How to Forgive: Introducing Our Forgiveness Video Series

After painful experiences, we often wonder, “How do I move on? How do I heal from all that has happened?” In my experience as a couples therapist, people sometimes tell me, “I don’t know how to forgive.”

In this 5-part video series on how to forgive, I summarize some excellent counsel from Janis Abrahms-Spring’s book How Can I Forgive You? Also, I share some of my own observations from nearly 20 years as a Marriage & Family Therapist. In the coming four videos and blog post summaries, I’ll first share some ideas about what doesn’t work. I will then share some observations about how to navigate forgiveness and relational healing in a healthy way. We need ways to approach forgiveness that allow for safety, dignity, self-respect, and authentic growth. To learn more, watch our 2-minute video above or keep reading!

If you’re asking whether marriage counseling works, you’re probably not just looking for statistics.

You’re wondering whether it could work for you — for your relationship, with its specific history and particular weight. You may have already tried other things: long conversations that went nowhere, books that made sense in theory but not at midnight after another argument, a period of quiet truce that didn’t last. And somewhere underneath all of that is a question you might be afraid to ask too directly: Is it too late for us?

It isn’t a small thing to hope. When a relationship has been struggling for a while, hope itself can feel like a risk. So before you invest it, you want an honest answer.

Here’s ours — informed by decades of working with couples in therapy.

Attachment Styles: a Key to Understanding Your Relationships

Attachment is a buzz word you may have heard before, perhaps in Psych 101 class or mentioned in parenting books. But did you know that discovering what your and your partner’s attachment styles are can unlock the key to a greater understanding of your needs and theirs? Understanding your attachment style can be instrumental in unlocking love in your relationships.

Saying sorry is not that hard. Not when you’re pulling out your carry-on from the overhead compartment and you bump that unsuspecting passenger. Or when your colleague has been waiting for that email from you since yesterday morning. Not even when you’ve just cut off someone because you were in a hurry and they make sure to let their horn tell you how they feel.

But when it comes to those who live and interact with us more intimately, apologizing is one of the hardest things to do, much less do effectively. There is a price to letting others into the limited confines of our heart space—we will bump into each other. Given the inevitably of these collisions, I’d like to speak to a few principles outlined by Harriet Lerner, PhD, that can help in making effective apologies. The following principles are taken from her interview with Brene Brown. Continue reading →

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
– John Updike

There’s a quiet kind of relationship pain that doesn’t announce itself with a dramatic argument or a clear breaking point. It creeps in slowly. One day you realize you’ve stopped looking forward to your partner coming home. You’re not angry, exactly. You’re just… indifferent. You’re tolerating your partner more than connecting with them. You’re getting through the evenings together. You’re managing the logistics of a shared life. But the warmth? The curiosity about each other? The feeling that this person is someone you chose?

That’s harder to find.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone — and it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. It means it’s doing what long-term relationships often do: drifting toward comfort or complacency and away from connection, without anyone really noticing until it’s been a while.

The good news is that drift is reversible. But it requires something most couples don’t expect: intentionality.

Here’s something that helps to understand: what looks like indifference on the surface is rarely actually indifference underneath. Most couples who feel like roommates aren’t falling out of love — they’re experiencing what happens when core attachment needs go unmet for too long. The needs that drew you together in the first place — to feel important to each other, to know your partner is truly there for you, to be loved for who you are rather than what you provide — don’t disappear over time. They go quiet. And when they do, the relationship starts to feel like logistics rather than love. Recognizing that is often the first real step toward something different.

In Brene Brown’s book Daring Greatly, she speaks of when she was conducting research with a group of students about vulnerability and the room became lively as they discussed how uncomfortable sex can be when you’re worried about how you look. Continue reading →

You weren’t looking for this. Maybe you found a thread of messages that didn’t make sense. Maybe something felt off for months and you finally looked. Maybe your partner told you, and you’ve been trying to piece together what’s real ever since.

Whatever brought you here, what you’re feeling is real — the disorientation, the sick feeling in your stomach, the questions that won’t stop coming. And the thing you’re trying to understand — whether what happened actually counts, whether you’re overreacting, whether your relationship can survive it — those questions deserve real answers.

Virtual infidelity is no longer rare. The ease of private communication, the intimacy of a phone that’s always within reach, and the blurry lines of online connection have made virtual affairs one of the most common — and most misunderstood — forms of betrayal. This post is for anyone trying to make sense of what happened and figure out what comes next.

If your partner had an emotional affair, you may be struggling to explain why it hurts as much as it does. There was no physical contact. No hotel room. And yet something feels broken — a trust that ran deeper than you may have realized until it was gone.

Emotional affair recovery is possible. But most couples who try to heal on their own find themselves stuck in the same painful loop: one partner pushing for answers, the other becoming defensive, and both walking away feeling more alone than before. Understanding what keeps couples stuck — and what actually breaks the cycle — is where healing begins. Sometimes what keeps couples stuck isn’t conflict at all — it’s the opposite. One partner grants a quick, surface-level peace just to stop the pain, without either of you doing the real reckoning recovery actually requires. That pattern is a form of counterfeit forgiveness, and it’s worth understanding before it becomes the whole strategy.