6) Negatively compare your partner out loud to your previous spouse or partners.
7) Expect your sex life to be like it was when you were dating or when you were eighteen.
Ignore or insensitively handle your partner’s requests concerning what excites them.
9) Have your children sleep in the same bed as you or stay up so late that sex is guaranteed not to happen.
10) Don’t work on your communication and affection in the rest of your marriage.
11) Don’t prioritize your own needs because that way you’re guaranteed to be  too exhausted and stressed out to make love.

Did I miss anything?

Here are a few recommendations when you start to get upset:

* Breathe slowly and deeply.

* Pay attention to your self-talk. Don’t catastrophize or generalize. Assume that your spouse or partner has their own valid reasons for their feelings or behaviors, however inexpertly expressed.

* Use a soothing tone when you talk to yourself, much as you would when trying to calm a distressed child.

* Take a time-out so you can collect your thoughts and give your physiology time to settle. Studies show that once your heart rate goes even 10 beats per minute faster than usual your ability to think begins to decrease.

If you have a very difficult time regulating your emotions in relationships, find a therapist and work on it. Expecting a partner to always be able to soothe you can unfairly burden your relationship.

Shifting Roles During the Economic Downturn

Many parents worry about whether they’re hurting their kids by fighting in front of them. Join Dr. Coleman on View from the Bay as he discusses the Do’s and Don’ts!

The holidays elict strong feelings about family — hopeful, regretful or homicidal. And Thanksgiving is one of the Big Boys — a nondenominational, bipartisan, school-excused, frequent-flyer, triglyceride-grabbing holiday that can act as a gaping black hole for family feelings and memories.
For many people, the tender images touted by Madison Avenue and the television networks generate intense feelings of sadness, loneliness, shame, guilt or anger. These media-generated, picture-perfect, feel-good families can underscore the disparity between the relationships people have with their parents and the relationships they wish they had.

Around the holidays, unresolved family issues tend to get hotter than a pan of jewel yams, because they keep us from being as close as we want to be to our families. Well, we may want to be estranged from our particular family — but we want to be a member of some family where we feel loved, respected and appreciated.

Children carry the memory of hurt or anger from family relationships well into adulthood. Many people stay away from their parents or visit them reluctantly, bracing themselves to swallow, ignore or fight over issues that have haunted them for years. Some, with time, acceptance or the help of therapy, are able to make peace with what they didn’t get — and never will — from their parents. In other families, where the parents are healthy enough to address their mistakes and change their behavior, relationships can become stronger and more resilient.
Parenting is a science of approximations. What works magically for the first child may be irrelevant for the next. Some parents are great with certain types of kids and clueless with others — better with boys than girls, better with girls than boys, better with cats than either one. I was more patient with my daughter than I am with my twin sons — her nature was calm and introspective, which freed up time for playing, talking or reading. My boys are loud, rowdy and constantly in motion; a larger percentage of my parental reserves goes toward containing and corralling them so they don’t disassemble our house and build a skateboard ramp out of the spare parts.

None of us are perfect as parents, and all of us wound our children to some degree or another. Ideally, we try to pass on as many good things as we can, but, inevitably, we pass on some of our problems as well.
It takes a healthy parent to listen to an adult child’s anger or hurt about the mistakes the parent made and not feel undone by it. And it takes a mature child to feel confident enough to tell a parent what he or she doesn’t like about the relationship. Parents often feel betrayed when their kids criticize them, no matter how warranted the criticism. They frequently react by getting defensive or by accusing the child of being ungrateful. This counter-blame is a way to block out feeling unappreciated, sad or guilty. Unfortunately, it usually confirms the adult child’s worst fears and sets the clock back for getting the relationship onto a healthy track.

Some parents, whether they admit it or not, are responsible for parenting transgressions that are extremely harmful to their children. Child abuse, incest, alcoholism or drug addiction are a few of the more egregious examples. However, people are often hurt by their parents for reasons that aren’t obvious to others. Something that may look trivial from the outside can be suffocating or damaging to the person who lives inside that family. “My mother had a pretty low standard of parenting,” a friend once told me. “Tell your children that you love them and don’t beat them. My father didn’t, so he was a success in her eyes. And everybody loved my father because he was really funny and outgoing. They never saw his subtle, day-to-day humiliations of us.”
People who grow up in families like this — where the deficits in the parenting are less overt — don’t know they’re being denied the small day-to-day acts of encouragement and involvement that create a person, layer by precious layer. As adults, they don’t understand why they feel sad or inadequate, or can’t apply themselves to things they value, or choose relationships with people who are harmful to them. They don’t understand why they don’t want to see their parents or feel so lousy after they do.

It’s common in psychotherapy to hear people berate themselves for feeling hurt and angry over childhood wounds they are barely able to identify. “It’s not like I was beaten or anything,” is a frequent refrain. “So my parents were distant and never told me that they loved me. Lots of people have worse problems than me. That’s not a reason for me to be depressed.” But for many people, it is.
Even for well-intentioned parents, pitfalls abound. One of the cruelest ironies of parenting is that we can do so much harm even when we are trying to do our best.

An example of this is when parents damage the relationship with their children by trying not to make the same mistakes their parents made. One of my colleagues grew up in a commune in the ’60s. “I was given a ton of freedom because my parents were rebelling against their parents’ conservatism. They were worried that discipline and limits would destroy my innocence and creativity. I remember asking if I could smoke pot with them when I was 10, and they said, `You decide. If you think that it’s a good idea, then it’s a good idea.’ I was 10 years old! How would I know what a good idea was?
“Now that I’m a parent, I’m super strict. My kids practically need permission to blink, and they resent me for it, but it’s better than what I had.”
Maybe. But adopting a parenting style at the opposite extreme of our childhood experience can create other problems. One couple, for example, risked their lives to come to America so that their children could take advantage of opportunities they never had. They constantly harassed their children to do better, and loudly criticized their efforts and achievements. If the children performed poorly in school, they berated them. As a result, their kids were burdened with strong feelings of worthlessness and guilt when they became adults.
These parents did the best they could, given what they knew. But fearing that their children would suffer in poverty, as they had, made them blind to the harm they were causing.

So should their children, now adults, forgive and forget?
Sure, if they can. But there is so much pressure in our culture to “get over it” and “move on” and “grow up” that many people aren’t allowed to look back long enough to grieve what they didn’t get from their parents without someone calling them immature. They end up blaming themselves for inadequacies and conflicts without understanding how those problems came to be. And if they’re blaming themselves for all of their problems, they may not be ready to forgive their parents. Forgiveness can only come when we know, in our cranberry-colored blood, that we didn’t deserve to be treated badly, no matter what our parents’ intentions.

Yet sometimes, the worst possible betrayals can be healed. In my experience of working with families who are trying to reconcile, the best outcomes occur when adult children are able to talk about their experience in the family and the parents are willing to admit to the possibility that they caused harm.
Children — even grown-up children — need to feel like their parents can accept the full range of their feelings. Listening without being defensive is one of the most crucial things a parent can do. It shows that we care enough about our kids to take their feelings and experiences seriously, no matter how unflattering or painful it is for us to hear them.

This is not easy for most parents to do, and it’s rarely pleasant. It’s an especially tall order to accept, with love and grace, the anger of a child who has an incorrect or partial picture of a parent at the time a transgression took place. Conversely, for parents who know they were at fault, there is the added weight of managing their own guilt and sorrow on top of their child’s hurt and anger. It takes strength and courage to face that we have hurt someone so important to us. But like it or not, it’s part of the job we parents sign up for when we create a child.
Parents have a right to have their perspective heard. There are separate realities in a family, and sometimes this is most strongly reflected in the difference between a child’s view of the parents’ behavior and the parents’ view of themselves. Airing this perspective, however, shouldn’t be done as a way to prove the child wrong. It should be done after there has been considerable demonstration on the part of the parents that they have correctly heard what their child has said, and that they are open to making efforts to address that hurt.

All parents do the best they can given what they know and what they have to draw upon. However, it’s important for both the parent and the adult child to recognize that this is where the discussion should begin, not end.

As children, we don’t get to choose the family we grow up with. But as adults, we get to decide who we want to have or not have in our lives. Being a member of a family is often a challenge, even in the best of circumstances. If we are able to make peace with our family, so much the better. If not, it’s our job to surround ourselves with people who treat us the way that we want and need to be treated.
Many people are confused about whether to blame themselves or their parents, whether to forgive or not forgive, whether being mad is infantile or an appropriate labeling of responsibility. We start out believing our parents know everything and slowly begin to see what they know and what they don’t — if we’re lucky.

Hopefully, our parents are willing to admit their mistakes and hear what it was like for us to be a child or a teenager or an adult in their homes. As parents, hopefully, we have children who are willing to forgive us for the hurt we caused when we were too tired, too frustrated or too selfish to do a better job. Hopefully we can forgive ourselves if they won’t. And hopefully, we are secure in the knowledge that we deserve to have people around us — whether family or friends — who care about our worries, value our friendship and take joy in our happiness.
Having that — at any time of year — is a reason to give thanks.

If your spouse is critical, verbally abusive, or an overall poor communicator, the first thing you need to do is get his or her attention.

Taking a “time out” from a fight is a great way to give yourselves time to clam down and collect your thoughts.

Dear Reader , How to discipline is a question that most parents are struggling with these days. How strict is “too strict?” Are children traumatized when we raise our voices or lose our tempers? What’s the difference between being a sympathetic parent and letting our kids rule the roost?

Part of our parental confusion has to do with the cultural shifts that have occurred within the last thirty to forty years. These changes have made our households less adult centered and more child centered. When I was growing up, maybe one or two of my not-so- inspired drawings would be affixed to our Frigidaire at any point in time. These days, whole houses (mine included) have become shrines to our children’s productions. Every time I go into the refrigerator, I risk knocking off photos and burying myself with their artistic productions of the past 3 years. When they were toddlers, our living room rivaled the showcase at Toys-R-Us. Unfortunately, I never bought their stock because I figured they had enough of my money.

We’re a lot more focused on our kids than prior generations and most of those changes have been for the better. But not all. Parents are worried, too worried, about the harm they will do if they set appropriate limits. They’re also too worried about the effect of the occasional loss of patience. Parents of young children are even more vulnerable to losing their tempers because the stresses are much more intense. In my household, the sheer volume of sound emitted by my sons constant vocalizations, whether it’s fighting or playing, is enough to decrease my ability to respond as well as I’d sometimes like. I certainly am more impatient with my twins than I was with my daughter. Part of it has to do with temperament; she was generally compliant and easy to manage. The sound of the word “no” appeared to find some receptor sites in her young and developing brain.

In our attempt to be sensitive, many of us have lost control over our own homes. Many parents are worried that being a figure of authority in the home is tantamount to the dreaded “authority figure” of other eras- an ogre who is concerned only with obedience at the expense of doing damage to the child. I often see couples who still have their 3 year old sleeping in the beds with them despite the fact that this prevents them from having a meaningful sex life, it disrupts the couple’s sleep, and gets in the way of their having quiet time together as adults at the end of the day. When I ask why they are letting their child dominate their life they say, “He doesn’t want to sleep in his own room. He cries when we move him.”

I am sympathetic. However, when we let our children dictate such critical arenas as sleep and sex, we are doing a disservice to those children. We are telling them that they are more important than we are and this can be a problem when they become teenagers and adults. It can create people who are self-centered and insensitive to other’s needs. It creates people who believe that what they want should always come first.
As parents, we sometimes let our kids have too much rein when we are feeling guilty about not spending sufficient time with them or when we have irrational ideas about the harm of limiting or redirecting a child’s behavior.

Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D. writes about the guilt that today’s parents feel concerning the lack of time they spend with their children. She notes in her book, “Spoiling Childhood”, that as a result of this, “parents try to make sure that every waking moment of the child’s life in the parent’s presence is filled with stimulation, fulfillment, and access to a parent’s undivided attention.” In two parent homes, “Four hands rather than two feed baby. Two players, rather than one, offer themselves as game mates in a Candyland game.” Parents thus are always “on” and burning out a little more with each passing day.
But setting limits is ultimately good for everybody. We have all been to homes where the parents let the child or children constantly interrupt the conversation or make so much noise that meaningful adult conversation is impossible. My boys seem the most interested in my undivided attention as soon as I have friends over. I guess they don’t want to share me. Fair enough. But, it’s important that they learn that I have needs too, and one of those is to have a period of uninterrupted conversation with my friends.

It doesn’t mean that children should be seen and not heard. But they need to learn, through our hopefully patient, loving, and firm style, that we have the right to a life that doesn’t always intersect with theirs. It’s their job to try to get as much from us as we can possibly give. It’s our job to know what is enough.
AVOIDING BURNOUT
Burnout occurs when our normal methods of coping become overwhelmed. It is a physical and psychological state that results from extreme stress and exhaustion. Parents of young children are more vulnerable to burnout because there is more to our physical and mental workload. More diapers, more nursing, more bottles, more laundry, more toys, more crying, more talking, and more fights to settle. There is also quite a bit less with our dear youngsters which can lead to burnout. Less sleep, less money, less downtime, less quiet, less order and less predictability.
Psychological Symptoms: Burnout is characterized by feeling chronically overwhelmed and exhausted. It can also cause depression, anxiety, irritability and anger. It addition, it can lead to feelings of shame and isolation.

Physical Signs: Burnout may cause decreased immune function, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, insomnia, and appetite disturbance. Burned Out Before The Kids Arrive? A pregnancy with twins makes mothers more vulnerable to gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension, pre-term labor, caesarian sections, increased nausea and exhaustion in first tri-mester, increased chance of bed rest from twentieth week on, hospitalization and pre-maturity. Thus, mothers of twins may begin their child rearing years burned out from the stresses of carrying a twin pregnancy.

Many parents of twins have suffered through years of infertility before they have children. While the birth of children is a relief from the sadness and trauma of infertility, it can also leave parents feeling guilty if they feel burdened and exhausted. “We spent so much money and time trying to have children and now I’m too burned out to even enjoy them. I feel ridiculous complaining or saying I need more help because I know we’re lucky to even have kids.”

Parents of today are more vulnerable to burnout because they’re much more anxious about being parents. In part, this is because they are better educated than any other generation on how their behavior advances or inhibits their children’s physical or emotional growth. In the past thirty years, there has been a cultural shift from an adult centered household to a child-centered household. On the one hand, this has led to many positive changes in our society. There is increased awareness that we can do a lot to increase the self-esteem and long-term well being of our children. There is a ready source of information on the causes of alcoholism, drug addiction, learning and attentional problems, and delinquency. The cultural shift towards recognizing the rights and needs of children have resulted in important social changes, such as the laws against child abuse which were first enacted in 1964.

At the same time, the world has become a more dangerous place. The increase of drugs and guns make raising children seem more fraught than it once was. As a result of the increased awareness about childrens’ needs and the increased dangers, parents of today are much more anxious about being parents. In my work, I constantly hear parents’ fears that their children will feel neglected or that a small mistake or misjudgment will have lasting consequences. There is enormous anxiety that their children will miss out on an opportunity that will place them at a social or educational disadvantage. These are conscientious, dedicated parents. However, the desire to protect their kids from harm coupled with a desire to make them happy, increases parental vulnerability to burnout. This guilt and worry leads to burnout because it means parents aren’t taking the kind of time for themselves or their marriages that would protect them from stress. They believe they should give to their children no matter how exhausted or needy they feel. And often we do have to give no matter what. But we also have to know when it’s okay not to give to our children and when to give to ourselves.

Recommendations for Avoiding Burnout: 
Manage your guilt: Strive to understand your beliefs about how you should be as a parent. Do you have problems leaving the children with babysitters, taking naps when they’re napping, or finding time to nurture yourself and your relationship? Do you worry constantly that some ill will befall your children? If the answer is yes to any of these, you may be burdened with irrational guilt or irrational worry about your kids which could make you more vulnerable to burnout. 
Take down time (anyway): Beg, borrow or barter with your partner or friends, but make sure you get time to replenish yourself. Children are benefitted by parents who take care of themselves. Even if your kids object, through tears or complaints when you leave the house, they will nonetheless benefit from your taking time to recharge your batteries. Don’t be so tuned in to their needs that you ignore your own. 
Make sure your down time isn’t spent with errands or busy work. Try to make your down time special. In the “Artist’s Way”, by Julia Cameron, she suggests people take “Artist’s Dates.” This is where you do something that replenishes you creatively and spiritually. 
Manage Your Stress: There is now a solid body of research that shows the benefits of exercise, yoga, and meditation on combatting stress. Most cities have community centers where you can learn how to meditate or do yoga. Even twenty minutes a day of exercise, meditation or yoga can make an important change in your mental outlook and well-being. 
Take Time With Your Partner: Your relationship can either be an ally against stress or a major contributor to it. Try to have one night or afternoon a week with just you and your partner to nurture your marriage. Don’t lose sight of the things you used to do before kids. Don’t be such a dedicated parent that you become a neglectful wife or husband. 
Ask For What You Need: Whether it’s with friends, family or partner, burnout happens the fastest when we don’t ask for what we need from those who can help us. 
Get help and support: Isolation can lead to depression, shame, and anxiety. Stay in touch with the people you like and care about. Tell them what you’re going through. Many parents (mothers in particular) feel embarrassed or ashamed if they feel overwhelmed by their children or resentful of them. This makes it harder to reach out for fear of being criticized or condemned. Try not to compare yourself to other parents who seem to be able to parent effortlessly and do a million other things. You should strive to have as much help as you can to feel good. Parenting twins is hard enough. It’s hardest when you don’t get the help and support you completely deserve.

There are several steps to keep in mind when fighting fair. It is important to explain your point of view to your partner in a calm and respectful way in order to keep the argument civilized.