You can’t initiate a courageous act of change because the other person will love you for it. The other person may not love you for it, at least not in the short run and possibly never.

When women are taught that mothering is a “career” rather than a relationship, “retirement” becomes an understandable crisis.

“Separateness” does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the “I” within the “we” – the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness.

When another person underfunctions - be it a misbehaved child, a depressed husband, a symptomatic sibling - significant others may become focused on that person. Over time, the focus on the other may increase, whether through blaming, worrying, fixing, bailing out, protecting, pulling up slack, covering up, or simply paying too much attention with too much intensity. To the same extent, the focus on self decreases, with less energy going toward identifying and working on one's own relationship issues and clarifying one's own goals and life plan. When this happens, the underfunctioner will only tend to underfunction more and longer.
We cannot simply decide to deintensify our reactivity and focus on another person's problems. It's not something we can just "do," nor is it something we can pretend. If we try to fake it, our efforts will be short-lived at best, or we may flip from overfocus to reactive distance - the other side of the same coin. We can deintensify our focus on the other only after we find the courage to work on other relationships and issues that we do not want to pay attention to. Each of us has enough to work on for at least several lifetimes. If we move forward with these challenges for self, we can avoid becoming overfocused on and reactive to that other party.

Whenever adults are not actively working to identify and solve their own problems, then the focus on children may be especially intense or children may volunteer to deflect, detour, and act out adult issues in most imaginative ways. Indeed, children tend to inherit whatever psychological business we choose not to attend to.

She was a chronic distancer with her father and a chronic pursuer with men in her love life.

Paradoxically, couples become less able to achieve intimacy as they stay focused on it and give it their primary attention. Real closeness occurs most reliably not when it is pursued or demanded in a relationship, but when both individuals work consistently on their own selves.

What will never change is the will to change and the fear of change.

Is it like a new day every time you look in the mirror?