"I often invite my clients to google "attachment styles" or listen to a podcast about self-esteem issues or shame. Clients can then maybe glean some insights into their own stuck points or interpersonal conflicts, naming and taming some triggering issues. Having knowledge of psychological language in this way can be an extension or form of knowing oneself. [...] Psychoeducation can also be useful in specifying or articulating a confused communication pattern in a couple. [...]

 A little psychoeducation gleaned from online sources can quickly turn into a means by which to diagnose your spouse, usually as a way to circumvent your own responsibility in a conflict situation. While there may indeed be some evidence in your informal diagnosis, most of us are not clinicians and diagnosticians, and diagnoses take time, precision, and expertise. [...]

My general rule when I encounter this clinically is to recommend keeping this psychological suspicion to oneself (or sharing it with a personal therapist) but acting empathetically with this in mind. For instance, if you suspect that your partner is, indeed, an avoidant type who stonewalls and withdraws, try to find ways to soften and include them, to help them "unzip their snowsuit," and better communicate. Using therapy speak in this context will most likely encourage further withdrawal, more protective barriers, and weaken trust. Your assumption may be correct, but this correctness will not necessarily improve your relationship. Being right in this instance rarely leads to better interpersonal outcomes."

"In a study published last month in the journal Emotion, researchers found that people who habitually judge negative feelings — such as sadness, fear and anger — as bad or inappropriate have more anxiety and depression symptoms and feel less satisfied with their lives than people who generally perceive their negative emotions in a positive or neutral light. 

The findings add to a growing body of research that indicates people fare better when they accept their unpleasant emotions as appropriate and healthy, rather than try to fight or suppress them. 

[...] 

 When we perceive our emotions as bad, we pile more bad feelings onto our existing ones, which makes us feel even worse, said Emily Willroth, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis and a co-author of the new study. It is likely to increase both the intensity of our negative feelings and the amount of time we suffer from them. Instead of having a feeling naturally pass after a few minutes, “you might be ruminating on it an hour later,” she said.

Avoiding or suppressing feelings can be counterproductive, too. In a small clinical trial, researchers asked people to put one of their hands into an ice water bath and to either accept their feelings of pain or to suppress them. Those who tried to suppress their feelings reported more pain and couldn’t endure the ice water for as long as those who accepted their discomfort. Other research has linked emotional suppression with an increased risk for mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety..."

"Thoughts are what we use to process information, make decisions, and understand the world around us, but they aren't fixed aspects of who we are.

Our "conscious mind" is what allows us to observe the automatic thoughts that are based on past learning.

Mindfulness, meditation, limiting distractions, journaling, and good sleep are ways we can connect more to our conscious mind."

[...]

"When you identify too closely with your thoughts, you can become trapped in them. You can become attached to certain beliefs or ideas, which can lead to suffering when those beliefs are challenged or proven wrong. You can also become overwhelmed by negative or intrusive thoughts, which can impact your mental health and well-being.

 However, when you recognize that you are not your thoughts, you can create distance from your thinking. You can observe your thoughts without getting caught up in them, which can help you to stay calm, focused, and centered in the midst of life's challenges. You can also become more aware of the patterns and tendencies of your thinking, which can help you to break free from unhelpful or harmful patterns of thought."

"...Perceptual psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim argued that over time, society has come to overvalue cognition at the expense of perception. For Arnheim, cognition is the mind's manipulation of concepts resulting from direct perception of objects, people, images, etc. He contends that cognition is bound to perception; therefore, historically determined dichotomies between seeing and thinking, perception and reason, are damaging to full cognitive development. According to Arnheim, verbal language, which has come to represent cognition and imagery, tends to be perceptual and is deficient in the sense that the verbal is actually an abstracted aural symbol that, lacks a referent. For example, the printed word "cat" does not visually resemble a cat (the image lacks any consistent symbol, i.e., a cat is a cat, because it is identified as such via language). In order to cognitively process the idea of "cat," we must have an idea of what a cat looks like. In order to conceive such concepts, a person must create a visual representation utilizing symbolic imagery. Therefore, verbal language and visual imagery are complementary and provide what the other lacks. This relationship strengthens both the perception and the resultant cognition. Arnheim claims that once this connection is realized the need for art to have a central role in general education will be evident." In the meantime, he contends that the dismissal of perception, and subsequently of the visual, has resulted in visual illiteracy, a claim more recently echoed by Luc Pauwels. Visual illiteracy has been detrimental to countless students who have been made to ignore perception at the cost of their cognitive development, and ultimately their success in school and society..."

Steven C. Hayes is the Nevada Foundation Professor in the Behavior Analysis program of the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. The author of 44 books and nearly 600 scientific articles, his career has focused on human language and cognition, and their application to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman recently hosted him on The Psychology Podcast to discuss how the science of mindfulness is finally catching up to what Buddhism, and other forms of spirituality, knew all along.

"...In a paper recently published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Franklin & Marshall College professor Megan L. Knowles led four experiments that demonstrated lonely people’s tendency to choke when under social pressure. In one, Knowles and her team tested the social skills of 86 undergraduates, showing them 24 faces on a computer screen and asking them to name the basic human emotion each face was displaying: anger, fear, happiness, or sadness. She told some of the students that she was testing their social skills, and that people who failed at this task tended to have difficulty forming and maintaining friendships. But she framed the test differently for the rest of them, describing it as a this-is-all-theoretical kind of exercise. 

 Before they started any of that, though, all the students completed surveys that measured how lonely they were. In the end, the lonelier students did worse than the non-lonely students on the emotion-reading task — but only when they were told they were being tested on their social skills. When the lonely were told they were just taking a general knowledge test, they performed better than the non-lonely. Previous research echoes these new results: Past studies have suggested, for example, that the lonelier people are, the better they are at accurately reading facial expressions and decoding tone of voice. As the theory goes, lonely people may be paying closer attention to emotional cues precisely because of their ache to belong somewhere and form interpersonal connections, which results in technically superior social skills. 

 But like a baseball pitcher with a mean case of the yips or a nervous test-taker sitting down for an exam, being hyperfocused on not screwing up can lead to over-thinking and second-guessing, which, of course, can end up causing the very screwup the person was so bent on avoiding. It’s largely a matter of reducing that performance anxiety, in other words.."

"Despite our best efforts, the dreams we have for our lives don’t always come to fruition. A relationship may fall apart; aspirations for a career or parenthood may not pan out; chronic illness or injury may limit what we can do.
...
As a first step, simply recognizing that an experience is a painful loss worthy of compassion can go a long way. 

...

Just as it’s important to give ourselves permission to grieve, without an expiration date, it’s equally important to give ourselves permission to be happy, despite the voice that might be in our heads saying that’s inconceivable. 

...

Research suggests that the ability to savor positive experiences, even simple things like spending time in nature or having a good meal, is associated with greater well-being. Savoring involves being present, paying attention to what we’re experiencing, and appreciating the enjoyment it brings us. 

...

We might hope for smooth sailing, but a life with unexpected challenges can also end up being a more meaningful one. Recent research has found that when people think about their lives in ways that resemble the Hero’s Journey, a type of story structure seen in many popular books and movies, they are better able to bounce back in stressful times and feel a greater sense of purpose. 

...

The life we planned may have been a great one, but it was no guarantee of happiness. Even people who get everything they want are not immune to disappointment and regret. What an unexpected life lacks in predictability or ease it can make up for in possibility, including the possibility that against all odds, in ways we never could have foreseen, it ends up being the life we wanted." 

 ~ Juliana Breines Ph.D., Finding Happiness When Life Doesn’t Turn Out as You Planned, Psychology Today

"To keep track of our relationships, our brains create neural maps. The neural map for a marriage or long-term partnership contains detailed information about the beloved, the relationship, and life together. Our brains acquire this information through lived experience.

[...]

Thanks to this neural map, your brain requires very little computing power to navigate life with this person. Instead of each moment being a shock or unexpected surprise, with loads of new negotiations and decisions to make every day, life flows more easily with a rich, filled-in neural map of predictable routines, customary habits, realistic expectations, recognizable presence, and familiar feel. 

[...] 

For many months, even though you know your relationship has changed, your brain’s neural map may lag behind. Your brain favors the implicit knowledge that the partner or loved one is everlasting and won’t update the map just because they haven't been around for a day, or even several months. It requires ample time and a ton of lived experience to absorb the absence, update the predictions, and complete this enormous redraw. In the meantime, the still-outdated areas of your neural map make you think, feel, and act as if your loved one is here, now, and close. Your grief is triggered every time an outdated prediction fails. You ruminate endlessly on what happened and what will become of you. You feel distracted and exhausted."

"...We could almost forgo the acting out of many of our desires if we knew that a partner could express why we mattered to them and could be warm and tender with us in daily life – even if (because of their own intimate history) their relationship to the erotic ran in a different and more invisible direction. Given enough affection between two people, the fact that one of them (for complex reasons) craves to perform certain physical acts – whether with them or even with someone else – and the other one has no appetite need not be a disaster or a terminal threat to the relationship. What is fatal is not so much that our partner can’t enact our desires but that they meet us with defensiveness, coldness, judgement or indifference.

 In order to see whether a relationship may be saved we need to accept that we may not directly be facing a sex issue, but one of underlying distance. It might theoretically be entirely survivable if a partner never sought to have an orgasm with their companion or never fully engaged with a fantasy so long as both parties were able to feel genuinely loved and wanted. The distinction matters because, if we end up splitting, we need to know the real reason: if we persist in thinking the problem is a lack of sex (or not the kind of sex we want) we may misread what we are in essence seeking from another person: we aren’t (as we’re too often taught to think) after the perfect sexual partner, we’re after something yet more critical and often harder to secure: a good enough source of affection and understanding. We might in a next, but better relationship, end up having the same rather negligible quantity of sex but no longer resent the paucity because we have found a raft of other, and perhaps more stable, ways of feeling assured of another’s love...."

"This past summer, a meta-analysis in Frontiers of Immunology looked at changes in gene expression induced by meditation and related practices. The authors, from Coventry University’s Brain, Belief and Behaviour Lab and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, examined 18 different gene-expression studies. These included MBI techniques spanning mindfulness, yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, relaxation response, and breath regulation. The verdict was clear: Yes, meditation practice is indeed capable of reversing the effects of chronic stress, down to the level of our genes."