Here Come the Holidays: Get Couple-Ready | Couple's Net | Chandrama Anderson | Palo Alto Online |

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By Chandrama Anderson

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About this blog: About this blog: I am a LMFT specializing in couples counseling and grief and have lived in Silicon Valley since 1969. I'm the president of Connect2 Marriage Counseling. I worked in high-tech at Apple, Stanford University, and in ...  (More)

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Here Come the Holidays: Get Couple-Ready

Uploaded: Oct 30, 2013
While this may be a time of family, love, thanks, giving, cheer, good food, and relaxing around the fireplace with good friends, it also may be a time of stress, high and/or differing expectations, extra activities, shopping, family drama, disappointment, and mixed signals.

This would be an especially good time to get on the same page with your beloved. As long as you two are connected, then going through all-of-whatever-it-is-that-comes-next together, you will come out of it in January connected. And that is what we are all biologically wired to crave.

Connection, also called secure attachment or creating a "couple bubble" (as Stan Tatkin, Ph.D. terms it), consists of five parts: 1) giving attunement, which is a fancy word for listening and letting him/her know we heard and giving empathy about what we heard; 2) demonstrating that we have each other's back no matter what; 3) seeking comfort from each other; 4) seeking sex from each other; and 5) creating a home that is a haven from which to venture into the world for all of the other things we do in life.

The really short version of these five things: put each other first. Help each other feel safe and secure.

More to come on this topic.

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