Why, you may ask? Because, after the frenetic activities of the holidays, the lack of partners’ focus on each other, and the tendency to put each other on the back burner due to other activities going on, intimate relationships in January tend to feel depleted and partners may question their bond and their feelings for one another. Love relationships suffer at this time because the holidays may have brought a lot of excitement and newness with travelling; celebrating with friends and family, gift giving and holiday cheers, and now all this is gone. So, if you and your partner feel down, facing the relational doldrums of everyday life with little excitement and not much to look forward to, you are not alone

It is easy to displace frustrations and lack of enjoyment from the loss of sensational and extraordinary activities in our lives to lack of excitement in our primary relationship. While you may feel disappointed about what’s gone, however, you need to turn the situation around by creating renewed freshness and enthusiasm about each other again.

It is quite possible that you may want you partner to be emotionally and physically available to you, with a positive, caring and responsive attitude and a willingness to respond to your demands and needs, but perhaps your partner wants and needs the same from you and neither of you is getting what you want and need. Typically, when this happens each partner will do one of two things: he or she will either become louder in asking for what’s needed, or shut down and disconnect. Though understandable, it goes without saying that neither of these reactions produces healthy results, because neither provides what one partner is looking for from the other.

So, make sure you devote the time, attention and care to your loved one by setting up New Year’s resolutions for your relationship. By the way, had you ever heard of New Year’s Resolutions for couples? If not, you are not the only one, as most of people’s New Year’s resolutions tend to be about individual goals – losing those extra pounds; plan to exercise more and more regularly; take care of what you have been ignoring or procrastinating; create more balance in your life, and so on – but what about setting up a New Year’s resolution about your relationship with your life partner? Being in a healthy intimate relationship is a very foundational part of being happy. So, taking care of what’s going on with your partner is a very important task.

Think about your own love relationship and see if you can see where more attention and care are needed at this time. Write a list of things you are willing to do in areas where you would like to see improvement, and begin to be more aware of what you may be doing to contribute to the current situation – you being part of the problem – as well as to improve it – you being part of the solution.

In the next blog I will list some specific ways in which you can begin to feed your relationship and get it out of the current sad state it is in and into a more exciting and healthy one. So, stay tuned!

Susan and I worked like two little ants for months and months to get our book, “Couples at the Crossroads. Five Steps to Finding Your Way Back to Love” ready for you. Then, when we finally thought it was ready, we “snuck” it in and, voila, here it is, on Amazon.com.

How do we feel about it? Almost like we had to let go of a dear friend who had been with us for years. We knew all along that one day we would have to let go of this friend; that we would have to push our feelings of wanting to be together forever aside and support his move toward independence, but it was difficult nonetheless to say goodbye. With letting go of the book, it was difficult to stop our tendency to make one more revision, one more comment, one little correction here or there, one more clarification; one more idea… Once the book was finished, we knew we had to let go, and we finally did.

It also feels a little scary, as you and everybody else can now buy our book, read it and make comments on what we said, how we said it; what we left out and what we said more than once.

But, above all, we feel excited and very, very happy. We truly believe our book can provide help for couples like you who struggle in their relationships and are desperate to understand how they got where they are; how they can find a clear path to follow and acquire the necessary tools to move out of the pain. We know the book will be helpful to you because it contains a lot of the same things we speak of in our clinical sessions with couples. And we see how these couples, slowly but surely, begin to move from their place of pain to a place of gradual openness, as they become more hopeful. We see them when they begin to look at each other with different eyes; reverse the previous patterns of mutual hostility and disconnection, and find love for one another again.

What do you think? Interested? Do you want to check our book out? Click on the link below and the book will open in a new window or tab. Just open the first page and scroll through its Table of Contents, Preface and Introduction. This brief preview will make you want to know more…

Couples at the Crossroads: Five Steps to Finding Your Way Back to Love – Preview

We may deal with these feelings by getting angry – at our president, at one party or the other, at our representatives and at whomever else we believe is not taking care of our needs. But, just like in any dysfunctional family, when we express our fears and hurts through anger at each other, we get neither relief nor help.

So, what’s there for us to do?

First of all, we need to acknowledge our feelings for what they are – fear, for instance, not hostility – and express them in ways that are constructive. We need to get in touch with our fears, our disappointments and our deep hurts, and use them to propel us to make healthy changes.

Let’s not use our current situation as a judgment on who we are. We did not cause this recession. It is not our laziness, our lack of drive, our lack of talents that put us in this situation. We can’t afford to take responsibility for something we are not responsible for, because this will make us feel worse about ourselves and decrease our self confidence in our ability to succeed.

So, the first step to making positive changes is to reach down inside and acknowledge our strengths and assets. What are or were we good at? What did we use to feel confident about? What are or were our biggest successes?  Let’s make plans that will make use of these assets again. They are not gone, in fact, but just inaccessible, covered as they are by layers and layers of doubts and insecurities. We forget they are still there, and can be as useful now as they once were. So, let’s resuscitate them, shake the dust from them and put them to good use again.

Then let’s look at which resources are currently available to us. Can we use any of them? How can that be achieved? What worked best in the past?  Can we make use of the same approaches, or how can we modify them to make them applicable to today’s reality?

Let’s make a commitment to stay focused, maintain hope, and provide self support and encouragement throughout this process. Let’s not isolate, but ally with people who can help and support us.

Let’s stretch our abilities to be creative and resourceful. Let’s work at being resilient. We need to tell ourselves that things will get better, as this is a cycle and cycles never go on indefinitively. Nobody knows for sure what will happen, but if we believe in something we can make it more likely to happen.

All these approaches decrease our sense of powerlessness and helplessness, which, in turn, help reduce fear and increase hope.

If we follow these ways, we can improve our situation, one step at a time, and gradually feel more empowered. This way it will be more difficult to give up.

Let’s remind ourselves daily of the assets available to us. Let’s be grateful for them and let’s use them to support, soothe and encourage us all the way along this difficult journey.

Data from 2009 indicates that more than 20% of Americans experienced a loss of 25% of their income. This is the highest percentage since these data began to be collected and studied. Since 2009 the economy has been getting progressively worse and the unemployment rate has steadily increased, without any indication of this trend slowing down or turning around. Savings have been mostly wiped out for a large part of the middle class, and the poor are getting poorer. Based on this, we may assume the percentage of Americans who lost 25% or more of their income will continue to increase.

How is this going to impact people emotionally?

The first element that creates a lot of stress is that of surprise. Nobody had predicted the intensity and magnitude of this recession. Nobody had expected it would last so long and its recovery would be so slow (if there is recovery at all.)

Young and old Americans alike have no personal experience of living through a recession as severe as the current one. Therefore, they had no way of preparing for it and, most importantly, THEY DID NOT BELIEVE IT WAS POSSIBLE. Everybody knew, intellectually, that things couldn’t go on the way they were forever. But there is a huge difference between knowing things intellectually and actually experiencing them emotionally.

It’s like when we know someone dear to us will soon die. Intellectually we acknowledge this reality. We can even convince ourselves that we are preparing for this event, so when it happens we will be ready for it. But, in reality, when this person actually dies we realize we had no way of anticipating the emotional impact of this loss. We had no idea of how it would feel like FEELING it. So, we get blindsided by how powerful and out of control our emotions are, and how destabilizing.

Well, something similar is happening to us now, as we try to grapple with feelings of ambiguity, confusion, fear and helplessness due to the current economic uncertainties. We look around for support, directions, comfort and reassurance, but there is very little to be had.

Like children, we look around for surrogate parents to reassure and help us regulate our emotions These are the politicians, the government representatives and other people in power positions we thought would be able to look after our needs and protect us from these kinds of frightening situations. However, they seem to be unable or unwilling to provide us with what we need. Even when they reassure us, their voices sound tentative and their body language not reassuring, so we have a very hard time believing them.

We are like a huge dysfunctional family where the parents are asleep at the wheel and failing to provide safety for its members. The children – all of us – always assumed they would take good care of us: that they would come through for us if/when needed, so we placidly continued with our comfortable lives, expecting things to go on forever. Now the parents are like the emperor without clothes, who is showing his nakedness for all to see, even though he still thinks he is hiding it.  But we now know better, and because of it, we are scared and deeply hurt.

In the next blog post we will describe what can be done to improve this situation and feel less powerless.

Feel free to give us your views by clicking the “comments” button below.

Of course a lot of sectors have been and still are affected by this downturn. Lots of people lost their jobs, which means they lost their medical insurance coverage as well. Lots lost their homes. Lots still are currently on the brink of losing everything they have worked for.

While it is no mystery that all these losses have affected people in deep psychological ways, very little has been written on this compared to the volumes that have been written in other areas affected by the current recession. However, this is an extremely important area that needs to be addressed, because the psychological impacts of stress tend often to be longer lasting and more insidious than the economic ones, as they affect people at the very core of who they are. Self-value, self-confidence, sense of security and sense of identity, in fact, are deeply shaken and at times people never fully recover from these impacts.

In addition to the people whose psychological health has been deeply affected by the economic downturn, there are also people who were already suffering from mental illness and who struggled to function and be productive in their lives. For all these people resources have been cut to the point where a lot of them currently have no or very limited access to treatment. “Tens of millions of dollars in state budget cuts since fiscal 2009 mean there is less money to pay for patients’ hospitalizations, psychiatric and counseling sessions and medications,” reported the Arizona Republic (AZ Republic, 3/19/10.)

One sign of this dismal situation is the increasing number of people who go to emergency rooms for serious mental illness or suicidal problems. Again, the Arizona Republic reports that at Maricopa County Medical Center, for instance, the number of patients who go to their emergency room for psychiatric problems has grown from “fewer than 10 per week to between 20 and 25 per week.”

Too often when we talk about economic issues, we forget to look at the enormous psychological impact that an unstable situation has on the human mind. For those who suffer from severe mental illness, no access to treatment and medication can mean losing whatever relief they used to get from a system that, though inadequate, was nonetheless available to them.  Reports indicate that currently the system fails more than 80% of people who need their services. One of the results of this situation is that Arizona ranks number one in the country for the number of suicides. This is a terrible catastrophe that affects not only people suffering from mental illness, but their families and those who depend on them as well, and should affect all of us because it erodes the foundations of a democratic society based on the collective care for its citizens, particularly the ones who are ill and in need of help.

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.

We encourage you to post your comments to this informative blog by pressing “comments” below!

 What are the changes that we are starting to see in our society, in the midst of the current economic downturn?

• A shift in the value of money. Some of us seem to have changed the way we deal with money. We are saving more; we are looking for bargains; we are more likely to buy when we need something, rather than on impulse.

An article on the New York Times on 8/29/09 reported less spending in general. In contrast, stores such as “the Natural Gardener” that sells seeds, plants and tools for organic gardening, are doing great.

This indicates that not only we spend less, but we spend DIFFERENTLY. There seems to be more thoughts about the future, rather than just the present moment. We seem to be doing more planning than we used to do. The popularity of community gardens attests to this new trend.

Additionally, rather than flaunting designer labels, we may talk more about buying what we need at discount stores. Magazines, likewise, have shifted from displaying luxury items to articles on less expensive ones, often listing places and ways of getting them.

• More collaboration. Another change seems to be about collaboration. We seem to be more willing to collaborate in joint projects and ventures, support each other and band together to face challenges and uncertainties. This is valuable both for our physical as well as our mental health, and yet it is also something we fight, as at times we see collaboration and individual achievement as contradictory and mutually exclusive.

In a recent article on Scientific American Mind (Sept/Dec. 2009), Jetten et al. state that “Belonging to social groups and networks appears to be an important predictor of health – just as important as diet and exercise.” 

All this is, evolutionarily, how we survived throughout history and how we evolved. As we had neither big fangs nor powerful muscles  to protect ourselves from stronger predators, we  survived by banding together and relying on the strength of the group.

Empathy is the main means of communicating with one another at an emotional level. It develops, together with and other “social” emotions, by being in groups. This is where we learn to get along, to feel what others are feeling, to follow (or rebel against) rules. Without empathy, we are isolated and disconnected from one another.

• More empathy. Currently even those of us who are still doing well in this economy do not seem to want to brag about it. We are more aware that this would be uncaring and insensitive to the less fortunate ones. There is as sense of being all together in this predicament, and needing everybody’s help to get out of it.

Will these cultural shifts be permanent? It is probably too soon to tell.

There are two schools of thought here:

One, which I call the optimistic school, believes people will be permanently changed by the current economic downturn, just like people who went through the great depression of the 1930s did after being exposed to the anxieties and tribulations of those times. They learned to be cautious and avoid excesses to be better prepared for whatever problem may be lurking behind the corner. They also learned to value of allying with other fellow men and women in order to support each other.

The other school, which I call the cynical school, believes that, as soon as things will start to be normal again, people will go back to their old ways of being self-focused and materialistic.

I am an optimist and believe people learn from experiences, particularly painful ones. As a species, we survived and evolved because we learned to be masters of adaptation to different environments and demands.

I believe most people appreciate the value of friendship, collaboration, sharing and mutual support. Therefore, what is currently happening in this country presents a great opportunity for all of us to reflect on our old ways and invest more effort in becoming better neighbors, better brothers and sisters, better friends and better citizens, because these are the core values that make us human.

Aside from these evident effects, there are others, more hidden but more insidious, which affect people caught in this economic downturn. These make up the cluster of symptoms I refer to as “recession stress disorder.”

Symptoms of recession stress disorder are:

• A chronic feeling of helplessness. This is due to the realization that our beliefs about working hard and moving ahead are no longer applicable. All of us have seen examples of people – maybe us! – who worked very hard, saved and did everything right by the books, and yet they are now in very vulnerable positions.
• A sense of shame. We may believe we should have known what was coming and better prepare ourselves for it. For those of us who lost jobs and savings, the sense of shame stems from not being able to support ourselves and our families; having to rely on family and friends for help; having to sell our homes, downsize and change our life styles.
• A feeling of betrayal. This is similar to what children feel when their parents, rather than taking care of them as they should, making them feel safe and protected, betray and hurt them. As those children, we feel unprotected, no longer trusting our “leaders” to have our best interests at heart. We are scared and alone.
• A declining self-confidence. Even though we may know it was not our fault, that we did not cause this recession, a part of us may still feel responsible for how it affects us.
• A loss of self-identity. For most adults, our jobs and professions are the main sources of self-identity. We are what we do – electricians, plumbers, farmers, teachers – and when we can no longer do that, we feel like fish out of water.

This cluster of symptoms may lead to somatic problems such as insomnia, digestive problems, chronic headaches, lack of energy and to an inability to concentrate and make decisions.

How do we cope with this? Some may seek out drugs and alcohol to medicate themselves into a state of numbness. Others may withdraw and isolate. Others may become aggressive and litigious, further increasing the strain that already exists in their primary relationships. Others still may develop apathy, cynicism, or become despondent. None of these reactions, however, helps.

In our next post we will discuss what is helpful when we suffer from Recession Stress Disorder.