While we are happy this time of the year is just around the corner, we may also feel overwhelmed by everything we want to get done TO PERFECTION before our family gets here, or before we go and visit them. We may create unrealistic expectations for ourselves and others. We may idealize what will happen. In our minds everything will be just the way we want it to be: everybody will get along with everybody else; each one will be happy to be together and will be at their best. Wonderful memories will be created that will be cherished for many years to come.

Holidays can actually be very difficult and stressful times for a lot of us, if we don’t adequately prepare for them. And this means having REALISTIC expectations and letting go of the fantasized views of them that we create in our minds. These fantasized views are exactly fantasies, not reality. They are fed by romantic pictures we see on television or in magazines, where everybody is happy and everything looks wonderful and super easy to do. But, when we hold on to these fantasized views, often we get disappointed and frustrated, because OUR reality very seldom, if ever, matches those views. We feel angry at whomever we decide was the cause of our disappointment. We don’t understand what happened and why. We grow inpatient and intolerant with the people who don’t follow our master plan.

Is there a solution to all this?

Make a list of what you need to do and keep it simple. Stick to what you know; don’t try new experiments. Review your list of guests and make sure they are suited to one another. Make food preparation easy: do not make an elaborate menu that requires hours and hours, maybe even days of work. In the end, the food may be delicious, but you will be too exhausted to even enjoy it!

Above all, PLAN. Starting a week ahead, write lists of what needs to be done. Organize the list in order of priorities. Some things can be done ahead of time. Others may need to be done at the last minute. Delegate rather than trying to do everything yourself. People typically like to be included and contribute to the celebration. Each person has one or more areas where they excel. Make use of these talents and resources.

Don’t forget to regularly check with yourself how you are holding up: are you tired? How is your level of energy? Are you more impatient and irritable than usual? Are you sleeping well? Do you feel rested when you wake up in the morning? Are you taking time for yourself?

If you keep track of your feelings and listen to what your body is telling you, you can enjoy this wonderful time of celebrations with family and friends.

H A P P Y  H O L I D A Y S!

What happens to couples when they are forced by external circumstances to live together? How does this situation affect each partner and their children, if couples have children? I suggest that, rather than fighting their situation – which does not solve the problem anyway – couples should face what is happening to them, understand how they got to this point and explore ways of possibly reconnecting with one another, or let go of their relationship in a healthy way.

Areas of common ground in their distressed relationship can become the starting point of alliance. One such common ground is their children, if they have any. Usually, both partners want to be good parents, no matter how bad their relationship with one another is. Other areas can be extended families, friends, assets and goals couples may have been working on together and other areas that were and still are meaningful to both of them.

Focusing on children can bring out patience, acceptance and flexibility, even in distressed couples. Because they have no choice, partners need to address parenting issues now, rather than when they are apart. And, when they are still living together, there seems to be less room for parental alienation, as it is in both their interests to make sure children are adjusting well. Children, on their part, may have the opportunity to go to either parent with any question they might have or for support. Though there may still be attempts by each partner to be” the better parent” of the two, there may also be a stronger need for closer collaboration and support.

When in couple counseling, couples often become more conscious of the repercussions of their decisions on children. Here the focus is on teaching couples how to become more aware of their children’s reactions to the current family situation. This awareness helps them reach decisions that are more fair and sensitive to the feelings and needs of all involved. This process, though challenging and difficult, facilitates the development of empathy and compassion. Partners can appreciate each other’s intent to do their best in order to protect their children from emotional harm.

Couples learn that, even at this stage in a relationship, they model to their children how to deal with life challenges and responsibilities, as ending relationships is part of life. Invested in this role, parents are helped to restrain from acting inappropriately with one another, particularly in front of their kids. Also, time together may help them find healthy ways of dealing with their relationship, rather than making precipitous decisions based on the emotions of the moment.

The most important gift to couples is that this situation allows time for reflecting and thinking about how they got to this point. If they are willing to do the necessary work, couples may begin to tease out what emotions belong to the relationship and what is triggered by events and situations outside of it. They can ally and collaborate in dealing with the external challenges that affect both of them, rather than allowing these external challenges become a wedge in the relationship.

Helping couples understand the impact of external stressors on their relationship can help shift the focus from each other to the reasons why they feel the way they do about themselves, each other, and their external environment.

In relationship counseling with couples who experience high conflict as consequence of the current economic recession, the goal often is narrower and more focused than in marital counseling. Teaching constructive communication skills and effective ways of problem solving can be far more beneficial than undertaking the enormous task of “fixing” the relationship.

It is difficult to know what will happen once partners decide to work together, even at this late stage of disconnection, but a better understanding of how partners got to this place with one another could open up options on how each couple wants to proceed. Even if couples decide that they no longer want to be together and they are clear about their decision, the process of disengagement from each other can be facilitated by increased understanding, better communication and deeper awareness of issues and dynamics. These tools will serve them well in the future, with each other and with other people.

Having time to think and reflect, rather than acting precipitously and reactively, can make the difference between a mature and healthy way for partners in intimate relationships to go their separate ways and a break up without closure.

Optimally, this time to reflect can create a place for couples to examine their emotions for each other and even be able to make a paradigm shift between seeing each other as enemies to finding areas of collaboration and re-connection.

The key here to communicate openly and harmoniously.

For most couples, owning their home has historically been a point of pride and an opportunity to live the American dream of upward mobility and independence. It is also their main investment. Add to this picture the use of “creative” mortgages that encouraged people to buy the biggest house they could afford with almost no money down, with the expectation of later rewards, when their home increased in value, and you have a perfect storm.

And a perfect storm was exactly what hit many couples who, when the real estate market collapsed, felt trapped in their own homes. A lot of couples found themselves upside down in their mortgages and unable to make their monthly payments. After months and months of surviving under very strenuous conditions, a lot of couples depleted their economic resources. In many cases one or both partners lost their jobs or had to take a pay cut. As men felt the impact of this economic catastrophe, they displaced their stress onto their primary relationships. Women, whose level of stress is directly influenced by what happens in their relationships, saw their stress level rise as well. Conflicts between partners increased, while at the same time the possibility of physically separating became less and less of an option for most couples. Living together was at times the only alternative open to them, at least until it was hoped things would get better.

It must be extremely difficult to live together when at least one spouse wants out and begin processing the loss of the relationship when the other partner is still around. The appearance of normality may make the hurt deeper and more painful. While hurt may build up in one partner, resentment may build up in the other, as she or he feels trapped, watched, controlled and often criticized by the other.

If couples do not do anything to improve their situation, they will continue to chip away at the foundations of their relationship until nothing will be left, in the process building thicker walls between them and preventing any healthy communication from taking place.

As a psychotherapist, I see both problems and potential benefits stemming from couples living together because their economic circumstances do not allow them to move apart. I suggest that these strenuous conditions may have not only negative effects, which are clear to see but also, potentially, positive ones. This is so because, while some couples may emotionally disconnect from one another in order to make their living arrangements more tolerable, others may decide to seek marriage counseling, or work on their relationship in other ways. Even for those who may feel past repairing the damage in their relationship, the need to learn to deal with one another is still an important part of ending their relationship.

When we are overwhelmed, preoccupied, scared or angry, we cannot access any feeling of love. The powerful emotions triggered by external stressors, in fact, prevent us from feeling anything else. Couples, therefore, often convince themselves that there is no love left for one another, and thus see their relationships as being over.

In the next post we will discuss how to become more aware of ALL our feelings, so we can make better decisions about how to act.

In a 2005 paper on “The Effects of Economic Pressure on Marital Conflict in Romania” (Journal of Family Psychology, 2005, Vol. 19. No 2, 246-251), for instance, M. Robila and A. Krishnakumar studied this correlation in post-communist Romania. Here the political changes in the process of transition from communism to capitalism created severe economic difficulties for families. Many Romanian couples were not adequately prepared for such transition that brought with it severe challenges and new problems, which they did not know how to handle.

Robila and Krishnakumar’s conclusions are that high levels of marital conflict presented aspects similar to those of their counterparts in the U.S. and other parts of the world, when exposed to comparable economic stressors.

Couples throughout the world, when exposed to economic distress, show higher incidences of interpersonal conflict, depression, domestic violence and substance abuse.

Isolation is an important condition that aggravates stress in couples. When they experience economic difficulties, most couples tend to isolate from extended families and friends, because there is shame in being in their position. A tendency to cover up what is really going on eliminates opportunities for sharing one’s feelings and achieving better ways of managing them without letting them become overwhelming. When couples don’t have a support system outside of their relationship, they only have each other to rely on for support and comfort. What they need, however, may not be available to one another, because of lack of empathy for each other’s feelings and needs.

Bad economic times are frequently reflected in falling divorce rates, as indicated in studies about the great depression and economic hard times in other areas of the world. This is mainly due to the lack of financial opportunities for couples, who cannot afford to split up. Gregory Rodriguez, in an article titled “Divorce and Hard Times” (the Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2009), predicts an increased rate of divorces as soon as this recession will be over.

Is what’s happening in the US today similar to what happened to couples during the Great Depression and what happened to Romanian couples as their country transitioned from communism to capitalism?

In the following posts we will discuss some unique challenges US couples face today ad explore way of providing help and open new options to them.

Whenever we are exposed to stress – either acute, or chronic, or both – it becomes harder to maintain inner emotional balance and separate what goes on around us from what happens within us.

The closer the relationship, unfortunately, the worse the negative effects because we tend to open up and reveal our inner thoughts and feelings in situations where we feel safewithout being afraid of reprisals. This is in most cases with our mates. Thus, they run the risk of becoming the punching bags that allow us to let steam out. We TRULY believe we are angry at them, without realizing, in most cases, that we are displacing our feelings from one situation to another.

In intimate relationships, under normal conditions, each partner is the caregiver and the care receiver in turn, according to what’s needed. Very seldom both partners are in the same emotional space, so when one is down, the other can be available for support, encouragement, empathy, soothing and this makes all the difference. However, when the stress affects both, like in any of the situations described above, each person feels the need to reach out to each other at the same time, but neither is available to provide what’s needed. So the system that works under ordinary circumstances ceases to provide the help needed under extraordinary ones.

What is there to do in such cases?

Couples need to:

• Remind themselves and each other that the problems they are facing are not between them. Both of them are affected by the problems, so if they ally and remind each other they are a team, they will build more strength and will be able to cope with the problems in a more effective way.
• Provide positive feedback and affirmation to each other for all the positive and strong elements in their relationship.
• Strategize on how to cope, both jointly and separately, with the external stressors in their lives, shifting focus from the two of them to the problems.
• Make a commitment to regularly take time out together to reconnect, relax, have fun and play and not talk about the problems that are causing stress.
• Provide consistent feedback to each other about how each is handling the stressful situation.

This is how it works:

•Select a room in the house that is quiet and where you won’t have any interruptions. Turn your phone off and forget about it for five minutes or so. Tell your partner, children, pets and anyone else who may be in the house not to disturb you until you come out of the room again.
•Find a comfortable chair to sit on.
•Lower the lights but make sure that the room is not totally dark.
•Close your eyes.
•Now, think about the most salient part of your day: was it successful? Did you accomplish everything you had set up to do? Why did you choose that particular moment of the day, instead of any other?
•Observe your feelings as you think about that particular moment: are you anxious, tense, happy, relaxed, upset, or anything else?
•Don’t try to talk yourself into changing your feelings, reassure yourself if you feel insecure, or chastise yourself if you made a mistake. Just observe with no judgment.
•If the moment was a successful one, congratulate yourself.
•If the moment was not successful, think if there anything you can do right now to settle whatever wasn’t settled during the day, like writing yourself a note for something you can do tomorrow.
•Now, focus on letting go. Observe, with your eyes closed, how whatever it is that you were thinking about is moving, slowly, further and further away from you, until it disappears entirely.
•Tell yourself it is gone now and commit to not revisiting until tomorrow.
•Return to the present moment and the room you are in.
•Open your eyes and observe what’s around you.
•Shift in your mind from what you were thinking earlier to where you are right now.

You can now go back to your family or to doing whatever it is that you want to do before going to bed. You will find that you are better able to relax and keep good boundaries between where you were earlier in the day and where you are now.

Try to practice this every night, ideally at about the same time and following the same routine.

Good night!

The number one thing that can help you cope with stress is creating a strong support network around you. Studies over and over indicate that, when we feel supported, comforted, reassured and empathized with by people we love and respect, our abilities to handle stress greatly improve. Likewise, when we are alone, isolated and socially and emotionally disconnected, our strengths decrease considerably, and we are more vulnerable to external and internal stressors.

Do you have a strong support network? Remember that emotions always look much less scary and overwhelming when we have someone who can hold our hand, figuratively, and tell us that everything is going to be ok. Our fears, in particular, can be managed much better in these situations. So, think about how you can strengthen your support system – by being available to people who need you; by reconnecting with people with whom you have not been keeping in touch; by making an effort to reach out through your work, or your place of worship, or through your community or school.

One element that considerably increases your ability to deal with stress is knowledge. The more you know and understand about a situation that could cause stress, the more prepared you will be to deal with it. For instance, one situation that creates a lot of stress for most of us is our health. If we have medical problems, or if we need medical treatment or surgery, the more information we gather on what our condition is and the various treatments, the less stressed we are going to feel. So, get on the Internet and find information. Take the time to talk to your doctors and go to medical appointments with a list already prepared of all the things you want to ask. Go for a second or even a third opinion if necessary, and make sure that you know enough to feel comfortable with your level of knowledge and understanding. Being informed will help you better manage your anxiety. Also, make sure you bring a loved one with you.

Another element that helps you better manage stress is control. The more you feel you have a handle on what’s going on with you and what you need to do, the less likely you will be blindsided by something you didn’t see coming and thus didn’t have time to properly prepare for it.

So, write daily lists of what you need to do, and keep them in a place where, periodically, you can look at them. Consult them throughout the day, and check them off as you get them done.

Organize this list in terms of priorities, from the most to the least important, and make sure you don’t avoid what you don’t like to do! Pushing things aside, even though at first it can provide some relief, in the long run will make you more anxious. If you tackle these disliked things right away, it will reduce the level of stress for you.

These tips for stress management, and others we didn’t mention in this blog for lack of space, have the purpose of changing your assessment of stress. They do so by improving your views about your abilities, assets and strengths. This view, in turn, makes you see the stress as less overwhelming and intense.

Do you have some techniques that you found to be very helpful in dealing with stress? Can you share them with us?

What is stress? Stress is a normal physical response to situations that are perceived as being dangerous. We perceive our abilities to cope with this danger as being inadequate to handle it. So, we get ready for a fight or flight. When we face a danger, our breathing and heart beat increase, and so does our blood pressure; we sweat, we feel a rush of adrenaline; our muscles get tense, and we become very alert. Stress, therefore, is nature’s ways of protecting us by shifting our body responses into high gear and thus increasing our chances of survival. In this way, we get ready to deal with the danger.

Some stress is to be expected, and, in fact, it can be even positive. However, when it gets too intense, or when it becomes a chronic way of life, we are likely to experience serious health problems, both physically and emotionally.

If the stress persists, in fact, our body can develop symptoms like aches and pain all over our body; we may suffer from digestive problems, we may have difficulties concentrating and remembering; we may feel anxious most of the time, irritable, overwhelmed; we cannot relax. I could go on and on, but you get my point of why acute or chronic stresses are bad for you.

And who wants all this?

When we feel stressed, we try to cope with all these symptoms by getting our minds off the areas that cause stress. However, while some of these ways are healthy, some are not. Drinking too much, for instance, or relying on drugs, cigarettes, overeating or oversleeping obviously are not good ways of coping with stress. They don’t remove the cause of it and don’t help us learn good and healthy coping skills. They are, however, quite popular because, temporarily, they allow us to tune out how we feel, so we can better manage our emotions and relax for a little bit. When their effects are over, though, we find ourselves in the same original position we were in at the beginning, or even worse, and this pushes us to seek more relief by using again. Eventually we become dependent on some substance to make us feel better, in this way adding another problem to the original one.

Some healthy ways of dealing with stress, temporarily, are: taking a relaxing bath; going for a walk; doing some relaxation and meditation exercises; listening to calming music, and so on. These are ways of getting our minds off the reason(s) for our stress and, giving us a needed break. However, they don’t address the cause(s) of the problem. So, none of the ways we discussed so far, be them healthy or unhealthy, really help you in the long run.

Are there better ways of coping with stress? Absolutely there are. These are ways that help reduce the distance between the seriousness of the problem and our abilities to cope with it. Once we feel that we have the ability to handle a stressful situation, in fact, we can reduce the amount of stress we feel.

In the following blog we will discuss some of these healthy ways of assessing both situations that can create stress and our resources in dealing with them.
Think of some of the ways in which you cope with stress: what’s helpful and effective to you? Write down some of your answers and compare them to what we will suggest in our next blog!

Gone seem to be the times when people retired and stayed home, played bingo, and gradually reduced their activities as their physical conditions deteriorated and their energy waned. Up until as recently as twenty to thirty years ago, when people retired they were OLD, often sick with multiple ailments, not interested in travelling and developing new interests and lifestyles. Often they lived close to family, their main activity being involvement with grandchildren and partaking of family life. A few of them, the adventurous and those who could afford it, moved to states like Arizona and Florida to live in retirement communities. These, however, were the exception, not the norm.

The idea of retirement today is quite different. A whole new industry has sprung out to cater to this growing segment of the population. A lot of people, at retirement, are still vibrant, healthy and full of energy, so this new industry is busy offering new housing facilities, new amenities, new opportunities to explore and be active in, and new medical care.

The new retirees tend to regard retirement as the time when they finally can do all the things they had to put aside when they were too busy working at their jobs and raising a family. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the ideas, plans and expectations of retirement are now quite different than what they used to be.

Because of all these differences – and because people live longer, hence they have more retirement years ahead of them – planning for retirement is an extremely important part of reaching this stage in life.

In most studies that address what makes people happy two elements are constantly reported as fundamental: having a purpose and being connected to loved ones. So, whatever you plan for your retirement, these two elements need to play a central role in it.

Having a purpose is an important driving force in selecting what we want to do and how to do it. When we work, whether we are professionals, have a trade or are stay-home parents, we like to feel that our work makes a difference. Perhaps we help people in need, or raise organic vegetables in our garden and sell them to the local farmer’s market. Or, we work in an office, or answer the phones, or clean houses, or do surgery. Or, we choose to raise our kids and spend many years involved in PTOs, immersed in after school activities and teenage angst. Whatever we do, we have a purpose, and this drives us to continue to do what we are doing …or change it, if we feel we don’t contribute enough.

As you plan your retirement, think of what purpose you want your days to have: do you want to learn new skills? Or, do you want to volunteer and give back to your community? Do you want to travel, and share with your local school the slides and experiences from your trips? Do you want to get more involved in your neighborhood? Do you want to do philanthropic work? Whatever you do, think of what purpose your choice will provide in your life and then ask yourself if this is what you want.

Retirement without any planning may lead to boredom, disorganization, and at times isolation and depression.

Being connected to loved ones is another important element that needs to be included in any retirement plan worth exploring. Isolation, particularly as we age, is a very hard thing to tolerate. Loved ones don’t necessarily have to be members of your biological family. They could be good friends, neighbors, fellows in the church or synagogue you attend. They can be people with similar interests to yours, with whom you resonate and feel close. Choosing a community where you can find the kind of neighborhood spirit that makes you feel ‘at home’ is very important, as isolation is dreadful, particularly as we age. Stay involved in their lives. Ask what’s going on with them. Be interested.

If you have planned your retirement right, you will get up each morning looking forward to a new day. You will be active, but not overwhelmingly so. You will feel positive. You will be better able to stay in the present and enjoy it, rather than worrying about what the future will be like for you.

The number one thing we can do is to monitor the level of stress in our lives.

When we look at ways of improving our lives, we tend to focus on physical changes like losing weight, being more active, looking better, but we tend to forget a part of our body that is central to all of this: our brain.

What can we do to maintain our brain in good health?

The number one thing we can do is to monitor the level of stress in our lives. Many studies have shown how stress can interfere with our brain’s healthy functioning and cause irreversible damage to it if it continues. When we are stressed, we cannot tune things out; we worry excessively; we obsess about what we need to do to manage the stress, and we cannot relax. Even when we sleep, we don’t give a chance to our brain to process all that happened during the day and be ready for the next day’s challenges.

Our body rests when we sit on a comfortable chair or lay down, when we take a bubble bath or when we sleep, but our brain never stops working, no matter what we do. So, if our sleep is not restful, for instance, in the morning our brain is already tired and weighted down by the many thoughts, concerns, preoccupations and emotions we dealt with throughout the night, even before we face new ones. Additionally, we know that when we are in the throws of emotions, our thinking abilities become less sharp and we tend to forget or confuse things more easily, our grasp of problems and our focus and concentration being diminished by the emotional state we are in.

So, what can we do to give our brain a well deserved rest?

Find a comfortable place to be, and try to clear your mind of all the thoughts and feelings that are there. Focus on your breath, in and out of your body slowly, and, whenever thoughts come to mind, gently push them aside and re-focus on your breaths, in-out, in-out, in-out. You will be surprised at finding yourself more relaxed, clear-minded and better focused. Just five minutes a day of this exercise will do a lot of good to your brain and, by extension, to your body as well.