Dr. Roher

After having finished a book on the value and benefits of developing and experiencing emotional safety with another person, it is so rewarding to experience it in vivo.

Karen Peterson and I have been friends for a long time. She has been a great supporter of mine throughout the long journey of writing the book “Couples at the Crossroads.” She has been there when I had doubts; when I was exhausted and wanted to drop everything; when I was scared and when I was confused about how to proceed.

Karen is a psychologist and published author. One of her books is called “Write” and it received an endorsement by Kurt Vonnegut, her “most favorite author in the whole world.” She knows the process of writing can be challenging and humbling, with ups and downs and moments of sheer exhilaration alternating with moments of sheer terror! Karen became my secure base, the person I could go to whenever I wanted to share something important, good or bad, about the book.

So today we had lunch to catch up as we regularly do and also because I wanted to show her the book proof. Tears came to her eyes as she held the book in her hands and leafed through it while repeating, “I knew you could do it. I knew you could do it.”

I asked her if she would read it, and she was elated that I asked her. “It will be done this weekend (mind you, the day in which we met was Saturday for lunch!) and I will give it back to you with my comments.”

As I am writing this blog, I am reminded of the saying “It takes a village …”

Karen is part of “my village” and an important part at that!

Tags: arizona psychologist, counseling a marriage, counseling for couples, couples marriage counseling, depression, jungian analyst, jungian psychologist, jungian therapist, psychologist arizona, psychology, therapist, therapist counseling

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are confronted with something you know absolutely nothing about, and all of a sudden you realize that a whole new universe has opened up in front of you? You are amazed by how much you didn’t even know existed and are mesmerized by the wealth of information that is now available to you.

Well, this is what happened to me when I shifted from writing a book to becoming unwittingly involved with the intricacies of layout and technical editing, ISBN numbers, Library of Congress Cataloguing, fonts, headers, footers and code. It was mind boggling!

This happened when I met with Heinz Kegerer, our layout and technical editing expert, to discuss the preliminaries of getting our book, “Couples at the Crossroads,” published. After the first couple of sentences I realized he was talking over my head. He might as well have been talking to me in Chinese (which I do not speak nor understand) as far as I was concerned. I had taken for granted the process of publishing a book. I assumed someone else was going to take care of it.

When I kept staring at him with a blank look, Heinz realized I was totally clueless. He was asking me to make decisions and I didn’t even know what he was talking about! He backtracked quite quickly, I must say, and started explaining things as simply as ABC. From there, he painstakingly pulled me along by the hand, trying to get me up to speed, so I could comprehend what he was trying to communicate to me.

Not that I know much more about this now, but I certainly have much more appreciation for all the work and expertise that goes on behind the scenes in the self-publishing process.

Here is Heinz with me during one of our meetings in which he is trying to explain some basic concepts.

I will never be able to pick up a book and leaf through its pages without thinking about all the work that went into making this book the final product I now hold in my hands.

Tags: arizona psychologist, counseling a marriage, counseling for couples, couples marriage counseling, jungian analyst, jungian psychologist, jungian therapist, psychologist arizona, psychology, therapist, therapist counseling

It is not only intuitive but also supported by research that during difficult times relationships suffer. We know, for instance, that events such as a death, an illness, the loss of a job, relocation, financial problems and other major events cause a lot of stress and this stress gets displaced onto our primary relationship.

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.

I used to see them all the time: a couple running together. She was friendly and smiling when we passed each other. At times she had a kind word or a comment about my dog, which I took as an acknowledgment of me. He seemed less friendly, at best grunting a “hi” as we ran in opposite directions. She was clearly much younger than he was, as he ran hunched over, and she with her high step.

They ran together every day, early in the morning, following the same route. Their pace seemed to be synchronized, as they ran side by side, at times conversing with one another, at times quiet.

I noticed that, through the years, things with them began to change, slightly at first, then more noticeably. She began to use an iPod, so conversation was no longer an option. She also began to lengthen her step or perhaps increased her speed. I never figured out what happened, but she started to run ahead and he was behind. At first I thought it may be for security, as they were running on a busy road, but then again they never did it before, so why now?

I was then in the process of writing the book “Couples at the Crossroads” and wondered if this is what was happening to this couple as well. Were they getting to the crossroads in their relationship? Or was I just seeing crossroads everywhere because this is what I was working on?

I didn’t want to rush any interpretation solely based on the changes I noticed on how they ran together, or no longer together, as was now the case. So I kept watching them.

As time went by, I noticed that the distance between her and him grew wider. She was still smiling when she passed me and seemed full of energy, while he looked gloomier and gloomier. He didn’t even say hi any longer when we passed each other. He seemed to be lagging further and further behind her and she no longer seemed to care whether he was there or not. There was no doubt about that. I decided this wasn’t my imagination. At times, she was almost a quarter of a mile ahead of him.

Then I didn’t see them for months. I wondered what had happened to them. They had stopped running. Was this a reflection of a much bigger issue?

It was. It was confirmed when somebody told me they got divorced and she moved out of town.

A few months later he began to run again, this time alone. Actually he wasn’t even running any longer. He would walk for a while, then break into a short run and then walk again. His head was down. He no longer looked at anybody when he passed people but looked at the road as though he was intently looking for a lost penny he could never find. He was looking for something that was gone.

It became clear to me now that their running together – and separately – was a microcosm of the gradual disconnection that had been developing between them, a reflection of a bigger disconnection in their relationship. I wonder if they were even conscious of how their emotional disconnection reverberated in many other areas of their lives.

And, I kept asking myself, would I have noticed, had I not been writing a book on couples at the crossroads?

Tags: arizona psychologist, counseling a marriage, counseling for couples, couples marriage counseling, jungian analyst, jungian psychologist, jungian therapist, psychologist arizona, therapist, therapist counseling

When couples living together break up, sometimes no one moves out. Why? The answer is money. Some people who can’t save the relationship still live together to save money. How can two people live in this situation? Here are my five tips:

• Sit down and go over the finances BEFORE anything else. Leave feelings out of this as much as possible. Come up with a plan that both feel is fair and feasible. Try to divide things up as closely as possible to 50/50.

• Set a goal such as: “We are going to be living in the same place until …” This could be a time frame: six months, three months, one year and so forth. This could be a financial frame: “We are going to live together until we both have paid our joint debts” or “until one of us has paid off what he or she owes the other” or “until one of us finds a job. This should happen within a certain number of weeks.” Make a commitment to each other to respect your joint plan and not change it unless you discuss it first.

• Share with each other information that affects the two of you. Did one of you find a new job or did you or your partner lose one? Is there a major change that may affect your mutual agreement? Couples should also share minor changes that affect each other. For instance, if you decide to spend the night somewhere else and you have always been very consistent with your schedule, leave a note or send a text to your partner about this change so he or she does not worry about your whereabouts. This doesn’t mean you need to tell your partner everything you do and everywhere you go, but it is common courtesy to let your partner know that you are OK.

• Talk about your feelings for one another. Quite likely one of you is emotionally ready to move on, whereas the other may still be hoping your relationship can be repaired. It is important you know where each of you stands.

• Discuss how you want to handle new relationships. How does each of you feel about the other getting involved with someone else? Is it OK to bring a new friend home? How can you do this in a courteous and respectful way?

Tags: arizona psychologist, counseling a marriage, counseling for couples, couples marriage counseling, jungian analyst, jungian psychologist, jungian therapist, psychologist arizona, therapist counseling

The idea for our book about couples at the crossroads in their relationships came to me one day as I was thinking about how to reach more people than just my patients with information I thought would be helpful to them. After all, we are all in relationships of one sort or another. We all have been in relationships from the first day of our lives and on and off since then. So I figured some information that addressed the “common denominator” to most interpersonal problems would be useful! And I think this is the core message of the book: No matter how different your individual circumstances are, there are some basic issues that come up in all relationships. These are the issues addressed and explained in the book we are working on.

Dr. Susan Schwartz and I began to write and meet regularly to discuss what the book would look like. We would e-mail our parts, read them out loud to one another, revise them and move on.

We typically met in restaurants. You can imagine how much food consumption is associated with the writing of this book! We can say we tried a lot of restaurants in town that offer lunch, typically sticking to one we liked for a while, then moving on to the next one once we got tired of the same food. We also moved to different parts of town, covering most of the Phoenix area.

I typically write in the morning. Like now, it’s before 6:30 am and I have been at the computer for over an hour. Mornings are times when my mind is fresh and full of ideas. It is also when I still remember my dreams and spend some time pondering over their messages. At times they provide flashes of insight into what I am doing.

I write with Mozart. Not the composer. Mozart is my dog. He lies under my desk while I write and keeps me company.

I rescued Mozart through a rescue group for Golden Retrievers. He was neglected from birth. When we adopted him last spring, he had never had a bath, been on a leash, driven in a car or visited the vet. No one even pet him. Now he follows me everywhere and gets anxious when I leave because he is afraid I will abandon him. So I guess I have become his mom. He is extremely attached to me.

When we got his papers, I saw his mother’s “family” name was Mozart. Mozart also happens to be one of my favorite composers. The name was totally spot on!

Can you see how the issue of attachment, which I discuss at length in the book as being the bedrock of all human connections, applies to relationships between dogs and animals as well? Dogs love you unconditionally, just like children do. It’s adults who at times mess things up. And when that happens, we hope our upcoming book can help those couples reconnect.

Tags: arizona psychologist, counseling a marriage, counseling for couples, couples marriage counseling, jungian analyst, jungian psychologist, jungian therapist, psychologist arizona, therapist counseling

I call it “debriefing,” you can call it anything you want. It is a few minutes at the end of each day that you take for yourself. You will be surprised how effective it is in relaxing you and clearing your mind.

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!

Tags: Dr. Roher, manage stress, psychotherapy, relax

Let’s discuss what approaches to deal with difficult situations are effective in helping us manage our stress levels and increasing our abilities to cope with it.

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?

Tags: cope, manage stress, stress, support

Why another blog on 9/11?

Because I want to remember this date by offering something that hopefully can shed further light on some of the repercussions of the fateful events of ten years ago.

As a psychotherapist, I am deeply aware of the importance of traumatic events that occur unpredictably and seemingly without any logical reason, such as the events of 9/11 ten years ago. These events affected each of us individually as well as collectively.

We know that the goal of terrorism isn’t only or even primarily to cause physical destruction, but mainly and more subtlety to cause psychological damage to the people targeted by these heinous and random acts.

The main psychological damage of the 9/11 events is that it forever changed the sense of security each of had prior to that day.

Feeling safe is an important need that all humans have. We seek security from birth on, by developing attachment bonds to people we believe will protect us and take care of us, thus creating and preserving a sense of security and emotional and physical safety that we all need. As we grow up, we continue to maintain this need for safety and achieve it by creating relationships and environments around us that keep dangers at bay. In this way, we can keep fear and anxiety under control.

Prior to 9/11 most of the people living in his country felt safe. Though aware of dangers in the world, in fact, most of us in this country nonetheless felt we had a level of safety that allowed us to pursue our goals and interests. After September 11, however, this sense of safety disappeared and our views of life and the world changed forever.

So, what happens when this feeling of security disappears?

Social psychologists tell us that we tend to react to the loss of perceived security in two ways: by feeling “moral outrage” and a need for “moral cleansing.”
Moral outrage is triggered by ANGER, which pushes us to seek vengeance, to direct our feelings toward the people whom we believe responsible for the terrorist attacks, or to people who are close to them (like people of the same ethnic background, of the same religion, similar political views, and so on.)
More cleansing is triggered by FEAR, which pushes us to adopt those behaviors that tend to reduce our fear by recreating a belief in fundamental goodness and in positive values (offering help, volunteering, getting closer to family, friends, community and people directly affected by the attack.) If we look back at the last ten years, we can see examples of both.

Ten years on, what can we do with what we have learned from this horrific tragedy?

If I were to summarize in a few words the biggest lesson of 9/11, this is what I would say: We learned that we need to acknowledge both our fears and our anger, and channel these legitimate feelings in behaviors and public policies that acknowledge our emotions and express them in healthy, balanced and constructive ways by reinforcing physical and emotional security. We also learned that we need to keep the memories of that day fresh in everybody’s mind, so that we strengthen and reinforce the ties that were built on the loss of many lives and the pain of those left behind.

Tags: psychological, psychotherapy, relationships, safety, security, traumatic

We cannot escape stress. We are surrounded by it in our busy lives, where we tend to get as many things done as possible in as short time as possible.

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!

Tags: cope, coping, Dr. Roher, manage stress, psychotherapy, relax, stress, stressed