When our lives don’t turn out exactly how we want them to, men have a certain way of stagnating, or freezing themselves in time. We become like Icemen, psychologically trapped in the confines of our own memories and unable to live in the reality of the present. This inability to contact our lives as they are unfolding now means that life passes us by, and a lot of times we don’t even know it.

Why does this happen Why do we get stuck in time? Is it possible to unfreeze ourselves and start living our lives?

A lot of men stay trapped in periods of their lives that were more glorious: when they were captain of the football team in high school, in their party years in college, in their adolescence. Some guys stay emotionally and psychologically trapped in these periods of their lives because this is when they felt good about themselves and about what they were doing. They were getting acclimated and validation for being a superstar, and the dreary reality of their present lives today doesn’t provide them that same sense of accomplishment or identity boosting.

Who wouldn’t want to relive their glory years? Which guy wouldn’t want to feel good about those points in their lives where things were working well, where they were successful in work or with women, or where they felt really good about themselves?

The problem comes when we stay stuck in this alternate dimension, and never unhook ourselves from those past memories. It’s like we can never make contact with our lives as they are playing out in the present.

A lot of times, our lives are too difficult to deal with, or to even look at. We may be unhappy with our careers or our work, our spouses may be making us miserable, our children may have constantly disappointed us, or we may feel like failures to ourselves. As human beings, it’s to want to avoid pain and suffering, and strive for pleasure. When we get stuck in the past, were living in a faux reality that is out of touch with the present.

The first step to waking up from this disillusionment is to become aware that were actually residing in our memories more than we are in our lives. If we can recognize that, if we can start to shake off the past, no matter how seductive it is over us, we can start to turn to face the reality of our current situations, even if that brings pain, grief, fear or other negative emotions. We may need to deal with people who cause us pain, or with situations, such as work, relationships, or depression, if we start to wake up from living in that alternate reality.

It’s also important to seek out professional help, because it’s difficult to see your situation when you’re smack dab in the middle of it. And, on top of that, if you’ve been living your life in the past, you may need some professional support to help you navigate back to your life.

It’s critical to know that dealing with the pain of the present doesn’t mean you’re fated to live a life of unhappiness and misery. You’re not. Plenty of guys can successfully work through their problems or issues and get to feeling better again while living in their present reality, not in their past. Just because you were a successful student athlete, or popular with the women, or were you stand out in your career, all of those things are fleeting and won’t bring you lifelong happiness. If you start to live more in the present moment, and in your current life as it unfolds today, you’ll learn to ease up on gripping the past four your sense of self-worth and happiness.

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Whether in relationships, at work, or with oneself, there are a multitude of ways to sabotage yourself from getting what you want in your life.

In undermining our own success, we set up scenarios in which we fail, or hold ourselves back unconsciously from what we really want, often out of negative emotions or beliefs that fail to hold up under scrutiny in the real world. In effect, we hold ourselves back, and often don’t know how we do.

If you think you self-sabotage yourself, might any of these things characterize your behavior?

• Constantly beat up on yourself
• Let yourself believe the negative or worst case scenario
• Let others decide for you, including women
• Succumb to and make decisions out of fear
• Prevent relationships from developing because you’ve got walls, armor, or other barriers that keep others out

Lacking in self-support and inner resources, those men who self-sabotage seem to constantly make decisions that are bad for them, or at the least, make them deviate from their own path to success in life.

What does self-sabotage look like?

• Believing you’re no good, or worthless, and then choosing behaviors that align with that belief, like being underemployed, choosing a wife or girlfriend who likes you “enough”
• Not having confidence in yourself and your abilities to have success, whether as successful relationships, good self-esteem, or in one’s professional aspirations
• Attacking others in our lives, and those close to us, because we hide, protect ourselves and fend off from really showing others our genuineness and authentic self.
• Not moving forward, staying stuck, or failing to make good decisions, out of fear of failure, fear of success, low self-esteem, or any number of other reasons.

People are attracted to those guys who are confident and not at war with themselves. Self-saboteurs are in a war with themselves, so it’s going to be difficult to attract healthy, growth-oriented people into the realm or the self-saboteur. Even if we say that we want them in our lives, we may be attracting the wrong kinds of people, whether those be women, jobs, friends or the like.

To want health is different from attracting health: if we’re still at war with ourselves, we end up attracting others (read: intimate partners) that conspire in our self-abuse. And that’s not what we want for ourselves. That’s not how we see our lives as healthy and growth-promoting.

What can you do to stop the saboteur in you?

1. Develop self-support: start a new relationship with yourself by being kind to yourself, getting to know yourself more and work at easing up on yourself.
2. Practice being genuine with others, even if that means letting them inside your fortress a bit
3. Tame the self-critic: Get counseling, journal, channel your anger in other, more productive outlets, get physical exercise, and try meditation to focus the mind. You need to admit to yourself that you and your self-critic are different entities, and that you’re at war with him. most people don’t see this or admit it, and it’s the first step to becoming whole.
4. Understand how you sabotage yourself, Whether through anger, fear, jealousy, insecurity or inferiority. Maybe it’s a mix, or maybe it’s all of them together.
5. Seek out the support of others: Attract heathy people into your life that support your journey of health, not enable it or undermine your health. Yeah, we’ve all got people in our lives that feed the self-sabotaging we do, so reconsider some of those relationships through this process.

People pleasers are more interested in pleasing others than in taking care of their own needs and concerns. They usually say ‘yes’ when they really mean ‘no’, because they’re afraid of letting others down or upsetting them.

Plenty of guys that I talk with fall into this category of people pleasers. They’re the ones that usually are so attentive to the needs of others, most especially intimate partners, that they neglect themselves. People pleasers who spend their time and energy trying to make others happy – to the detriment of their own happiness – are on a crash course for unhappiness.

People pleasers usually end up stuffing their anger, or intermittently exploding on others, or both. Anger and frustration builds up, and, over time, it needs an outlet. It usually comes out periodically, when it should have a ongoing release valve in the form of good communication with others.

Learning to say ‘no’ is essential for people pleasers. This is the hardest part. Saying ‘no’, for people pleasers, risks a rejection by others who people pleasers think don’t want to hear their ‘no’. It’s a risk. In the mind of the people pleaser, it can be terrifying to say ‘no’. But, like many other things, the reality is often quite different from our fantasy. Usually, people can accept the ‘no’ you give them, once you summon the courage up to finally spit it out.

Here are some more tips to stop people pleasing:

1. Draw a line in the sand: Develop healthy boundaries, and learn what you will do, and what you won’t. Assert those boundaries without compromise.
2. Spend less time with people who drain you: “Takers” are attracted to “people pleasers”, and vice versa. Part of recovery from people pleasing is renegotiating friendships that function on you giving and them taking. Relationships need to be about mutual giving and receiving, and if you feel like it’s only one way (going their way!), it may be time to drop the friendship or spend less time with them. Why hang out with takers or energy vampires anyways?
3. Learn what you want: So you can be firm with others and take a stand to get what you want.
4. Don’t be afraid to say ‘no’: You probably won’t lose friends if you try, and if you do, don’t worry – see Tip #2.
5. Communicate more effectively: You don’t need to get angry to communicate to others what you want or don’t want.
6. Know this cycle can be broken: It’ll take time, effort, and a commitment to doing things differently from now on, but it’s changeable.

We learn how to people please at an early age, and just because we’ve been dealing with this for most of our lives, it certainly doesn’t mean we have to continue to. There is help, and recovery is possible. I know. I used to be a people pleaser, and not doing it is a hell of a lot better.

When it comes to dealing with others, learning how to communicate effectively is the single most important tool you can use. Whether it’s with coworkers, service providers, your wife, or your friends, saying what you want to say in the way that you want to say it is critical. In intimate relationships, communication between partners can deepen your relationship together, or it can disrupt it to the point of a breakup or divorce.

For men who have a difficult time accessing their emotions, communication can be difficult. Usually, if were not in touch with our emotional state at the time we’re speaking, words come out wrong, and we usually end up acting in ways we don’t mean – reactively and mindlessly. Learning to access our emotional state in the present moment can transform poor communication skills to superior communication skills. This requires training, and development of personal awareness, about the fluctuating moods and experiences one has from moment to moment by checking in with their body, feeling state for their mood.

Speaking from the “I” perspective (as in “I’m moody for irritable, and I need personal time alone.”), as opposed to blaming or criticizing others, including your wife or girlfriend, turns the table around and automatically creates a better trajectory for delivering the words that you really mean. I can’t think of a quicker way to shut people down than by blaming, scapegoating, criticizing, shaming, feeling superior, or generally attacking other people, whether that be your brother, mother, wife, boss, or best friend.

Lastly, having a really clear picture of what you want – whether it’s where you want to eat on Friday night or how much of yourself you want to share in a conversation – is really important. A lot of men struggle in this area, and many guys simply don’t know what they want in terms of short, medium or long term goals. If we don’t know what we want, it’s going to make it impossible to communicate those desires to others, and we  may end up getting frustrated with ourselves or others because we can’t spit out what it is that we want, sometimes, we don’t even know what we want and expect that others will. This is a false assumption, and it can impede good communication between people.

Developing better communication skills takes time. Have patience with yourself, but keep working towards developing the skills that you need to get the point across, get what you want, and learn to help others get what they want. Communicating with others is a two-way street: communication is just as much about empathy, understanding and listening as it is the above suggestions. Best of luck, and know that developing better communication skills is well within your reach.

Jealousy and insecurity go hand-in-hand: when were feeling insecure about ourselves, it usually is expressed in the form of jealousy about our partner. We may fantasize that they are cheating on us, not in love with us, or seeking out affirmation or attention from other people. In fact, we may go to great lengths to legitimize those irrational concerns, by checking phones, e-mail accounts or the like. But, the bottom line is, we have to learn how to take responsibility for our own fears and insecurities, and open up to them to be able to forge a deeper connection with our partner.

How can we deal more effectively with jealousy in our relationship? Here’s some ideas to consider:

1. Take responsibility for our own fear and insecurity, as well as anger
2. Identify points in the past where our relationships have burned us, and where we are currently stuck in the mud.
3. Communicate with your partner about some of your deeper fears about losing them, having them leave us, finding another mate that might be “superior” to us in some way
4. Understand that all men deal with this, and most guys struggle with this in one way or another.
5. Realize that your partner has a will of her own, and that if there are problems in your relationship or marriage, it’s her responsibility to come to you with those problems and not cheat on you.

Jealousy is as old as human existence. We fear “mate poaching,” or someone coming in and swooping up our partner. Aside from the evolutionary function of this fear, this type of thinking is irrational and can distance ourselves from the ones we truly love and want to be close to.

If you’re like most men, it may take you a while to come around to the realization that there are problems in your relationship or marriage. some couples think that if they don’t fight, all is well. But is it? Are you both really okay, or is that what you’re telling yourselves?

For guys, the thought of going in the couples counseling is comparable to getting a root canal. The thought of showing up in the counselor’s office and starting to take a look at the problems, and ultimately, their role in the problems, is no picnic. Added to that, most guys think that the therapist is going to side with their wife or girlfriend, and end up attacking them.

Most of the myths that we generate about couples counseling are false. The right counselor can understand these things, and work with you to help you feel comfortable and not like you’re on the hot seat. The right approach to couples counseling is also critical for the successful goals you want to accomplish with your wife or girlfriend.

One extremely effective orientation to marriage counseling comes in the form of what’s known as EFT, or Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples. The success rate is quite high: studies are coming out that show couples have a better than 70% repair rate from EFT.

Developed by Susan Johnson, Ph.D, a Canadian psychologist, Emotionally Focus Therapy looks at the attachment bonds between couples. This is an approach that looks deeper than just building better communication skills or developing more effective negotiation or coping skills. EFT helps couples connect in an emotional way. And yes, men do want to connect with their wives in the emotional way, even if they don’t say so. It’s this emotional bond between partners that is sustainable, and many of the reactive behaviors and emotions that result are part of a complex “dance” or chronic negative cycle that emerges between partners.

The idea is to bring awareness to that negative cycle, and all work together in therapy to help couples stop fighting, reduce conflict and connected and more animate an emotional way. The negative cycle becomes the problem, and therapist and couple work towards understanding and reducing the negative cycle together.

Even guys who are hesitant to dive into their feelings talk about really making progress with this form of marriage counseling. a lot of guys really enjoy it, and not only turn around the destructive path of their relationship, but are able to improve it in ways that they never thought that they could.

Here’s a free worksheet on identifying your negative cycle with your partner. Download this and do it together to begin the process of identifying how you both get stuck in your own relationship patterns: http://phoenixmenscounseling.com/clinicalforms/negative-cycle.pdf

You don’t have to feel hopeless and trapped in your relationship or marriage situation. There is help, and options for you to explore instead of a breakup or divorce. You might be really surprised with the results.

For couples already in relationship crisis, alcohol can fuel the fire pretty quickly. If there are problems already underlying a relationship or marriage, alcohol can surely make everything worse.

For men, who can often binge drink for drink to excess, alcohol takes the lid off of our emotions, which are usually held in check in our sober lives. Men have a difficult time dealing with emotions already, and alcohol has an effect of drudging up those negative emotions, bringing them to the surface, and amplifying them under the influence of alcohol. If we have repressed emotions or thoughts concerning our relationship partner, alcohol gives us the freedom to express those in a big way, often to the dismay of our partner.

What’s worse, when those unexpressed emotions or thoughts do come out at a relationship partner, it’s usually in a social setting, such as at a party, a bar, or another place that would generally be inappropriate to hash it all out. Furthermore, we are not in the right state of mind to have an argument–were not thinking clearly, and were inebriated and irrational. There can be no good that comes from an argument or fight under the influence of alcohol, yet most couples get into fighting when they’re drunk. This is making a bad situation worse.

Being able to communicate and talk about the problems between you and your partner is very important, so as those issues that have been repressed or not talked about don’t spring open when you people been drinking together. The point of drinking together is to enjoy each other’s company and have fun, not to open up the powder keg and start drunk fighting in front of all your friends. learning to identify and work through the problems in an ongoing way, so they don’t build up and come out only when you both were drinking, is certainly a way to help de-pressurize the relationship problems between you and your loved one. Limiting the amount of alcohol that you both consume together is also going to help, or simply having an understanding before you go out drinking about how much you’re going to drink so there’s no surprises.

“Does frequenting strip clubs count as cheating?”

“What if I communicate with ex-girlfriends on Facebook, and not tell my wife?”

“ I didn’t think getting a happy ending in my massage was all that big of a deal, so I didn’t tell her.”

Especially with the introduction of online communication and social media, cheating and infidelity have new modes of transmission in recent years. And for some men, the line that constitutes cheating has becomes blurry, and for women, presents even more reason to worry.

So what counts as what? Does communicating with other women, especially those you’re interested in, over social media counts as cheating, when you’re in a relationship? Does ogling and flirting with other women at the restaurant while you’re enjoying a meal with your girlfriend count? the answer might lie in how well you can develop empathy for the one that you’re dating.

How well you can put yourself in her shoes to answer these types of questions may clarify some of them for you. Also, identifying your true intentions and values will go a long way: how much do you value your current dating partner and the idea of an intimate, monogamous relationship with her? How do your behaviors reflect that commitment to her?

To indulge in these behaviors, sometimes guys compartmentalize and deny. Our minds have a way to compartmentalize those unacceptable behaviors, and push them away. For example, if you started up an online conversation with someone of the opposite sex, it’s easy to legitimize that as a simple online chat, or as a nonthreatening interaction. We use denial as a way to stave off the reality of the effects that it might be having on our life, our relationship or on our significant other.

The hurt, distrust and confusion that cheating, or cheating-like behaviors, cause wives and girlfriends is underestimated by a lot of men. Men don’t think about those effects on their women, and have a hard time developing true empathy for what their wives or girlfriends must be going through. One female psychologist that I spoke with asked, “How would you feel if your wife was talking to her old college boyfriend on Facebook?”

Men do have sex on the brain quite a bit of time, but acting on those impulses or thoughts is certainly another matter. Behaviors are different from thoughts, and while normal sexual fantasy is left to the minds pleasure, acting on those can cause your relationship a lot of damage. The behaviors are different from the impulses, and this is an important thing to think about when looking at cheating.

The difference is that the behaviors are usually an expression of some crack in the marriage for the relationship. As studies have shown, sex is a factor in cheating and infidelity, but it’s the lack of intimacy, communication, and appreciation and affection that men miss most. When guys aren’t getting this in their current relationship, they are more prone to activate those cheating impulses and turn them into behaviors.

A lot of this boils down to how well you and your partner are communicating. Are you comfortable sharing sexual fantasies with each other, or telling her about non-sexual run-ins that you have had with former partners or lovers? How well do you trust each other to talk about these things before they turn into big problems? If the trust and the communication aren’t there, it may be more likely that cheating behaviors will happen.

Thinking about this topic, I know we’re heading into murky territory, but I’ve been talking with a ton of guys this season where that big question has come up. I think it’s something about the holiday season that makes us look back on our past year and assess both the good and the bad. Do we look back in happiness and success, or do we look back in regret?

The holidays seem to drudge that question up for a lot of people, because I think a lot of otherwise unhappy people want to be able to make a change for themselves with the new year. Relationships are no different. Many people who are unhappy or unsettled in their current relationships start to ask themselves this question around this time of the year, and start to ask themselves if they need to make a change.
This is one of the most difficult questions to ask -  “do I stay or do I go in my relationship or marriage?” This article is not going to answer that question for you, but it’s been a bring up some points for you to think about.

There are some things that make answering that question easier, such as direct physical abuse, a partner who is mired in substance use, or other immediate response needs. I think those types of things need into serious inquiry into the “do I stay or do I go” question.

But, for a lot of men, they ask this question of themselves out of sheer reactivity and hopelessness. Many kind of choose to stay stuck between a rock and a hard place, and never seek out the help that they need, such as couples counseling. For some, it’s more comfortable. For others, it’s just denial.

A lot of times, the question “do I stay?” really means “ can I continue to deal with the problems that I am experiencing currently?” We often end up blaming our partners and creating a certain storyline about them and our relationship, and how it’s going to hell. If we get stuck in those types of thoughts, we’re toast. A lot of relationships and marriages that can be worked on, aren’t.

For men, it’s a little harder to take a look at the things that we are doing to our partners, and to take responsibility for the negative things that we do to them. I think the “do I stay?” question reflects a little bit of this, as well as “can I continue to deal with the negative emotions that come up inside me?” Sometimes, enough suffering drives people out of their comfort zone, where the pain of a bad relationship had become more than they can sit on.

For the guys who are emotionally avoidant already, the next logical question to start asking is “do I go?”. For men who avoid their emotions, and often avoid conflict situations in general, the desire to end a relationship or marriage is logical. It’s just easier to do it that way, and to start over from scratch. Problems are too difficult to work on in this relationship, you might tell yourself. She’s not open to a change, you might tell yourself as well. Or, this is just too much work, and I’m not up to the task, you might end with telling yourself.

I think the biggest question you need to consider is are you asking yourself if you want to flee the relationship based out of reactivity and emotion, or is this a rational, well-thought-out plan? For a lot of men, it’s acting out of reactivity and impulsivity, and that might work briefly in the short term, but not in long-term. We are bound to have to deal with this dynamic again, whether we get back together with our partner, or develop a new relationship with someone else. It’ll still be there.

And then, there is the “I should stay for the children” dilemma. I see a lot of couples wanting to hang in there, despite really difficult problems, for the sake of the kids. Some drudge through miserable marriages because they don’t want to expose their children to break up or divorce. Many times, it’s these guys who were those children in the past, and don’t want to do to their family what it is their parents did to them.

Really making a commitment to hang in there and work on the relationship issues, especially if you feel strongly about your partner, is really the first step. Identifying whether you’re wanting to end the relationship out of the emotion, or whether this is a well-thought-out plan, is one question that you could consider.

A lot of times, even the most hopeless situations can improve with some emotional connection, but it can be difficult for men to both connect to their feelings and to be able to listen to some of their partner’s issues with them and not want to fix those issues (which women often don’t respond well to, but do when you’re present and listening).

Is your relationship or marriage worth saving? Do you feel strongly enough about it, and about her, to start to do the heavy lifting to get your relationship back on track? Some guys do; others don’t. I’m not going to lie to you: it does take some work. But, your relationship is worth it, isn’t it?

Like no other time in the year, the holidays demand that we get quite gluttonous. Starting with gorging ourselves with turkey and stuffing, to im-bibing on New Year’s Eve, the holidays make it easy for us to push rationality aside to indulge in the joyful holiday spirit.

For most, overindulgence happens all across the board, from eating to drinking to spending. Learning how to reduce some of your holiday stress might lower the post-celebratory hangover in January (your relationship and your wallet may thank you later).

Spending too much is pretty much a given for most people during the holidays, but use these tips to help you deal with your holiday money stress:

1. Plan your spending early: Whether you’re trying to decide how much to spend on gifts, eating out or traveling, getting in touch with how much you figure on spending, or setting a budget, can help you deal with some of the post-sticker shock experiences of the new year. Try to get a sense of how many people you’re spending on, plan what events or functions require you to shop, or pick up wine,or get a sense your specific travel expenses may be. Planning early, and setting a budget and sticking to it, will help you not get caught up in the mad consumerism of the holiday season.
2. Understand your reasons for spending money/saying “no”: Gifts and holiday expenses are normal, but going over the top may not be, especially in today’s economic climate. For some, especially people pleasers, the tendency to buy gifts for people so they’ll be happy with us may be going too far. Also, if you are going to holiday parties or events where you feel obligated to, don’t. There may be the obligatory work party that everyone needs to go to, but if there are parties or dinners you’re invited to and you don’t really want to go, and where you can reasonably decline, stay true to yourself and say ‘no’.
3. Communicate with your wife or girlfriend about spending: Talk and plan with the one you love about what the financial expectations are for the season. Are you both on the same page about how much you are wanting to spend, say on the children’s gifts, on each other’s gifts, eating out, etc.? Do you both have the same ideas about how much you think is reasonable to spend? Talk and get on the same page.
4. Use Mint.com: This is one of the best websites out there, for tracking your expenses, setting short term goals, or getting a sense of what parts of your life you spend most in. There are pretty color pie charts and line charts to help illustrate your spending and saving, so you can feel like you’ve got a nice hold on your holiday spending. They’ve got a pretty handy iPhone application to boot, so you can track while you’re shopping.
5. Don’t “emotionally spend”: Emotional spending is probably the majority of what we end up consuming up holidays, whether that’s the impulsive peppermint latte at Starbucks, or that quick $50 photo shoot with Santa for your kids at the mall. Christmas and the holidays have a way of stoking our emotions to open up our wallets, so just be careful that you don’t end up spending out of emotion instead of logic and planning. The retailers and businesses depend on our emotional spending, this time of the year more than any other, but as far as stress goes, it could be better to just leave the house with a firm list.Don’t give into those merry Christmas tunes piped into the store you’re browsing, and buy just on impulse.
6. Watch That Debt: If you can, leave the credit cards at home completely this holiday season. Debt is lessen vogue now, after the chilly economic recession we’re trudging out of. Adding more debt is going to leave you more financially stressed and may push some into depression or anxiety. Debt will make you stress, and why would you want to have more stress to an already stressful season? Leave that credit card of home, and pay with cash. To take it one step beyond, try shopping this season with just a planned wadful of cash. Decide early how much lump sum to to pull out, and use that strictly for your gift shopping this season.

The men who are firmly centered this holiday season are the men who are mindfully spending. Reckless spending’s not good for anyone, except for the credit card companies and retailers. If you’re in a relationship this holiday season, try to use these tips to help you and your partner stay the same page about how you’re both spending money. This will add to a lot less relationship stress, too. Dealing with holiday money stress can be difficult, when we get swept up in the good times and tidings of the holiday season. Watching your money may help you start the new year in a much less stressful way.