1. Respect is more important than love
2. Checking in about the Relationship
3. Not taking each other for granted
4. Protecting quality time
5. Letting go of the small stuff
6. Making amends, owning your behavior
7. Working on your sex life
8. Actively create a future together

Video Transcription

Hello, my name is Sevin Philips. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist and I’ve been working with couples for many years. During this time, I have found 8 key principles that really help in creating a healthy, long-lasting relationship.

If you’re dating or you’re new in a relationship, these principles are excellent for developing a foundation for the relationship you want.

And if you’ve been in a relationship for a while, even if you’re having challenges in that relationship, these are the principles to practice together to make it better.

The first principle is respect is more important than love. We all know that love is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It’s the thing that drew us together in the beginning. But what happens over time is if we’re disrespectful – we’re bickering, we’re defensive, we cut each other off, we start name calling, whatever the disrespect is – we erode our love over time.
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East Bay, Berkeley Relationship Counseling Center (Couples Counseling Therapy)

Do you keep ending up with people who are not good for you? Yes, it’s true the person you are picking is behaving poorly.  Since we cannot change someone else’s behavior, we must examine our own patterns in picking the wrong person. In doing this, we can begin to conceptualize healthy relationships and hold that as our new standard.

Unhealthy Relationships:

1. We mistake love for physical attraction, neediness and the need to rescue or be rescued. (Examine how your desperation effects your perception)
2. We choose emotionally and physically unavailable people in relationships. (Examine your fear of intimacy)
3. We pick people who treat us poorly by being punishing, critical, controlling or demeaning. (Examine your low self-esteem.)
4. We lose interest in our own personal interests and activities and become enmeshed with the one person and their interests.  (Examine your boundaries.)
5. We stay in and return to unhealthy relationships. (Examine your fear of loneliness.)
6. We begin sexual relationships or become emotionally attached without really knowing someone.  (Examine your boundaries.)
7. We fantasize about who we think someone is and then are crushed when they fall short of that fantasy.  (Examine what is reality vs. fantasy)

Healthy Relationships:

1. When something is wrong we can talk about it.
2. We encourage each other to be better people.
3. Having separate interests and friends isn’t a threat.
4. We can be vulnerable about feelings with some degree of safety.
5. We can handle difficult situations as a team.
6. We both are dedicated to spending quality time with each other.
7. Trust builds through our growing capacity to be honest with one another.

Remember unhealthy patterns are necessary to learn and grow!

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San Francisco – Relationship Counseling Center – Couples Therapy

If we are on the computer too long our partners can feel a little left out. Even worse so if they are talking to us while we multi-task online. This article is meant to be a reminder to us all, ‘We need to be mindful of our boundaries between business and personal time spent online and with our families or loved ones.” You may not classify yourself as an internet addict, however most of us can admit, at some level, our gadgets and attention online can and do interfere with our relationships.

Here are some warning signs that your time spent online is getting in the way of your relationships:
1. Surfing the web becomes a more powerful draw than spending time with family or friends.
2. Paying more attention to gadgets than what is happening in real life.
3. Fiddling with your mobile device while on a date.
4. Checking social networking sites, emails or feeds obsessively.
5. People feel hurt when you are talking with them and clicking away on the computer at the same time.
6. Gaming more than 1-2 hours a day
7. Texting or checking email while driving

Help finding the balance
1. Define where work ends and personal life begins, especially for those of us who are online for a living.
2. Set limits to checking email and visiting social sites.
3. Define inappropriate times to use technology.
4. Set a boundary with yourself if your work expects you to monitor business communications outside of work.
5. If your girlfriend/boyfriend, partner or friend is talking to you while online, stop what you’re doing and give them your full attention or tell them that you need to finish up and get back to them later.
6. Never text or check email while driving, even though it is tempting.
7. If your ‘numbing out’ with technology, come back to your life and face the issues you’re avoiding.
8. Stay away from texting or IMing while you’re newly dating someone. It’s too easy to be misunderstood by someone who doesn’t really know you yet.
I suggest you try some of these practices in your daily life for a week’s time. If it doesn’t enrich your relationships, you can always go back to your old life.

By Sevin Philips, MFT

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Love is an amazing event that grows between two people. You can love someone and yet at times be disrespectful and unloving towards each other. This cycle is heart-wrenching and can erode love quicker than anything. The cycle begins with a person in the relationship feeling hurt, unloved or disrespected and leads to this person feeling justified in their poor behavior. .
Relationship Advice:
We all have the right to be treated with respect no matter what. We all have inherent value and worth.
1. Two people agree that it is unacceptable to be disrespectful.
2. Agree that time-outs are OK. (Walk away in a good way)
3. Wait twenty four hours to talk again about issues.
*Many people find that after 24 hours the original issue isn’t as important as remembered.

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Sevin Philips gives guidance on starting a marriage. Couples Counseling advice for relationships.

Transcription
Hello, my name is Sevin Phillips. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’m here to talk about premarital counseling and really give you the things that I bring up in session with people who are starting their lives together. It’s a great way to fine tune your relationship and be set up for success. It’s a great way to take care of future bumps in the road and ensure that you will have a better chance at going through those things together in a good way.

The first one is pretty obvious: communication. We all have a different style of communicating. Some of us don’t want to rock the boat so we tend to withhold information and don’t want to bring up hard talk about subjects. Some of us are more reactive.

Whatever it is where ever you are in your partnership, you want to make sure you guys can, when these things happen, have some sort of way to talk these through together so they don’t go under the surface and cause you trouble later on.
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Los Angeles, Beverly Hills – Relationship Counseling Center – Couples Counseling Therapy

Video Transcription

Hello, my name is Sevin Philips. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist and I’m here to talk about conflict avoidance.

Some of us, in relationships, are uncomfortable with having conflict, with upsetting our partner, with having to deal with the fallout of sharing stuff that’s just difficult to talk about. So we learn to hold it in and not say it.

In the short-term, we win out, right? There’s no conflict.

But, in the long-term, and what most people don’t know is the curse of it is that it causes a lot more damage to the relationship by not expressing your needs. By not going through the conflict earlier on, you have much more conflict later on.

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Normal and valid experiences:
• Overwhelming grief and sadness catches us off guard
• Emotional ups and downs lead us to feel like we are going crazy
• Concern with over-burdening our loved ones with our sadness and grief
• If you where the one who didn’t have a choice in ending the relationship you are left feeling powerless, betrayed, abandoned and sometimes resentful for not getting a chance to work it out
• Everything changes at once, including relationships with friends, in laws, moving, finances and changes in the family unit.
• The hopes and dreams we shared with our partner no longer exits, leaving many of us questioning who we are and where we are going.

Suggestions:

1. Read the Book- Rebuilding: When your relationship ends, by Bruce Fisher
2. Watch out for isolation: force yourself to create weekly events to show up to (workouts, friends, classes )
3. Join a support group of people going through the same thing

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San Francisco – Relationship Counseling Center – Couples Therapy

7. Working on your sex life

8. Actively create a future together

Video Transcription Advice

Hello, my name is Sevin Philips and I’m here to talk about the 8 principles for creating a healthy relationship.

Principle 7 is working on your sex life. Many of us have a myth that if we have to talk about our sex life or if we have to work on our sex life that means there’s something inherently wrong with our sex. And it’s not necessarily true if you think about it.

You’re constantly getting to know yourself. I don’t care how old you are; there’s always more to explore in your own sexuality.

And if you’re with somebody for 20, 30 or 50 years, things are going to happen that are going to change how you feel about sex. What used to turn you on isn’t going to turn you on in the future. You need some sort of way to talk about this with your partner if you want to maintain and have a healthy sex life for a long period of time.

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North Bay, Mill Valley – Relationship Counseling Center – Couples Counseling Therapy

5. Letting go of the small stuff
6. Making amends, owning your behavior

Video Transcription Advice– Couples Counseling Therapy

Hello, my name is Sevin Philips and I’m here to talk about the 8 principles for creating a healthy marriage.

Principle 5 is letting go of the small stuff. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the dishes, it’s the “You’re always late,” and even asking your partner to change forever and they haven’t done it and you get really steamed up about it. It’s that stuff.

I know there will be things in your relationship that will be very important to you that you’ll need to stand up for and ask your partner for their support or their help. However, I want you to really choose your battles. Some of the stuff we need to be willing to let go of if we’re going to be happy with somebody and live our lives with them.

Life is very short, and if you’re getting a lot from your partner, they’re the person you want to spend your life with, be willing to live with some of this stuff. They probably have to learn to live with some stuff that you have as well.

Principle 6 is making amends and taking responsibility for your own behavior. When you’re hurt in an argument or in a relationship, sometimes we don’t want to make amends. We feel wronged and we feel justified. That’s a very dangerous mindset. I’m asking you to turn this around. In other words, take responsibility for your own behavior. It’s the only thing you can take responsibility for. Even if he or she started it, if you end up finishing it, make amends for that. You’d be amazed how contagious and infectious humility is.

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Los Angeles, Beverly Hills – Relationship Counseling Center – Couples Counseling Therapy

Principle #3 Not taking each other for granted
Principle #4 Protecting quality time

Video Transcription – Couples Counseling Therapy

Hello, my name is Sevin Philips. I’m here to talk about the 8 principles for creating a healthy marriage. This is video 2.

Principle 3 is not taking each other for granted. It’s a very easy thing to do, especially the longer you’ve been with somebody, you just stop appreciating how you support one another on a daily basis.

Remember in the beginning of the relationship you might’ve been paying attention and noticing what the person was doing for you that felt really good? You’d say that. “Wow, I love when you do that” or “Thanks so much for doing the dishes. I was really tired.”

Whatever the small and seemingly insignificant comments are, they have great impact on one another. Especially the longer you’ve been with one another, to know the other person appreciates you really encourages you to want to do more.

So I ask that you install this no matter where you are in your relationship. Appreciate each other often.

Principle 4 is protecting quality time. You might remember when you were dating when you were looking forward to seeing the other person. You knew the other person was holding that spot, that date night, as important. You just felt really good about that.

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