Positive Changes to Rebuild Your Relationship—Blog on Making a Difference

Many couples I talk to who live in Manhattan, New York City often ask me what are the little things they can do to make a big difference in their marriage or partnering relationship.

Here are number of daily habits that can help.

Look at your bedroom as a retreat for romance. This sounds obvious, but many couples don’t do this, or even conceive of it. Create an ambience that awakens the romantic lover in you. Decorate it with a little more pizzazz. Perhaps some new sheets, or a new wall color. Fresh flowers and little love touches that can bring back the erotic in your relationship.

Make a date night each week. Sounds like a great idea, and it’s appealing but you have to make it happen. Schedule it. Make it a real part of your week. And don’t change it. And don’t miss it. Pick from among the great spots in Manhattan to have a fresh date, and discover what fun it is to be with each other on a new adventure.

Make sure you’re not disconnected from your partner by distractions. When your partner is talking to you, don’t let his or her voice be a part of the background noise of TV, or mobiles or laptops or children. Pay attention and listen to what they’re saying. Be conscious of their voice, their words, their thinking. This will assist in overcoming many communication challenges.

For more assistance in improving relationships, please contact Michael Mongno Ph.D., a very experienced relationship couplestherapy expert in Manhattan, NYC, NY. Midtown offices.

Blog on Best Effective Couples Therapy in NYC (New York City)

New York City is an exciting metropolis to live in, rich in an engaging, vivacious range of culture, dining, entertainment and the buzz of everyday life in NYC. Living here means there’s certain ways to be with people, including our own couple partner or spouse. Many couples today are not married, and may not be married ever, choosing to remain as loving partners. Others are in the delight of pre marriage, or in the trenches of longer term marriage.

For all these couples, there may be occasions to need therapy with a qualified, very experienced therapist. New York City itself may contribute to this as it is such an exciting and diverting environment it can bring undue pressures on couples, through jobs, living space, and the constant seduction of its lifestyle.

There’s a good, and profound, truism that falling in love is easy. Staying in love is the hard part, the part that needs pretty constant cultivation. Falling in love doesn’t take effort for a couple. It happens naturally, even biologically and brain neurologically. Being in a perpetual state of being in love is both natural (with the right understanding and emotional IQ) and a state needing tending. Daily tending at least. Hourly tending, or minute to minute in the best instances. It takes a sense of selflessness and deep interest in the person you love.

There are occasions when couples are falling out of love, and want to examine what is happening because they would prefer to stay in love, to stay as a couple.

That’s where the relationship counseling of couples therapy comes in. Being able to talk about current situations and emotional states with a counselor who has the trained cognition and experience to recognize patterns or provide transforming insights and suggestions for understanding and changing behavior.

If you feel you’re at an impasse and want to improve your relationship, get in touch with Michael Mongno, very experienced couples therapy expert with Manhattan,NYC offices.

Successful Marriages in Manhattan: Counseling Can Be Best Help

Sometimes while traveling down the marriage road we need to stop and ask ourselves how healthy is our marriage. Is it in good health, with a relationship that brings satisfaction and contentment, well being and reasonable happiness to both spouses. Or is it somehow not quite in robust health—perhaps a bit dysfunctional.

Evaluating a marriage from the perspective of happiness is a little tricky. And most people do this. Am I happy? Are we happy? And they tend to translate their happiness in other aspects of life—work, family, social activities—into happiness in their marriage. Which, of course, can be very misleading. Happiness in other areas may mask an unhappiness in your marriage.

This also applies to enjoying good times together. Having fun is important, and many couples start out that way and figure that having fun into the latter years of their marriage does mean the marriage is healthy. This is same for doing things as a couple which can range from parenting to buying a house and making a home to handling financial challenges together.

Each of these, or a combination of these (and other feelings conditions) can give a false reading on the true health of the marriage, or even a pre marriage situation. What’s best is to really talk about the health of your marriage. Sit down and ask your spouse how they define a healthy marriage. Make sure he or she truly talks about it, and just doesn’t say something to satisfy the moment. Make some notes and compare your perceptions in the light of understanding each other better and improving the marriage. Perhaps some goals can be set, and then later talked about.

This is marriage counseling (or pre marital) that is self accomplished. And it can significantly help provide meaningful insight. In other cases it may be realized that an outside marriage counselor may bring more insight and change to the marriage.

For insightful, successful (and affordable) marriage counseling in Manhattan NYC, please click here.

Relationship Counseling Manhattan: Doing What We Do

By Michael Mongno Ph.D, Manhattan Relationship Therapy Practice.

As human beings, our behaviors and actions emanate from these primary emotional states. Emotions are always fluid, they come and go and can take many forms, slow or flurried, intense or gentle, dramatic or even. Watch a child, even for mere minutes, and you’ll see a continuum of different emotions being expressed. It’s often hard for children to manage their emotions so we teach them impulse control. They are taught how to let go and come back to the present moment, sometimes even by distracting themselves from uncomfortable feelings or circumstances that are out of their control.

In the relationship counseling and therapy (in Manhattan, NYC) I practice, I often tell people that part of maturing into adulthood is learning how to manage our emotions through healthy self-differentiation, which is a balance between our cognitive thought processes and the powerful energy of our emotions. When we’re not in balance we find that our behaviors are not productive and can be hurtful and destructive, both to ourselves as well as to others. When that happens we are not expressing our real or authentic selves, but a conflicted part of ourselves that is usually suffering in some way. And when we’re in pain there is almost always some kind of fear associated, be it nervousness, anxiety, agitation, irritation, frustration, annoyance or edginess.

Most fear has to do with not having our basic needs met and little hope or trust that they’ll be met, which then propels our actions. Maslow describes a hierarchy of human needs, from the most basic of physiological survival and safety, and then on to love and belonging, followed by self-esteem and self actualization. There is also the potential for living the added value of a meaningful vocation, causing all of one’s endeavors to be socially significant and impactful, leading to transcendence. The more basic the need however, the more primal the emotion; i.e. we’ll do almost anything to survive; it’s in our very physical constitution. When our needs are continually thwarted we feel discomfort or hurt and then become resentful, passive-aggressive, or angry and act out in an effort to change the status quo. The longer our important needs are not met the more intense our acting out becomes, which can escalate to the point of violence. If one is approaching this breaking point, it’s critical to seek some kind of help so as to interrupt and stop what can become a very destructive cycle.

Visit here for the best, affordable relationship therapycounseling in Manhattan, NYC. I have over 22 years experience helping unmarried partners or married couples.

Relationship Counseling: Why We Do the Things We Do

Michael Mongno Ph.D, Manhattan Relationship Therapy.

People hurt people. It happens all the time. Married couples. Partners. Even those dating. And we’re left puzzled, wondering how somebody could do such a thing.  With incredulity we ask our friends, complain to our coworkers, rant on social media and even write righteous blogs.  How can people do such things?!  Although there are many reasons for the variety of expression of human behavior, one thing is apparent—there is always a strong, driving emotional component to what we do.  The two most primary states out of which people act are the states of fear and its opposite—the state of love.  This duality and the seemingly complex derivations thereof is what this series will focus on, along with a way to find and foster more understanding and compassion for the suffering we all experience at the hands of others.

Emotions drive our behaviors, whether we’re conscious of them or not.  They are much stronger than our cognitive operating systems and provide the energy from which we act.  Although there is a wide range of human feelings, most are derived from five primary emotions:  sad, mad, glad, afraid, and disgust.  In attempting to feel empathy for someone we can tap into these basic emotions.  It is also helpful for when we are trying to tune into ourselves to help ground us.

Emotions play two primary purposes.  First, they are the gateway to our needs, by which their expression is a way to get our needs met.  We can’t actually know what we need without having some sense as to what we’re feeling.  The second purpose is to connect us to others, especially our significant others.  It is our emotions that provide the avenue for resonance, empathy/sympathy, excitement and intimacy.

Visit here for the best, affordable relationship therapy counseling in Manhattan, NYC. I have over 22 years experience helping couples.