Welcome to Vera’s Blog!

How much do you think that your early relationship with your primary caregiver (e.g., your mom, dad, grandparent, or foster or adoptive parent) matters today?

If you’re like many people, you might think, “not much” or even “not at all,” especially if this person isn’t a regular part of your life right now.

But if you read my last post on attachment and attachment styles, you discovered that the way that we approach and navigate relationships in our life, even as adults, is heavily shaped by the early relationship that we had with our primary caregiver.

Specifically, if we developed what’s called a secure attachment to our caregiver, then we may trust others easier, form healthy relationships readily, and be resilient in the face of relationship conflict.

However, if we instead developed an insecure attachment to our caregiver, we may be anxious and clingy with our partners, shy away from close relationships, or both crave and intensely fear...

Whether we’re experiencing some challenges in our relationships or generally feel fulfilled in them, most of us would love to enjoy them even more.

After all, if you find that most conversations with your mom end with you feeling frustrated or upset, you’d probably love for this to change.

And even if things are generally going well with your romantic partner, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind enjoying a bit more intimacy and connection in the relationship.

As I’ve mentioned recently, one of the key benefits of doing inner child work and healing your inner child is that it can help you build stronger, healthier, and more fulfilling relationships.

But in thinking about whether inner child work is truly worth your time (which I know you can’t afford to waste), you might be wondering how exactly inner child work can benefit your relationship.

That’s why in this blog post, I’m going to pull back the curtain on 3 key ways that healing your inner...

As a therapist, I have clients coming to me with a wide range of issues and challenges.

But there’s one issue that pops up more frequently than almost any other: setting boundaries.

As I’ve said before, boundaries are an essential ingredient for a healthy relationship. Just like you can’t make an egg omelet without eggs, you can’t have a healthy relationship without boundaries.

The challenge is that it can be scary and uncomfortable to set boundaries, especially if you’re not used to doing it.

And as I know from my own life and the experiences of my clients, boundaries can be downright daunting when you need to set them as an adult with your parents.

Why?

Because think about it:

If you’re like most people, your relationship with your parents is probably the one that has changed the most over the course of your life.

When you were born, your parents were 100% responsible for you. They made every decision for you, including what to eat, what to...

As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I’ve done A LOT of couples therapy over the years. So you might expect me to say that if you want to reduce conflict in your relationship, feel more heard by your partner, or enjoy a deeper connection with them, you BOTH need to work on your relationship.

But do you want to know something?

I have many clients who really want to change something in their relationship. But they come to my office alone. Why? Because for one reason or another, their partner doesn’t want to work on the relationship.

When these clients start working with me, there’s something I see in all of them: doubt. They doubt whether the time, energy, and money that they’re investing will be worth it if their partner isn’t working on the relationship with them.

That’s why they’re usually pretty surprised (I would even go as far as to say “shocked” in some cases) when they start seeing BIG changes in their relationship...

In my last post, I shared some of my favorite tips for communicating better with your partner or loved one. (In case you haven’t read it yet, these are 3 tips that most people don’t think about, but they can quickly improve communication in your relationship. You can find out what they are right here.)

When I was first training to be a therapist years ago, I shared some of these tips with a friend named Maria. She had been with her husband, David, for over a decade. But around the time that I was in grad school, Maria had started to realize that she often felt unheard in their relationship.

David was generally very loving toward Maria. He would make coffee for her to take to work, plan date nights for the two of them, and even buy her flowers for no reason at all. And so in many ways, their relationship seemed great—even like something straight out of a rom com.

But recently, Maria had realized that she had been losing her voice in the relationship because...

Do you ever walk away from a conversation with your partner thinking…

• “I never end up saying what I want to say”?
• “They just don’t get why this matters to me”?
• “Small things turn into a bigger deal than they need to be”?
• “We always have the same argument over and over again”?

If you do and it happens more than once in a blue moon, you might recognize that you could benefit from improving how you communicate with your partner.

It makes sense, right? If the way that you’ve been trying to communicate with your partner or loved one hasn’t been working, it’s only reasonable to try to switch things up.

But here’s what you might be thinking: “Yup. I know that I need to change the way that I communicate with my partner. But WHAT do I need to change? And WHAT should I do instead?”

That’s how I felt after every disagreement that my ex-husband and I had.

I knew that the way that we were...

Does it seem like you and your partner are always arguing about something these days?

If you do, you might be feeling emotionally exhausted and frustrated. But you might also be feeling a bit confused.

After all, if you and your partner care about each other and are in a committed relationship, why do you butt heads so much?

If you think you’re alone in wondering this, I want you to know right now that you most definitely are NOT.

Because when I work with couples in my practice, one of the most common issues they raise is that they argue or disagree ALL the time (and they’re sick of it).

As an example, let me tell you about one of my clients. For the sake of this blog post, we’ll call her Rachel.

Rachel came to me because she and her husband Marcus seemed to be fighting about everything lately.

One time, for example, she had gotten home from work late in the evening after an exhausting day during her company’s busy season. She was hoping to walk in the door...

It’s never fun when conflict arises in your relationship. It feels unpleasant, it can be uncomfortable, and it can make you worry about the future of your relationship or your bond with your partner.

Plus, as I shared in my last post, conflict can negatively affect you and your relationship in a number of ways.

That’s why you might try to avoid conflict in your relationship.

For example, instead of having a conversation with your partner after they forgot to do the laundry yet again, you might just keep your mouth shut and do it yourself.

Or when your partner asks if their friends can come over on Sunday for the fourth week in a row, you might agree even though you were really looking forward to enjoying some time just as a couple.

Initially, avoiding conflict can seem like a good strategy. Because on the surface, it might seem like everything is a-okay between you and your partner. After all, there are no overt arguments, disagreements, or emotionally charged...

In my last two posts on the #1 thing that couples fight about and how to know whether you and your partner fight too much, I told you that conflict is inevitable in every relationship. Because when two people decide to share their lives, it’s only a matter of time before a difference in opinion, preferences, or dreams triggers a disagreement.

You know what this means?

It means that if you want to enjoy a happy, loving relationship, the goal isn’t to eliminate conflict from your relationship. As unpleasant as conflict can feel in the moment, it just isn’t possible or realistic to completely remove conflict from your life. So to some extent, it’s important to be comfortable with the idea that conflict will arise in your relationship from time to time—no matter how much you and your partner love each other and how long you’ve been together for.

At the same time, though, you don’t want to brush off just any kind of conflict that arises in your...

What do I hear most often from clients who are struggling with their relationship?

“My partner and I fight all the time!”

In other words, many of the people I work with worry that they and their partner fight too much.

Where do these concerns come from? They’re usually rooted in unrealistic beliefs and expectations that people have about what a “healthy” relationship looks like.

Specifically, like some of my clients, you might think that if a relationship is healthy, you should hardly ever argue with your partner.

Why?

You’ve probably watched movies or read romance novels where the characters who are in love spend their days staring into each other’s eyes, cuddling in bed, and strolling down the street hand-in-hand, not arguing about how to manage their budget or who’s going to drive their kid to basketball practice at 6 a.m.

As a result, you might think that ANY kind of conflict in your relationship is a sign that something is wrong....