Sometimes, we are not only left in love; we are left for someone else – a rival who comes to assume a large, indeed monstrous position in our imaginations. The torture comes down to one essential question which pursues us into the early hours: What do they have that we…
Life is full of moments where we are meant to feel certain things. The demand starts in early childhood: it’s our birthday – and we are meant to feel happy. Dad…
There is a certain sort of relationship that is alternately passionate, fiery and painfully unfulfilling – and that tends to puzzle both outsiders and its participants; a relationship between one person…
We live in an age increasingly prepared to see hurtful aspects lurking within many apparently so-called minor situations, and ready to lend greater public acknowledgement to what had previously been merely…
It’s natural to imagine that the highest virtue in love would be kindness and, a close second, politeness. But there is an odd danger lurking here: a relationship where we are…
It would be most of our first choices to have relationships in the real world; but for many of us, it is a great deal more plausible to pursue them with,…
In so many areas of life, it’s easy to feel desperate that we have failed to live up to our own expectations. We are evidently not beautiful enough, rich enough, intelligent…
Compassion for others is an attractive notion, but in reality we often find it extremely difficult to be kindly and understanding towards people who make a lot of noise at unwanted…
It sounds paradoxical and absurd to think that some of us might need to find something to worry about in order to recover our equilibrium. Worry is, after all, something we…
If we were totally sane, we would respond to the present only on its own terms; we would worry or be angered or give way to anxiety only as much as…
One of the greatest questionnaires in the history of 20th-century psychology had a modest start in the pages of a local Colorado newspaper The Rocky Mountain News in July 1985. The work…
Many of us are wandering the world bearing a lot of emotional damage. We may be depressed, anxious or very difficult around sex and relationships. We might in certain moods ask ourselves where…
There are so many ways to be unhappy in love, but one kind which modern psychology has given particular attention to are relationships, very high in number, in which one of…
Like many things that help our relationships, couples therapy has a habit of sounding appallingly unromantic, involving patience, gruelling work and a host of embarrassing conversations about matters it would be…
We would not have been able to survive so long if we were not able, at points, to get very worried indeed; if we didn’t possess a native genius for flooding…
Of the many desires we might harbour in relationships, few attract as much mockery or suspicion as ‘the rescue fantasy.’ According to this longing, a lover – normally a man –…
Every year, all around the world, millions of couples are forced to recognise – with considerable guilt – that they are emotionally defective. Despite what they would ardently wish, they do…
Few mental afflictions are as humbling or as terrifying as what is known as ‘Pure’ OCD or, more colloquially, Intrusive Thoughts. In standard Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a person is haunted by…
One of the great problems in the world is also one of the most invisible, because – by its nature – it asks to be hidden and saps our ability to…