The Relationship Maze

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Would you like to discover your conflict style in relationships? Discover how it can help you in your relationships, https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Everyone experiences emotional ups and downs, but how we respond to our emotions is what matters most. 

Emotional regulation skills are key to managing our emotions and leading a healthy life. Developing emotional regulation skills can be difficult but with the right exercises and determination, it can be done. In this podcast I'll take you through a couple of exercises to help you improve your emotional regulation skills and become better at controlling your emotions. With practice and commitment, you can learn to recognize and respond to your emotions in healthy ways.

Breathing exercises

Breathing exercises are a great place to start when you’re looking to improve your emotional regulation skills. When we’re under stress, our breathing can become shallow and erratic. This can lead to increased feelings of anxiety and stress. When we’re stressed, it’s important to take the time to focus on slow, controlled breathing. This helps to calm the nervous system and reduce feelings of anxiety. There are a few different breathing techniques you can use to help improve your emotional regulation skills. The 4-7-8 breathing technique involves inhaling for a four-second count, holding your breath for a seven-second count, and exhaling for an eight-second count. The 10-10-10 breathing technique involves inhaling for a 10-second count, holding your breath for a 10-second count, and exhaling for a 10-second count. In this podcast you'll go through box breathing.

Progressive muscle relaxation

Progressive muscle relaxation is a relaxation technique that involves tensing and relaxing different muscle groups. When you’re feeling stressed or anxious, you may notice that you’re tensing certain muscles. Progressive muscle relaxation helps to release these tension spots and can reduce feelings of anxiety and stress.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

Would you like to discover your conflict style in relationships? Discover how it can help you in your relationships.

Erik Erikson was a renowned psychoanalyst and psychosocial theorist who proposed eight stages of life as a way to understand the development of the human personality. His theory of life stages, which takes into account the different developmental tasks that must be achieved at each stage of life, has been widely accepted and applied to a variety of settings.

By understanding Erikson's life stages, you can use them to improve your life and help you to reach your full potential. By looking at the different stages, you can identify where you are in your development and use that knowledge to make choices that will have a positive impact on your life.

You can also utilize the life stages to help you to understand the development of others and to better support and guide them on their journey.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

Is there a particular behaviour by your partner that you find intensely and frequently  irritating, frustrating, dismissive or irksome? Do you know how to effectively let your partner how you feel and what change you want to see?  In today's episode we talk about an effective way of  communicating that can enable a behaviour change in your partner. 

We discuss the  4 step Feedback Wheel structure as suggested by Terrence Real in his book 'The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work'.

1.  Describe (as neutrally as a recording video camera) what you saw or heard
2. Describe what you made up about this situation (your interpretation of events)
3. Let your partner know how you feel about this situation 
4. Make a request for a change: what you would like to see happen (your request has to be viable and measurable)

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

When you get very caught up in your emotions you may struggle to express your needs appropriately. You might feel very angry or highly anxious for example your reasoning may go out of the window.

When agitated, we often react automatically without any reflections. When we cannot regulate our emotions, we get overwhelmed - we are controlled by the emotion rather than the other way round. In the situation where we get triggered emotionally, we often lose the capacity to utilise that part of our brain that helps us to cognitively process, instead our emotional "monkey brain" takes over.

If you experienced adverse experiences in your life and trauma, you are more likely to unconsciously scan for danger and feel more readily threatened. Trauma studies have shown that people with high levels of trauma struggle to read another person's face: another person's sad face may be experienced as angry. Arguments with the partner may get more readily out of control if there is perceived danger.

Other people can help us to 'co-regulate': if you have a very calm partner, this can help you to feel calmer and reassured. Conversely, if both of you are highly emotionally agitated, you are more likely to further increase each other's distress.

You can learn to increase your window of tolerance for difficult emotions and thereby get less easily triggered and distressed by other people's interactions with you.

If you struggle to identify your emotions the Feelings Wheel may provide some help.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

In this podcast I mentioned a device I use for breathing practice which can be found at https://www.airofit.com/

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Related podcast episode:
What happens when you 'lose your mind'? - How understanding the structure of your brain helps in conflict situations

Trauma - how it affects you and your relationship

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

Do you often complain to others about your partner? Or do you constantly tell your partner that their behaviours are dissatisfying to you? Do these complaints help your relationship and get you what you want?

Complaining can be satisfying but is not likely to achieve anything, in particular if you talk to a person who is not the source of the complaint and cannot do anything about this, i.e. a friend.

Complaints are usually caused by the behaviour of the other person that troubles you. Often the complaint is about a behaviour that is seemingly innocuous to the person who is at the receiving end of the complaint.  However, frequent complaints about the same set of behaviours in the partner, often have long roots. They tend to relate to a deeper underlying fear: for example, a fear that your partner does not care about you or not love you enough.

Complaining to others is often a proxy way of addressing your frustration: you raise your frustration in a 'safe' way by talking to a friend rather than to the person who caused you the frustration. This way you avoid a 'confrontation' or conflict with your partner that you perceive as dangerous.  

Conversely, you might be someone who readily raises all their frustrations with the partner in a continuous litany of wrong doing. 

Both scenarios  help us to vent our frustrations but in the long run do not facilitate the desired change you crave for. The person you need to talk to, is the person whose behaviour is troubling you. How you go about doing this, is crucial. In this podcast we talk about ways of addressing frustrations with your partner, that actually get you the change in behaviour that you want to achieve.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

Do you always know what your partner is thinking? Well, you may find that you are completely wrong with your underlying assumptions. Mind reading mostly does not work very well.

Assumptions are generalisations, inferences and predictions about the world and about other people's intentions. They offer us a sense of predictability and safety. Mostly we are not aware of our assumptions, they run on auto pilot in the background without us putting them to the test and questioning them.

For example, in dating you may automatically assume that another person is not interested in you, if they have not responded to a text message within a certain time frame. In your relationship you may come to the conclusion that your partner does not care about you because they didn't like the meal you cooked for them.

The problem with assumptions is that they often entail jumping to a conclusion about our partner's intention. We may be right, sometimes, but not always. Assumptions make us less open to possibilities. Particularly when we are getting into regular arguments with repetitive themes, it can help to closely examine your underlying assumptions. They may connect to some core fears that you have about your partner and the relationship.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

Today we discuss the importance of rituals in life and in your relationships. A ritual is a predefined sequence of symbolic actions which are often characterised by formality and repetition.  Weddings, birthday celebrations or funerals, for example, are rituals. Particularly, of course, in the sphere of religions there are strong associations with rituals that provide symbolic value.

Why are rituals important?
Because rituals are highly structured they help us to have some sense of predictability about the future and possibly create more certainty. They can contribute to lessening anxiety. Rituals create meaning and they can bind us to a particular group or person; they may contribute to group cohesion and unity.

Rituals can help to process a loss. For example, a ritual may help you to let go when there has been a painful break up.

Rituals are also important to celebrate important moments and mile stones in your relationship. This may be celebrating the end of the working week, anniversaries or any moments in your relationship that you want to mark. Engaging in a ritual helps you to connect.

Rituals can also help us when it comes to emotional regulation; they can be soothing, exhilarating or motivating.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Related podcasts:
What happens when you 'lose your mind'? - How understanding the structure of your brain helps in conflict situations (Podcast about emotional regulation)

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

In today's episode we consider what happens when you think too much about yourself and what others might think about you. You may have a constant,  internal dialogue running where you are very focused on other people's - perceived - critical perception.  You may worry that other people notice everything about you that you don't quite like about yourself. There is a constant monitoring for harm that others may do to you. Being on the lookout for harm creates particular, defensive behaviour patterns that may inadvertently further feed into the idea that other people may not like you.

Often too much thinking entails having repetitive, obsessive thoughts. In this episode we talk about ways of engaging differently with unhelpful and unpleasant thoughts and recognising that you do have choices when it comes to your own interpretations of a situation. First of all, your choices need to be recognised.

If you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review. For Apple Podcast this is most easily done via your iPhone. If you have an android phone, please leave a review on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes or any  other platform that you are using.

Suggestions for a podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Related podcasts:
How to Deal With Obsessive Thoughts In Your Relationship? - In Conversation With Kimberly Morrow
Rumination - When You Are Thinking Too Much

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

In episode 102 we discuss what co-dependency looks like and what the likely causes for this presentation might have been. Co-dependency is a term that describes a relationship where one partner needs the other, who in turn needs to be needed. A person who is co-dependent works extremely hard at pleasing their partner; they generally only feel worthy if they are making strong sacrifices for their partner.

Behaviour patterns and attitudes that play out in co-dependent relationships can touch on a wide range of psychological presentations and abusive relationship patterns: low self-esteem, lack of identify, insecure attachment style, trauma or domestic abuse.

A person who is co-dependent will often struggle to identify their own needs or feelings, often minimising their own emotional experiences. They tend to be outer, rather than inner directed, seeking validation and approval from others. Their self esteem tends to be very low. Co-dependents often comprise their own thoughts or values and tend to avoid any form of perceived conflict. Often they may find themselves in relationships where they stay far too long, even if the relationship proves to be harmful to them.

In terms of their attachment style co-dependents tend to be insecure. If anxious-preoccupied they either attempt to control the relationship or they tend toward avoidant-dismissive behaviour suppress emotional expression.

If you enjoy our podcast, could we kindly invite you to leave us a review. For Apple Podcast, it's easiest to do if you have from your iPhone; for android phones it's easiest to leave a review on Amazon, Spotify or any other podcast platform you may use.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship.

We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Send us Fan Mail

You may find that you often chose partners that are not necessarily the best choice for you. Why is it, for example that children of alcoholics or children of abusive parents often find themselves in similar relationships as adults? The child of an alcoholic find a partner who drinks too much, the child of emotionally unavailable parents choses a partner who is not emotionally present, children of narcissists make sure they find a narcissistic partner.

As children we learn everything there is to learn about relationships from our primary care takers and other influential people. Early experiences of love, no matter how loving the parents, always comes with some aspects of pain or frustration: for example a sense of not being quite good enough, not getting the attention you crave, having to care for a vulnerable or depressed parent or mediating between quarrelling parents.  In adulthood, we are replicating familiar relational patterns with our partners.  We often turn down partners who don't display those qualities that we associate with love, however dysfunctional they may be. The qualities may be 'positive' or 'negative'. Above all, they need to be familiar to us and offer us the possibility of a reparative experience.

Our unconscious search for the familiar means that we are often drawn to partners who are similar enough to our primary care takers. Seemingly they offer us the potential of re-creating and healing old childhood dramas. On the other hand, these objects of our desires are also dissimilar enough to offer us the potential for a more healing experience. 

Frequently, a nice' partner who doesn't offer an adverse experience is often seen as a less valuable partner: only a partner who is won over with hard work and eventually convinced that you are worthy is a worthy partner for you.

Understanding your relational template will help you not only to chose wisely when finding a partner, it will also help you to identify what your needs are and how you can address some of these needs yourself.

The Relationship Maze courses:
What is your argument style? Find out in our short quiz. You can find a link on our website: https://therelationshipmaze.com.

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course:  https://therelationshipmaze.com/relationshipconflictvsl2.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship.

We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.

Contact us for information about individual counselling/psychotherapy, couples therapy, clinical supervision or CPD training.
Tom's website
Angela's website

Struggling with a lot of conflict and arguments in your relationship? Learn about communicating effectively and addressing common relationship problems in our Stop Arguing, Start Loving mini course.

Learn everything you always wanted to know about building and maintaining  loving relationships in our comprehensive course The Relationship Maze, starting with understanding yourself in relationships to understanding your partner and understanding what makes for a successful relationship. We look at common causes of relationship problems and offer solutions. Learn how to address relationship problems and questions without breaking up.