I consider relationship jealousy to be one of the more painful emotional challenges, regardless of your chosen relationship model. No one teaches us how to protect ourselves from the agonizing grip of jealousy. In full force jealousy is emotionally (and physically) overwhelming. It not only cuts to our deepest fear of not being loved, but on a very primal level, jealousy is a warning sign that even our physical survival may be threatened if we were to lose our partner to another.

By engaging in honest self-reflection and exploring the source of our stories, we can better understand ourselves and improve relationships by approaching conversations with clarity instead of fear or judgement. By owning up to what we’re telling ourselves and actively listening to our inner dialogue, we can unravel distorted thinking and create healthier connections with those around us.

When two people get together to form a relationship, there are two sets of wounds merging and intertwining, our partner’s and our own. We know when our old wounds are being dragged into a conflict because our pain and defensiveness will suddenly spike. If our partner is speaking the same words as our inner abuser, the armor will go up, and disagreements will escalate into shouting, tearful battles.

There’s no getting away from the fact that couples in long-term relationships impact each other profoundly, in small and large ways. If you’re a couple who live together there are moments throughout each day that bring you together to discuss something, to work on a task, to accomplish an errand, to share a story, or listen to one. Partners flow in and around each other with such symbiosis, that we can sometimes feel like we’re one mechanism with a shared mind.

In my Tips for Couples in Captivity blog posts over the past weeks I’ve been inspired by clients, both their questions and their solutions. What did I hear about this week? Couples want to take advantage of this at-home time together to focus on their relationship, everything from ironing out the conflict wrinkles to having better sex and intimacy.

Confirmation bias. We all have it. We experience it every day in the news, in our politics, in our workplace, and most directly in our relationships, where partners can suffer the consequences of confirmation bias on a daily basis. When it comes to our relationship it makes sense then that our brains are far more skilled at noticing what’s wrong with our partner, than what’s right.

You may think that having a threesome would be exciting, but the truth is, you’re already in a threesome. There’s you, your partner, and your relationship. When we begin to view our relationship as the 3rd in our threesome, it’s easier to see how we are either feeding it with attention and nurturing care, or we’re literally ignoring it to death.

Ask most couples about the early stages of their relationship, and they’ll remember the ease they experienced around sex and intimacy. They’ll stare off into space with memories of testosterone-driven lust and estrogen flooding seduction.

It's hard to believe we've only had iPhones in our lives since 2007. Prior to that if couples wanted to ignore each other they hid behind newspapers. The cliché of the man, sitting at the dinner table with a newspaper up to his face has been replaced with the couple sitting in a restaurant scrolling their cell phones. If you’re using your phone as a way to avoid human intimacy, connection and conversation, then it doesn’t matter what you’re hiding behind, you’re still hiding.