Relationships shape us, change us, and challenge us.
Emerging research indicates that the quality of our relationships can significantly impact our mental health, and with that in mind, I have created a number of illustrated resources to help individuals, couples, and families grow better, more satisfying relationships.
Through our own personal growth, learning to listen well to others, and engage in conflict well, we can all take steps towards helping our relationships become healthier and more supportive.
Attunement and Containment – along with Rupture and Repair – are key building blocks for relationships that support the formation of healthy attachments. In this article, we’ll dive a little deeper into understanding containment and attunement and how these puzzle pieces fit into the larger concept of forming healthy attachments to the people we care about.
External boundaries are where we bump up against each other (like setting boundaries around our time or how we allow others to treat us), while internal boundaries are where we bump up against ourselves in ways that bring dissonance between competing desires (like wanting to take on a new project but knowing we can’t don’t have the resources to complete it). In this illustration, I tease out some of the nuances between internal and external boundaries.
Good attachments take work, and one of the hardest parts of building and maintaining satisfying and supportive relationships is repairing after rupture (i.e. conflict). It’s so hard, and conflict is so often avoided, that many of us have never experienced really good repair – or the way that it can deepen and strengthen our connection and trust with another person. Rupture is inevitable. Repair, however, takes work.
Pop-culture “wellness” often pathologizes desire. We are promised that if we can ignore physical hunger, meet our own needs emotionally, and keep our sexual desire …
It’s not uncommon for adult siblings to hold very different opinions from one another about the personality of the parents they shared when they were …
Can we take a moment to collectively acknowledge how hard this is right now? With everything going on, we need people more than …
Healthy groups allow every member to express their individuality without that difference being seen by other group members as a threat. That’s differentiation. In a …
This simple illustration is meant to be a visual representation of something that can be hard to understand about therapy: it’s okay to not see …
Below is a sketchnote created from the text of an article titled “Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions” by Robin …
You’ve seen my Halloween themed ghost attachment styles doodles, now here’s the Valentine version! Purchase Valentine Digital PDF: Order A 3-Pack of Psychology Valentines Directly …
Demonstrating our trustworthiness builds relational bridges that self-advertisement cannot. If you sense that your friend, partner, child, client, etc. feels hesitant to trust you, let …
Most psychological measures and scales tend to make us think in black-and-white terms. I like how this adaptation takes the attachment style grid and transforms …
In a culture where “vulnerability” can sometimes feel like relational currency, it’s easy to fall into a trap of telling someone about our trauma stories …
Dr. John Gottman spent 40 years researching marital stability and theorized these “4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” but it only took me a few hours …