how these behaviours are possible, is it temporary madness? Or is there more to it, what do you think?
The answer is simple these behaviours are learnt from the persons past and are behaviours for the most, based on fear and control. These people are trying to meet their needs, but in ways that will only hurt them.
Typical causes are past heightened emotional experiences and poor role models growing up.
Every person has a different driver and different fear, but these behaviours can be devastating for those people and those that love them.
If you are experiencing these problems then please feel free to get in touch.
Who do you think taught you to have a relationship? When you consider this, where do your thoughts take you? Was it your parents, the schools, your friends, did you learn what you know through trial and error, what is the answer for you?
When you think back to who taught you, do you think they were really qualified to help you? Did they have a relationship that you would like? Did they know how to help you have a relationship that would be successful?
If your relationship is struggling it may not be yours or your partners fault, it maybe that the model of what equals a successful relationship, that was given to you both as children, may have been the wrong one and you didn’t know.
Of course if this has happened to you, then you may not be aware of this because, whatever you grew up with was normal to you.
So what you went through growing up and the model that was presented to you may not be normal to your partner.
So when the differing “normals” clash problems start to happen and fighting can start.
This list is potentially massive, but you get the idea.
BUT what is important is where do these thoughts take you. It’s likely that you can see your partners parents in his, or her behaviours. BUT can you see your own if not, ask them see what they say.
A relationship is a life decision, and because you only get one life getting it right is critical, especially if you have children. After all if you have learnt the wrong pattern as parents, you are likely to pass it on to them is this what you really want?
The benefits are massive: If you take the time to unlearn what doesn’t work and replace it with what will.
Not only will your relationship last, but the passion will naturally grow again.
Feeling out of control of your life is a terribly scary place to be. People can feel out of control in so many ways helping them to feel depressed, powerless, worthless they could feel unloved, depressed, anxious.
These feelings all can lead someone to feel unable to make decisions that make sence so they live in a place that helps them to feel stuck.
People can start to feel that whatever they choose they will feel unhappy and so feelings of hopelessness start to take over.
This can happen at work, in relationships, with family in fact in almost any life condition that is import to the person.
How can a person have confidence in their ability to make a decision, if they have a history of bad decisions. Or maybe they think they have done everything right, yet the result has always felt bad for them.
What I’m going to share today is critical to understand if you want to make lasting changes in your relationship. I have not spoken about this before on this blog so it’s important to understand.
Very few couples do this automatically and this is one of the major factors to why there are so many single parents, broken families, affairs, separations and divorces.
By understanding and helping couples understand what is important to know in their relationship is one of the key factors to the success in all my relationship clinics.
If you have been following my posts you will have learnt that couples “presenting problems” such as arguments, loss of passion, lack of trust, etc, are not the real problems in a couples relationship. Although with no other logical knowledge this will be their incorrect assumption. [Read more...]
Too many people ignore the alarms in their relationship and within themselves and end up heading for the rocks. With the right focus this can be avoided but whatever you do, doing nothing is not a good choice and i’ll explain why…
Your mind and body is constantly working to ensure your survival. The problem is most people see the alarm as the problems and try to shut them down.
This is why individuals and couples find themselves in so much trouble.
For example: Arguments: The arguments are the signal (alarm) that something has to change, we can work together to stop the arguments, but the real issue that created the alarm will still be there.
This is why couples end up going round in circles.
Whatever your presenting problem, or alarm you can be 99% sure that that is not the real problem.
Example: I remember being told about advice a counsellor gave to one of my clients. The husband had complained about his wife dramatically over reacting and arguing with him. So the diagnosis was she had anger management issues, his wife believed the diagnosis and became depressed because she had to suppress her true feelings. [Read more...]
A young lady came to me this week stuck in her past, she had become depressed because she couldn’t get over how she had been treated by her ex. He had left her for another woman and with no money. Her ex was still with the same woman 2.5 years later and was living a wonderful life and now planning a family.
Meanwhile she was stuck depressed and full of resentment for how he treated her, she wanted to forget him, but felt that she couldn’t.
She was so traumatised by what had happened she had stayed stuck for 2.5 years. Fed up of life always feeling so bad she called me. [Read more...]
The answer is because we are not aware we have created them, and those that are affected end up with an illusion of truth that only creates misery or poor quality lives, lives that have no purpose or fulfillment… This is important to know because it could be happening to you, or someone you love…
Have you ever felt stuck in your life? No matter what you do, did you end up feeling bad, or you feel that something is wrong, but you don’t know how to change it, is this happening to you?
Have you ever thought that the reason you are stuck is because you get some thing good from being in this stuck place. Maybe you have a partner friend or family member who is also stuck.
Breaking the patterns that don’t work for YOU & YOUR RELATIONSHIP: Many couples across the world are all running patterns that are creating their futures without them knowing. Most people are unaware of these patterns and live their lives which, to them feel normal. The way they think, behave, speak everything is derived from learnt patterns.
These patterns take hold when people are growing and learning at the fastest rate. These changes happen in emotionally charged events and when we are growing up. You have heard the expressing children are like sponges.
Children don’t just take in information they take in everything, and so whatever the world is presenting to them, with no other bench mark to hand, this for them will be their normality.
It is very likely that the children will model their parents behaviours as the way to run their relationships in the future. Boys linking to in the fathers and girls to their mothers. With more and more absent fathers the male role model for children is fast becoming a strong woman designed to cope on her own. [Read more...]
Depression is affecting my relationship: Which came first the chicken or the egg. Relationships problems can cause depression, or relationship problems can be a result of depression.
Having a depression in a relationship can put significant strain on any couple.
So getting help to deal with it is critical: There are many forms of help, but my favorite is to work with the individual and help them understand what they are doing to make depression a possibility.
Plus I help them understand if they are caught in a cycle where they are choosing depression without knowing. This can happen because they are getting something they believe they are missing from their lives, E.G. Attention: Depression can in some cases help them to get significance in the form of sympathy, caring and love which they don’t get when they are well.
Sounds like a strange question I know, but the reality is many people suffering from depression are creating behaviours that if those that were not depressed did every day, they would become depressed too.
For example: If anyone practiced all three of these activities they too would become depressed.
If anyone did that for week-after-week they would become depressed too.
Of course depression and the causes can be very complicated, because there are many reason why life might not be the way it should be for the individual suffering. Plus we are chemical beings and so our chemical make up also comes into play.
The bottom line is the more you can do to help yourself through understanding how you work and how the meanings you are giving to your life is creating how you feel. The better armed you are to put depression in reverse.
If you would like more information on how I can help please contact me NOW!.
I have many clients come to me with what seems like very confusing problems. They seem to have it all, yet they also seem hell bent on destroying their lives and marriages, but they tell me they no longer want to life to be this way, but still carry on.
To them what they are doing seems normal, but to the outside world everyone can see the pain they are causing themselves and those they say they love.
Maybe you or your partner are experiencing this very thing.
There is of course many reasons why this can happen, but the over riding reason is because the individual does not feel safe and is running a pattern that they have learnt that will give them security again.
This is why victims of abuse struggle so much in later years. Every time they feel unsafe they run the patterns that were designed to cope with a moment in time.
The problem is that very often the pattern they run is out dated.
What’s critical to know is what you or your partner is attempting to get to. It could be love or security.
But they could be trying to get to it through anger, depression, running away, or a contradiction of other core values such as respect or honesty.
All these are responses to a fear that feels very real to them.
A decision about what patterns we use to live our lives usually happen naturally, but when situations are perceived as threatening in some way, it’s this high level of emotion that creates a need to feel safe again fast.
A pattern will be created at this point to cope and be brought into play whenever life creates a situation that feels similar.
In reality what this means is an adult can behave like a child when they don’t feel safe as they run an old pattern to get back to safety or love.
The problem is this old outdated pattern will not work no matter how many times they run the pattern. But because they were not consciously aware they created this pattern, they feel that what they are doing is normal so they relentlessly run the pattern over and over again, slowly destroying everything including themselves.
They can become depressed, angry, guilty, blame others, run away, overly control and behave in many more destructive ways..
Is this happening to you, do others keep telling you to stop what you are doing, but to you it feels normal?
Is your partner saying they want your relationship to work, and yet their behaviours suggest the reverse. Now you find yourself on red alert, constantly ready for trouble.
If this is happening to you, your natural response will be to mistrust your partners intentions, and react as if they are trying to hurt you on purpose.
As difficult as this may sound your partner maybe be stuck and in need of your help. Helping someone who seems to be choosing to hurt you, goes against everything you have been taught.
The rules for creating successful relationships are not the same as how we deal with people in the rest of our lives.
For example if someone does something wrong we punish them so they won’t do it again and that is the pattern we have all been taught that gets results… but does it?
In relationships punishment never works. That’s because you are making an assumption that you know what your partner is thinking and you understand why they are behaving in a way that hurts you.
Very often people that are down, depressed, or fearful have no idea why they are reacting or behaving the way they are. So if they don’t know what’s going on with them then you have no chance of understanding them either, so making them wrong or judging them is totally unfair and will get you nowhere.
Just because you can’t see a broken limb or an open wound it does not mean they are not suffering and are as confused as you are with them. So when they are placed under pressure either real or created by themselves, they will react or complain seemingly unreasonably.
Just like the person with a broken limb would complain.
It is very likely that if two people are reacting negatively to each other and have been for sometime then the chance is they are both to a greater or lesser degree in the same distorted place both stuck on red alert looking for problems.
Punishment never works so understand that your partner is complaining, because they are in pain. Rather than punishing them and making things worse, help them with the love you say you have for them.
As StephenHedger.com gets bigger it’s sometimes a challenge to find exactly what you are looking for. So for those that have just joined and for those who have been following my post for a while please go below for a snap shot of what is freely available.
The states you are in from moment-to-moment is what crafts your life and your destiny. Your states create how you experience the world and how others experience you. So understanding your states and how to control them is critical to everyone’s life.
Every decision and behaviour is created from the state you are in at any given moment in time. So if you are in a fear state, or angry state then you would make very different decisions than if you were in a happy or fun state.
You may have discovered that being tough or angry gets people around you to do things and you like that. Or maybe you live in a depressed state because you get more love or sympathy.
Maybe you are in a negative state where you moan about the world, because this is your best way of connecting with others who also like to moan and so what you get back is a connection.
The question is this…
Many people get stuck in certain states because by creating that state in a critical moment in their past they got something they valued which saved them from being hurt.
Maybe they felt more secure, or more loved, or more significant. Whatever their reason for getting stuck in a particular state can cause long-term problems because that person a can fear without knowing going into other states, through fear of being hurt in some way.
Most people have no idea that they are stuck, but if you were to look back at your life what consistent comments did you get from others and how do you feel inside, because there will be clues.
The biggest problem is when someone is stuck in this state, assumes that the roll of this state is to create a balance in their lives, but this is a poor illusion because this state will only be able to LIMIT them and to limit means to block other possibilities.
The result is a tired and unhappy person, because what they value most can never be achieved and so they fight to craft the world around them to fit how their life should be, but they do it from a place of fear, and no decision from that place will give them the lives they truly want.
