I think about happiness a lot. I think about it around this time of the year quite a bit, as happiness and the holidays are so closely wedded. I meditate on the nature of happiness, and how we go about seeking it.

Happiness can come from finding meaning: in the work we do, in the friendships we create, and in the intimacy we deepen with our partners. It comes when the roads of the imaginary and reality merge.

Happiness can come from being present: to ourselves, to our thoughts and to our emotions. Being present and undoing the destructive emotions and thoughts that lead to destructive behaviors can lead to happiness. Quieting the self-destructive voice inside our heads, and learning to deal with the pains of life as they arise – and not continually pushing them aside – will lead to being happy.

Happiness comes from the little joys in life, not from always trying to get somewhere or grasping at trying to accumulate more stuff. We’ve tried that as a society, and it’s gotten us into an epidemic of mental health suffering. And medications don’t always help make us happier.

Happiness is about “knowing thyself”; it’s about developing a compassionate eye back at oneself, and learning to accept oneself as one is. It’s about ceasing to compare ourselves to others for a change, and even to stop comparing ourselves to ourselves. Compassion comes when the voice of comparison quiets down.

There are a lot of distractions to happiness, especially during the holiday season. We’ve seen where our surge to happiness has brought us: into the worst economic crisis in 70 years. We buy more, and crave more, and buy more, and never manage to fill ourselves up with more, now matter how big our appetite grows. We seek solace in self-help wisdom, and cultural gurus, yet things don’t always seem to get better.

Happiness is being away of our mortality, yet not succumbing to the fear of it. It’s being aware that our days are numbered, which encourages us to enjoy our relationships, be mindful and enjoy the fleeting nature of things: good music, colors, delicious food and the mystery of nature.

Happiness is there for the taking. It’s those self-imposed obstructions that, with presence and awareness, can free us from the suffering and neurosis that keeps us stuck.

Divorce tends to be emotionally gut-wrenching for the people who go through it (not to mention those around them). But most couples don’t realize that divorce can also be among the most ruinous financial moves anyone can make.

Sure, you could bet big and lose on a single stock or money manager. Or your small business could go bankrupt, taking your life savings with it. But divorce and the costs that often come with it — from legal bills to the sudden need for an additional residence — affect far more people.

When we get in our own way, it’s hard to do a post-mortem on what exactly went wrong, and it’s even tougher to look at what we did or did not do to contribute to it. Whether our relationship failed, whether we are lazy in pursuing our professional passions, or whether we haven’t learned to bring more friendship into our lives, it’s easy to blame the outside world and hard to take responsibility for making those changes that we need to take in pursuit of our own happiness and satisfaction. A lot of times, we just simply don’t know what we want. Or, were too scared to go get what we want. There is distance between us and expressing our values.

Wavering on our values is a big part of where we get in our own way. It’s hard to make the changes that we really want to see for our lives — the way we envision ourselves in the future — when we compromise those things that are at the core of our being — our values.

Getting in touch with what we truly value is really tough for many men. For a lot of guys, life just kind of “takes over”, and we let life live us instead of us living our own lives. We live from the outside, not the inside, and when that happens, we set ourselves up for a whole world of pain and problems. But, when we are living in accordance with those values, life just kind of “lines up”. We live from the inside, not the outside anymore. We create a certain flow to our lives that feels easier and cleaner, just by identifying, activating and lining up with our key values.

Some guys value learning to be a better father. For some, it’s learning to communicate their needs and feelings more clearly, and to not react so defensively or angrily with their partner. For others, living one’s values means developing hobbies and interests outside of our work, or to simply live in a more organized and efficient way. Whenever the value is, the degree to which that created life is lived in a clean, easy and organic way is reflected by the degree to which we are lined up with those values we prize.

Are you living those values that are closest to your heart? If not, the deeper question is, what roadblocks and barriers are challenges to you living those values? Are they external barriers, or internal, or both? Just starting the process of identification of both the values that you hold, and the challenges to lining up with them, is the beginning of living those values. It’s the start of making the changes that will bring you the happiness that you seek for your life.

Comments welcome. I’m interested to know how you live – or don’t – your own personal values.

Sometimes, for potential clients, the hardest part is working up both the courage to admit that there is a problem in their life that needs attention. For clients, especially guys, it’s easy to avoid admitting or knowing when to admit there’s a problem. That’s the first step. Actually finding a professional therapist is a whole other matter.

People don’t always know who they need – they just know that they need help. When it comes time to research a counselor or therapist, many seek out the recommendations of their friends and family. They trust that they’ll feel safe and comfortable with that professional if those they love vouch for the therapist (like any good service provider).

But if there’s no personal referral, the search for help becomes like hiding your eyes and throwing the dart at the board. You hope for a hit, and you could just as well throw it way off the target.

Knowing who does what is an important start. Here’s a quick primer to get you going, and a simple way to understand the alphabet soup of credentials that your next therapist might have:

LPC = Licensed Professional Counselor. In the State of Arizona, LPC’s are licensed by the state through the Board of Behavioral Health Examiners, and are educated and trained to work with a variety of problems. Many specialize, so it’s important to know which speciality the LPC you are interviewing works with – kids, relationships, depression, trauma? Many generalize, and it’s important to know that yours will have experience working with your unique issues.

PhD/PsyD = Psychologist. These professionals are also licensed, and have a Doctorate in Psychology (as opposed to LPC’s who are Master’s Level in Counseling and Psychology). Psychologists can do individual and couples therapy, and have an advantage of administering tests and batteries, aside from clinical work.

LMFT = Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Background in working with families and marriages, and workj in therapy with those populations. These professionals are Master’s level, and licensed by their state’s licensing board.

MSW = Social Worker. Social workers often do therapy with individuals and couples, and are Master’s level in education, trained, and licensed by the state in which they practice.

Life coach = Life coach. Life coaches are newer to the scene, and do not perform psychotherapy. Life coaches are not therapists, but can help you in areas of life management, goal setting and much more. They are not licensed by the State of Arizona, but are certified through private organizations.

MD = Psychiatrist. Many psychiatrists do not do individual therapy much anymore. They are trained medical doctors, who specialize in psychiatry and psychiatric disorders. They are who you want for medications (including antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications) and psychiatric problems and illnesses, and often times refer out for therapy these days.

Hope this little guide to decoding the search for a therapist helps you understand you you need to get to to help you and your problems. Remember: the most important element to counseling is the relationship that you develop with that professional, and it’s important that you know, like and trust the person you are confiding in and opening up to.

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At Phoenix Mens Counseling, I work extensively with gay clients and couples to help them better their lives and relationships. My practice is same-sex friendly, and I work with couples to help communicate better, lessen anger and cool tension, and learn to have successful relationships.

Some of the issues that I help same-sex clients with include:

- dealing with family members that haven’t accepted their gay lifestyle

- working with the ill effects of social stigma, and feeling comfortable with themselves

- having fulfilling relationships with their partners

- sexuality issues

- working through difficult emotions dealing with HIV and AIDS

I invite you to contact me at 602.309.0568 to find our about my services that are tailored to the gay community, or check out PFLAG Phoenix to learn more about me.

One of the biggest issues that I work with is a guy’s simple inability to communicate his needs and feelings. It’s this lack of ability to communicate that creates seismic tensions in his marriage or relationship.

Guys are just generally less attuned to their feelings, and couldn’t possibly access their needs if their life depended on it, right? No so much. Guys are very much emotionally-based, as their women are, and need the same satisfaction of getting those emotions accessed and released as their ladies do. The problem has many origins and explanations, and to understand some of them, we look to understanding one simple fact.

A lot of the time, guys don’t have the tools to access their emotions and needs, and yet their women have a certain expectation that they should. This expectation wasn’t there 50 years ago, as society and culture shifted its focused towards the individual, self-expression and liberation in the 1960′s in America.

On top of that, guys have fathers that haven’t been able to teach them these critical tools. A lot of the time, their fathers behaved in the same ways that they did, although it’s harder to get away with it these days because of social pressures and expectations of men in relationships that we’re there back in the 1950′s.

What guys do if to suffer in silence, resort to pornography or alcohol, seek out friends whose advice is often not helpful (the friends are often struggling just as much as the guys themselves), or avoid conflict or adverse situations that would elicit their true feelings, which are often just “too difficult to deal with.”

What might help in relationships is to create a space to let those needs and feelings be more well known. Too often, we, as partners, get caught up in our reactivity patterns and can’t really listen to what is happening with our mate. We react to assumptions and expectations that our guy “read our minds” (read: women) and that “they should know what I need.” This type of false thinking contributes to the very communication problems that got us here in the first place.

Creating a space for your guy to communicate, or at least not react and avoid you, is key. Understanding what he is needing – straight from his mouth – is essential in helping your relationship along, because what you think he needs, and what he thinks he needs, are often two very different things. And not making the assumptions about where he is coming from is very important, because you may be reacting to him through your own assumptions. And that will make it worse.

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The biggest reason to work with a male relationship counselor (i.e. me) is because men often feel more comfortable talking with a guy. It’s true. I think that men feel like they have an alliance, although the reality is that counselors are neutral, shouldn’t take sides and should communicate impartiality in working with the couple.

Men often assume that female therapists are there to gang up on them, and that they’ll have two women in the same room barking at him. I understand the fear there for guys.As it happens, I get a lot of women calling me because I work with couples, and because they think two things: that a guy will indeed feel “safer”, but also because they will have a better chance of getting their guy into counseling at all. A large number of wives, girlfriends and women who care about their guys are the ones that initiate counseling.

Counseling is still seen as a self-improvement vehicle, and something that men just don’t do. We don’t help ourselves, and we surely don’t go to counseling. Part of my mission – personal and business – is to break that cultural stigma or messaging. It’s got truth to it, but it’s not totally true.

For women, the golden benefit of having a male relationship or marriage counselor is being able to work through the issues from a guy’s perspective. I have found that women are much more likely to empathize with men with they hear it from a guy counselor (your truly), and then they are more ready and able to hear, translate and assimilate what is going on for their guy. It’s very effective, because I am helping the guy to communicate to his wife in a way that only another guy can.

If you’re considering marriage or couples counseling in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, or anywhere in the Valley, consider the benefits of working with a male relationship counselor for those reasons I wrote about. I think you might find added value to the experience, and it’ll help your marriage or relationship a lot more than you might have expected.

Ready to break the chains of relationship boredom? Have you been stuck in a rut for some time now, and haven’t known how to get out? It’s possible that, for some, that you didn’t even know you were in a rut in the first place, which makes things even more difficult to fix (when you can’t even diagnose it).

Here’s 4 quick tips to crawling out of the pit of a relationship that fell asleep:

1. Make yourself more interesting: It’s easy to look upon our spouse, or our relationship, as the problem, and then blame our boredom on those, because they’re convenient. It’s harder to take responsibility for our own boredom, and do something about it.

I propose doing something radically different. I invite you to take a look at your own individual life – aside from the relationship – and ask yourself, “What can I do to make myself more interesting – to myself?” When you can generate answers to this question, you’re starting to make something happen. Maybe it’s learning to communicate differently. Maybe it’s learning how to speak Portuguese. Maybe it’s taking up reading about topics that once interested you, that got pushed aside by a busy life. Or maybe it’s getting involved in volunteerism. But working to make yourself more interesting is by far a major step towards developing renewed interest in your relationship.

2. Talk about the boredom: Too often, couples who are bored make it worse by failing to call the elephant in the room what it is. If boredom is obviously a problem in your relationship, why you you keep contributing to it – because it’s easy? Quit having the same doldrum conversations, and say to your partner, “We need to talk about something that needs to change for me in the relationship.” Make it a priority, and have a conversation to get the ball rolling.

3. Come up with a list of boredom breakers together: Get together (even after the conversation above), and brainstorm about the things that you both enjoy doing together. The very act of brainstorming together will remind you both of the “getting to know you” process that you once enjoyed, before the stalemate set in. Coming up with activities that you both love to do is key. Bonus points: come up with right brained activities, or fun things to do to get you out of your head. Try indoor rock climbing, creating art or music together (there’s Taiko Drumming here in Phoenix – bash on those big old Japanese drums together), or doing something “non-intellectual” or for pure fun.

4. Talk about the anger: Often times, boredom is really anger that’s been frozen. If there is anger between you two, air it out. Talk about it, melt the anger or tension, and get back to spontaneity and fun. Boredom is an intellectual, or mental, way to express anger sometimes, and it’s a way (esp. for men), to distance themselves from their partners. Talk about anger if it’s a problem for you, and you may see boredom start to blow out of your relationship with that simple change.

I am going into the studio in the next couple of weeks to record “The Guy’s Airbag: A Relationship Pre-Crash Course.” Here the gist:

What if you had an airbag for your relationship? What if when things went really wrong, or even as a safety measure against a crash, you had solid skills and tools designed to help you ? I picked this title because I want to help you prevent a fatal relationship. I see them all the time.

All too often, men and couples come to counseling after they’ve been through what amounts to an auto accident in their marriage or relationship, and never had the skills and tools to know how to keep it alive.

Maybe the relationship is on life support, or maybe an affair has damaged a marriage to the point of irreconcilable differences.  Everything seems to be held together by a string, and it didn’t used to be this way. 

Worse, I see men start new relationships with the same faulty thinking that got them into trouble the first time. Maybe you know somebody like this. Maybe this is about you.

Have that sense of working too hard to make somebody else happy? Is that somebody your partner, girlfriend, or wife? It’s tough to decide on when you are at the point of working just a little too hard or two much to meet her expectations of you, as a boyfriend or husband.

Sure, there is work to any relationship. Ideally, you are able to meet as many of her needs as you can, and there will be some needs you simply cannot meet. But, are you feeling judged and criticized for underperforming? Does she complain that “you don’t love me?” or continue to remind you what you’re not doing for her? Do you numb out, or avoid hearing what she’s saying? Am I making any sense at all?

Deep listening is so important, as is a willingness to change and start to both understand and meet the needs that she is asking of you. It’s hard to listen when you feel defensive, and that happens when you feel criticised, belittled or generally upset. The difficulty lies in listening, because it’s probably true that you’re angry, disconnected, and otherwise unwilling or able to meet her needs and give her what she is looking for from you. The distance gets wider, and she may not realize that her words are pushing you further away from her, which is creating more of the original problem. The issues are snowballing.

So, good communication, listening attentively and deeply, and becoming crystal clear about what both people’s needs and feelings are (and how they can be met – e.g. through a hug, kind words, etc.) are critical elements of success in bridging the gap between the two of you. Ironically, its the verbal assaults, criticizing and name calling that creates more of the same problem.