Category Archives: Family

How to Keep Relationships Strong While Social Distancing

What can help you keep your relationships strong even when you can’t get together with people you care about?

Bill O’Hanlon, MS has several strategies for fending off loneliness and building relationships during the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic poses a lot of new challenges for relationships. But with some creativity, you can keep enjoying quality time with friends and family alike.  Bill has some good advice for men in particular.

Check out the short video below.  Any ads that might pop up come from YouTube, not from this post or this website.

Leave a comment if you like; always great to hear from people.

Cheers Ben.

 

Protecting Your Relationship Under Lock-Down.

As life in lockdown becomes our new normal, you may be asking how you can maintain your wellbeing and relationships under these conditions.

The University of Auckland’s Dr Jessica Maxwell and Professor Nickola Overall offer some advice on how to maintain your wellbeing and relationships under extreme conditions.

This is about a 10 to 15-minute read, but well worth the effort and includes a number of links to some very useful resources.  Read the full article here

Cheers, Ben Bennett.

Why Does This Feel Vaguely Familiar?

Remember Mike and Genevieve from the last blog?  Here they are again talking about an idea developed by marriage and relationship therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt.  They are the co-founders of Imago Relationship Therapy, and one of the foundations of this model is the idea that we carry an unconscious image or “imago”, that is an amalgamation of the positive and negative attributes of our parents or primary caregivers.  The story goes that we are unconsciously attracted to people who match up with the positives list in our “imago” and this is what pulls us into falling in love, only to find, as the rosy glow of early romance fades, that our lover also has a bunch of really annoying habits that match the negatives in our unconscious “imago”.

I like the saying “A theory is an idea in search of the truth”.  Imago theory and the idea of our partners being an “imago match” seems to hold up a lot of the time with the couples I work with.

Here are Mike and Genevieve talking about The Imago Match