Infidelity
Deepak Chopra famously said: “When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself.” The tendency to focus on the flaws of others in order to deny scary or painful dimensions of the self comes up often in therapy. Sigmund Freud described this process as projective identification. Projective identification — often called…
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Discovering infidelity is a common reason that couples seek therapy. Infidelity is much more frequent than one might expect, and the popular culture tends to equate infidelity with a loveless or passionless marriage. In my work as a couples therapist, I often discover marriages that have experienced infidelity but that clash with this popular conception.…
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Celeste Ng’s 2014 debut novel about a Chinese-American family coping with the excruciating aftermath of a teenager’s death is as absorbing as it is humbling. It is absorbing due to its complex and realistic characters, each with their own layers and secrets and struggles related to the middle daughter, Lydia’s, mysterious disappearance and death. And…
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Women entrepreneurs and on-line shoppers alike can’t help but enjoy Anne Hathaway’s snappy, stylish performance as internet mogul Jules Ostin in Nancy Meyers’ 2015 film The Intern. The film’s tag line — “experience never gets old” — is a tribute to the wisdom and elegance of Ostin’s unlikely intern Ben Whittaker (Robert DeNiro), a seventy year old retired widow who…
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“If age is just a state of mind, then While We’re Young is the best kind of therapy a forty something starting to lose touch with the younger generation could hope for.” Peter Debruge, Variety Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are settling into their forties and beginning to feel all washed up. Josh,…
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A few days ago, the New York Times reported on the explosion of new ideas and approaches in sex therapy and revolutionary thinking in the psychotherapy field about how to work with couples around issues of monogamy and sex. The article, “First Comes Sex Talk With These Renegades of Sex Therapy” by Amy Sohn points out that…
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Director: Charlie McDowell Writer: Justin Lader 91 minutes/ August, 2014 Infidelity is a common topic of conversation in couples therapy. While discovering that one’s partner was unfaithful is a devastating and often traumatic experience, many couples can and do work through this discovery and come out stronger on the other side. One of the toughest…
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Can a marriage be saved following infidelity? Is it okay to cheat if a marriage has become sexless? If infidelity is discovered and a couple wants to stay together, how do they find their way through? Such questions are frequently raised in couples therapy if one or both partners have strayed. Ian McEwan’s 2014 novel,…
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Esther Perel, 2007, 272 pages A mantra of my post-graduate training in couples, family and sex therapy was that when a couple is struggling in the bedroom, that struggle is a mirror for what’s happening outside of the bedroom. So, if you help a couple increase intimacy and enhance communication, and you employ the sex…
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2011, 1 hour and 56 minutes Written and Directed by Sarah Polley When a marriage is going through challenging times, it is extremely common to become consumed with thoughts about how there must be something out there that is better. Such thoughts can be especially powerful if there is someone else in the picture. Whether…
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