Help Advice Support & Guidance
You know the situation, your partner has assumed you have done something to hurt them. You try to explain that they are wrong and they have misunderstood you, but they won’t listen. Frustrated you end up losing your temper and now the problem is escalating out of control.
What started off as a simple disagreement is now a power struggle where hurt, resentment, disbelief and a loss of love starts to grow.
Both people end up feeling misunderstood and unloved. [Read more...]
One of my clients asked me, why have I decided to work with couples with marriage problems and why specifically have I decided to work with couples in extreme marital crisis?
This for me was an easy question, because…
I am passionate about relationships and family. I am especially passionate about helping lost couples find their way back to each others hearts. Also when I know there are other little hearts involved I feel even more responsibility to guide them all to safety.
If one person thinks the marriage is over and the other disagrees, what do you do? This couple from Manchester, Brian and Christine share their personal story of trauma and their courage to discover their truth for their son…
My wife told me out of the blue that she loved me but wasn’t in love with me anymore. This came as a complete shock to me. I had known that things weren’t great between us but had just assumed it was one of those patches that every marriage goes through. Clearly my wife felt very differently.
As we have a young child we agreed that we would go and see a couples counsellor – a decision that was pretty disastrous. That counsellor took a difficult and upsetting situation and turned it into something much worse. The sessions were bleak, depressing and frankly fairly poisonous – they made us both feel awful about ourselves and our relationship and made us believe that there was little hope for us to turn things round.
After several sessions with that counsellor things kind of fell to pieces and I was pretty convinced that we were heading for divorce. [Read more...]
She told him the marriage was over, she had lost all feelings for him. He knew there were problems, but was totally shocked at her sudden desire to want to end the marriage.
They had a child together and torn with what to do, they sought help. She was convinced the marriage was over, but driven by guilt she felt she owed it to her son to try one last time. Her efforts however seemed half hearted as she shifted between, resigned, cold and sad almost at the same time.
He came to me on his own initially, he wanted the very best service I could offer to help them. He didn’t believe the marriage was over and he told me he would throw all he could at saving his family.
I explained to him that I do run intensive programs for Marriages in Crisis [Read more...]
Over the next few weeks I will be sharing important information that has helped many marriages come back from the edge of divorce. So please email your friends share this page and next week we will get started.
Why is this information important?
There is no formal education open to the public on how to build successful relationships. This has proved to be devastating for couples who marry expecting their love to last.
They don’t know how their love was created. So when the inevitable problems arise they don’t know how to grow closer through their problems so they pull love away to protect themselves. It’s not long before the couple have lost the focus that created their passion and they are now focused on what’s wrong and their problems.
This is disaster for any relationship. [Read more...]
Yes men have needs too and if she can learn to understand what he needs he will feel great about himself and attach that great feeling to her. So below is an outline of what he wants/needs. Of course every man is different and so try out some of the suggestions below and see what reaction you get.
He wants to know he can please her. This is a primary driver in most men and is a significant source of pain if he feels can’t. If she’s not happy he will be in pain.
He wants her to give him feedback. If you don’t tell a man when he’s done well he will assume his actions haven’t worked and he will never do it again. [Read more...]
Reassuring her everything will be okay
Couples who judge each other, or belittle their partners’ emotions will usually find resentment in their relationship and this can be very damaging.
One of the golden keys to a successful marriage is to take away judgment of your partners’ behavior(s).
If he or she feels something, that something is very real to them and even if it makes no sense to you, showing you care about them is critical. [Read more...]
I just don't feel that you care about me?
Is it you?
If anyone in a relationship / marriage feels that someone or something is more important to their partner than they are – there will be trouble.
What’s important to understand it’s doesn’t have to be the attractive female in the office who is just “a friend” or the man down the gym “giving her advice” that can cause problems for relationships. [Read more...]
Many relationships are dying long before the couple realise there is a real problem.
Some people will bury their heads in the sand and do nothing hoping that any problems they have will just go away and some will start a search.
So what is the danger sign that you need to look out for? What is the one thing that’s guaranteed to accelerate your problems?
Many people are watching their partners every move, or watching what their partner says and does. They start to piece together all the things that are wrong in their relationship and they find more and more things that could equal their partners don’t love them or care enough.
So as these people start their search what should they be looking out for? [Read more...]
Couples with problems all suffer from the same basic challenge. You see if a marriage is to survive then the focus of the individuals has to change.
Take a moment and think about the type of relationship that equals the one that you really want, the one that will fill you up, the one that will help you to feel all those emotions you long for.
Now ask yourself another question, who do I have to be to attract that relationship into my life?
Many people are disappointed with the way their partner behaves. [Read more...]
What is a man designed to do? He is designed to be physically strong make firm decisions, breakthrough challenges and take action to solve or fix problems.
When he is in this space he feels great about himself and ironically this is what many women want their men to be like.
You see many women are surprised in my couples session when we discuss how our needs are met.
Women in relationship crisis will have needs missing. They feel the trust has gone and they usually feel less certain about their future. [Read more...]
As soon as the relationship becomes all about “ME” the relationship is over. As soon as the person is pointing the finger at their partner blaming them for all the problems because of what they are not getting, it’s all over. You may still be together in a house, but you are migrating towards problems.
You see a relationship is about ‘giving’ not ‘taking’ when a couple consistently gives to each other in the way they need the relationship will grow. If they constantly take naturally the relationship will become empty and so dies. [Read more...]
The most natural thing to do when life seems to be going wrong is to feel consumed by all your problems. You could talk to others about your problems, play them over and over in your mind. It could be that when life goes wrong you have learnt that worry is what you do, maybe mum was a worrier, or dad didn’t trust people.
Whatever you do when things go wrong is learnt, but there is an outcome that worry creates as the natural laws of life come into play.
People that are conditioned to be negative and sceptical certainly have their place. For example [Read more...]
Are you starting to wake up and you realise that the life you have is not the life you thought you were going to get. Did you think your life was going to be different?
Maybe the problem is your money, your job, maybe it’s your relationship. Whatever the problem you now face if you want to fix it then you have to understand why you are in pain.
Pain in any area of life is caused when how you think it should be, does not match your perception of how it actually is. [Read more...]
For twenty years they lived together, she never felt loved by him, but he loved her with all his heart. He showed his love in so many ways, but she never really felt it.
He gave her everything he could think of, but he knew in his heart whatever he did was never really enough. Even though he knew she was not truly happy inside he could never let her go, because he loved her so much. He hoped she would see what a great man he was and the unspoken problems would go away. [Read more...]
When couples have experienced problems for a long time they get into patterns of thought and patterns of behaviour within their relationship which to them feels normal.
These patterns can be destructive without the person knowing and so what to them is keeping them safe may actually be destroying their relationship.
My job is to understand and break their patterns from destructive to growth orientated.
Pattern interrupts are the core of what works in all therapies. However their method of how to interrupt a persons habitual thought process/patterns is varied. Some methods take years some take months some take weeks some happen in one session.
How long a person or couple wants to take to make changes is up to them. Some people want the process to take time, some people like months/years of therapy.
What I wanted and has become my life mission was to find a way to help couples quickly, couples in crisis don’t have much time because their relationship is already on the edge of divorce/break-up.
Award Winning Master family therapists and the top coaches in the world have discovered that significant changes does not have to takes years or months it can actually happen in just a few sessions, sometimes it can happen in just one session.
What they discovered is changing the face of how we help individuals and couples to live happier and more fulfilled lives. They changed how I worked and 80% of couples in my practice make significant changes very quickly.
Of course not all couples fixed their relationships (20% on average don’t get fixed), but the reason were simple, when an individual has no desire to change and their partner is the one that has to change for them to feel ok then the couple will continue to struggle. Also some people either have totally different life goals, or they really just are incompatible. So in some cases separation is the right move.
The core goal is not to fix the relationship at any cost. Happiness and fulfilment has to be the ultimate result, together or apart.
Firstly the person has to want to make changes. You cannot force a person to want to change.
People are usually focused to make changes when the threshold of pain becomes too much and they feel they have no choice.
Many couples in crisis give up with each other replacing love with resentment and a lack of respect.
When they come for sessions with me I help them understand there is more they can do to rebuild their relationship than they have been aware of. I help them understand the differences between the sexes the importance of core needs and values. How to grow together and work as a team when problems strike their relationship.
This helps the couple to understand that maybe there is hope because this a new approach that will actually meets their core needs and help them to be successful.
The next step is to interrupt the patterns that have destroyed their relationship and replaced those patterns with something far more appealing that meets their needs at the deepest levels.
For example: A man may be driven by significance. When they argue he feels he is significant when he is always right, this works for him in his career. His intent and desire is to feel important and strong for her. I help him see that trying to win arguments actually makes him insignificant in her eyes because she feels bullied and controlled not loved.
If he was to look after her in the way she really needed then she would stop at nothing to help him feel strong and important as the real man in her life.
Simple changes massive results for them both…
One of the ways to become an amazing partner for her is to understand your partner from her perspective. Too many men only see their world from their own perspective and when he does this she knows he doesn’t understand her.
When pain strikes many women initially fight and battle with their partner. He sees this battle with her as negative because the fight is proof of something bad for him. [Read more...]
I love my partner, but it’s just not working anymore! Is this you? If you and your partner love each other, but are just not getting on there is good news for you.
With the right focus and understanding a very fast shift can put you both back on track. You see most couples come for help far too late and so it just takes longer to build up the trust, respect and rebuild that intimate connection again.
So if they leave it too long they will feel so numb that leaving the relationship now feels far less painful and so an attractive option so please don’t ignore problems and never assume they have gone away. Many men have sat in my sessions very upset to have been asked for a divorce when they never knew there was a problem.
The reality was they thought the problems had gone away months or years before, but within her the problems were getting bigger, but she had stopped communicating because she saw no point.
So if you are still in love with each other, but are struggling NOW is the time to deal with this. These are the key signs to look out for… [Read more...]
If you and your partner are struggling to get answers to your relationship questions and you are looking for some free help online then this may help you.
Every day I am helping couples from all walks of life with all kinds of problems. From loss of passion to obsessive compulsive behaviours, from poor communication skills to loss of confidence.
This information is FREE and is designed so you can start to understand where to put your energy. When couples hit problems they are not sure what to do, fear takes over and they make matters worse. [Read more...]
The reason so many couples struggle is because they really don’t understand each other. If this goes on for long enough what they start to feel is fear/emotional pain, they feel alone and unsupported. The worst place to feel lonely is in a relationship.
Fear then becomes the filter of experience for that person. So when their partner communicates what they hear is very different from their partners’ original intention. In essence they are searching for problems as their partner communicates to them. Anyone can at this point find problems with the most innocent of comments. [Read more...]
STEPHEN HEDGER:
Marriage Adviser & Divorce Prevention Specialist
10 Harley Street London W1G 9PF
