SHMILY has been a part of our marriage from as far back as I can remember. Early on my wife and I read a short article from a couple who regularly enjoyed showing each other acts of love. Each kind gesture was accompanied by a five-letter acronym “SHMILY.” The acronym stood for “See How Much [...]
When I was going to college over 25 years ago, I heard a wonderful idea on how to strengthen a marital relationship. The activity is called “Loving Things.” The concept is simple—find out how your spouse wants to be shown love and then do it. It is normal to show love the way we want [...]
When couples come to me wanting help for their relationship I often offer them this simple analogy: a relationship is like a plant. It is dynamic, living and growing and there are two basic principles that, if followed, will make it flourish. First there must be the absence of negative. For the plant it means [...]
My wife and I refer to actions that add or detract from the quality of our relationship as deposits into or withdrawals out of our relationship account. We want to regularly make deposits and make as few withdrawals as possible. We want to keep the balance very high to keep our happiness in our marriage [...]
Adolescent clients often have a hard time making good decisions, so I developed a little something that has helped me help them. I call it my “$100.00 Decisions” exercise. I’ll walk you through how I present it to a young man. I ask him to picture someone he knows who is two or three years [...]
Sinister and Dexter? It is actually a name that I have given a cognitive exercise that I have found very useful in my clinical practice. It helps my client to be able to better dispute faulty beliefs. The exercise starts by drawing a line from the top of a page to the bottom. At the [...]
Some brief therapy techniques have helped my practice to become much more efficient. The one I use the most is the “Miracle” list that I create with my clients in the first or second session. This is how I introduce the concept: “I’d like you to envision a miracle. And the miracle is that suddenly [...]
The views expressed here are solely those of the blog authors; they are not necessarily the views of the American Counseling Association.