People often talk about their moment of clarity when they shift into a higher awareness about how to tackle the problem. Some call it their “aha” moment. Some are less certain about what changes have come about but know something is different in the way that they approach a problem.

This process of illumination is different for all, and as varied as there are people experiencing change. It’s a very personal and subjective experience, but transforms both inner and outer environments in a profound way.

How do you jump from “tree-to-forest” perspective in your own life? Concerning the important changes that you have made in your own life and relationships, what has the illumination process consisted of for you? How have you made the changes in your life that have brought you improved awareness and success?

We know when we have achieved the forest perspective when things in our life (subtle or not) begin to take effect. Our loved ones respond to us differently. Maybe we feel less stressed. We can experience moment to moment happiness for once without mentally living in the future. Or maybe we can learn to stop being so hard on ourselves and develop a little more patience and gentleness.

“Nice guys” in love often find themselves playing the role of the hero, or the savior, to the women that they become involved with in relationship. These nice guys guys often seek out women who are “broken birds,” or relationship partners that are attractive because their flaws create an attractive project to the nice guy hero.

So many men fall into the hero role, and end up creating a lot of relationship misery for themselves. This is not a truly loving relationship; this is a neurotic relationship that serves to reinforce the nice guy’s identity about needing to be needed. When a nice guy is needed by a broken bird, it makes that guy feel wanted, needed, and special.

Broken birds can often never be fixed, although they may look very appealing and beautiful on the outside. The appeal to be with or fix a broken bird blinds most nice guys to what’s really going on. It prevents true relationship, in the sense that two people are relating to each other as full human beings, and not as roles being played. Nice guys and broken birds interact with only versions of themselves, and not as people in love. It may feel like love, but it’s codependency.

As long as the nice guy is committed to trying to fix the broken bird, he is doomed to fail every time. Like I said, broken birds cannot be fixed. But when they do get fixed — if that happens — then that upsets the equilibrium of the relationship. When one person does something different, the whole system is forced into changing itself. What does this mean? Well, if you’re a nice guy with a broken bird, you will be forced into needing to learn how to reinvent your relationship with your partner. Or, just as often, the broken bird will end up mending its wings and flying away, unless the nice guy does first.

That latter scenario would entail a major change in the way a man redefines himself, and that would mean to lose the hero’s cape. He would need to learn how to have a meaningful relationship without needing to fix or man and his partner, and these are structural changes. So long as these structural changes go unattended, the attraction or seduction to engage in a relationship with a broken bird is highly tempting.

(This article originally appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix Online’s August 14, 2009 edition.)

I’m not mourning the death of the traditional dating experience quite yet, but I do see the heavy use of social media speeding it up.

Social media is now everywhere. Facebook boasts more than 250 million active users, and Oprah recently ushered Twitter into mainstream status. Is the heavy use of social media another death knell for traditional dating as we know it?

I think that the forces of texting, smart-phone use and social media addiction, combined with a wider cultural acceptance of “hooking up” (read: sexual encounters without the need for traditional relationships or intimacy), are making it much more difficult to really get to know someone in the way that the dating process did previously.

Although communication is light-speed and readily available, I don’t know that it helps us understand dating and mating any better. We’re talking a lot, but are we really saying much at all sometimes? For the daters that I talk with, it seems even harder to connect with someone in a meaningful way, now that we’re all wired, active and interconnected. Loneliness still festers, even if it’s digitally.

As evidenced by popular dating Web sites, like JDate, Match.com and eHarmony, we want to put on our very best face to prospective buyers. I think the same idea carries over to the use of social media, where that invisible electronic buffer allows us to show only those parts of us that we want others to see, and keep hidden the rest.

In some ways, revealing oneself on a social media site is more instantaneous and easier to do from behind a keyboard than in front of a live person.

But how much are we really revealing? Did the “archaic” dating process allow us the slow “meet and greet” process that social media simply excludes?

The mystery of getting to know one another as a time-honored process is simply too lengthy and too time-consuming. For many formerly “traditional” daters, going on a date with a guy or girl is simply outmoded, considering that they can communicate directly with them in 140 characters or less. Why spend the money and time on dinner and a movie when we could be getting to know someone online in a more efficient manner?

The evolution of the Internet and social media forecasts some very interesting changes happening with the way that we date and create relationships. I hope we can still take the time out to get to know people the way we used to in the past. In more than 140 characters.

Jason Fierstein, MA, LPC, is a counselor for men and couples who practices in Phoenix. Call 602-309-0568 to set up an appointment, or visit phoenixmenscounseling.com for more information.

If you suspect that the use of pornography is coming between you and your wife or girlfriend, it probably is. It’s not something that’s totally comfortable for guys to talk about with their women, and yet for a lot of couples, it’s the elephant in the room.

Some of the stats on pornography are staggering. More than 70% of men from 18 to 34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month (comScore Media Metrix). This stat especially stood out to me: 70% of all online porn access occurs during the 9-5 workday (Message labs monthly report march 2004).

If we’re that willing to risk our wives leaving us, and our bosses firing us, it must be pretty addictive to get online and surf for porn. But why?

Men are visually-oriented creatures, so there is a natural attraction to porn. From an evolutionary standpoint, men are attracted physically to women who they deem fit to mate with, and the most potentially successful genetic carriers of their DNA.

But in the 21st century, we continue to operate with those outmoded evolutionary responses. On a deep level, we are concerned about survival, but day-to-day, we have much less to worry about than our ancestors did.

We now live in a culture that has stripped sexuality down to the visual basics, and has removed intimacy and emotionality from the equation. In fact, most cultural vehicles — from movies to music to magazines — promote a sort of hypersexuality which continues to erode the other elements needed in healthy and functioning sexuality.

This is where men and emotional intimacy problems come in. Mens’ attraction to visually oriented things (like Internet porn), and combined with emotional withdrawal and avoidance, this creates a perfect storm of relationship problems. Men will retreat to porn as a way to not deal with the emotional intimacy problems that they are experiencing within their relationship. This creates a vicious cycle, because porn use further aggravates the problem is already inherent within a marriage or relationship.

This is a dangerous issue because many spouses may or may not know that their guy is using (or addicted to) porn as a surrogate for their relationship intimacy. Men may not even know that it’s a problem for themselves, but the first step is just to name the problem. Realizing that this is an issue for many guys is just too much; women need to know that this is an issue, and it may be a major contributing factor to the unhealthiness of their relationship as it is now.

Help is out there. Starting a conversation with your spouse or mate is a difficult thing to do, but if you identify your relationship success and intimacy as deeper, stronger values for you and your mate, then you may prioritize those things over continued avoidance and porn use. helping yourself is identifying those values that you hold closest to your heart, and not compromising on the junk food when it becomes a problem for you and her together.

If there is no time to waste, use one or more of the seven short steps to turn around the tempo in your relationship or marriage. Many guys that I talk with call me at the 11th hour, when it may or may not be too late to save their relationship. They go in a panic mode, and wants to do whatever they can to save their relationship. The simple fact: it’s not as easy as that. But try telling that to some of these desperate guys.

Here’s seven short steps to improving your chances for relationship success, and hopefully staving off some more sour times for you and her. Here we go:

1. Listen well. if she feels heard, and she feels like you’re not trying to fix it, you’re doing well.
2. Take ownership or responsibility. You’ve probably helped contribute to the situation.
3. Understand your role. Don’t just apologize because you think that’s what she wants to hear, and for something that you didn’t do. It’s phony, and she’ll see through it.
4. Prioritize her. A lot of times, well-intentioned guys prioritize other things, like their friends, career, ESPN, or anything else but her.
5. Improve your ability to give her affection, whether it’s verbal, physical, or sexual. They’re all related.
6. Understand what she needs from you, and do it.
7. Time, energy and variety: prioritize her by creating time for her, put some energy into the planning and try to infuse some variety into activities that you spend with her. Try something new each time.

I hope that these seven short tips trigger something in you want to do a little bit different. Relationships are a lot of work, and those that think that just cruising through a relationship is okay, it ain’t. Relationships,  like everything else in our lives, yield great gains when attended to on daily basis.

All too often, I talk with guys and couples who are having issues with one or more of the three of these issues. It’s like guys have one foot in their relationship or marriage, and one foot out. Many problems stem from the use of porn, infidelity or emotional cheating, and yet there are causes to these things as well.

Most of these types of problems, I believe, come from the failure for guys to connect to their emotional selves.  When we as men can’t connect to our emotions or know what they are, there is a higher chance that they will seek gratification in some form or another from an outside source.

It’s known now that the number one reason men cheat is not about the sex: it’s about emotional disconnection, or lack of intimacy. When guys are disconnected from themselves emotionally, it makes sense that I’ll be disconnected from their partners, wives or girlfriends. That’s when the cracks start to appear within a relationship. It may be subtle, but those cracks widen over time.

As the emotional canyon widens, many distractions then have an opportunity to seize hold of a guys’ wandering mind. The guy may not know it, but he is probably emotionally disconnected and is seeking that emotional gratification from one of those outside sources. So what we see are things like hitting use of pornography, extramarital affairs, improper interpersonal interactions (like flirting or the like), or creating emotional affairs with members of the opposite sex outside of the primary relationship.

The problems usually come to a head when the marriage or relationship is about to end, and often this happens when one partner stumbles upon the well guarded truth of the other, which makes it so much worse. It’s like adding fuel to the fire, and the chances of rebuilding that trust become excruciatingly hard.

One of the things that I feel so committed to in my work as a counselor and therapist for men is to help guys become more emotionally connected with themselves, so that they can be able to connect emotionally with the women they love. It’s through this lack of emotional intelligence, or emotional blindness, that we disconnect and the problems between us start to take hold.

I was watching a video of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina yesterday, stumble through his atonement from his bewildering escapades to South America. He explained his extramarital affair, and all the people he hurt, and uses a lot of “believer”-type vocabulary – basically his “fall from grace”. This type of thing happens so frequently with men, and it is embodied in our fallen politicians, such as Govs. Sanford, fmr. Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York and others.

Repentance is, well, kind of obligatory these days, and even promotional and accepted, to ensure a continued politcal career. But, what I am concerned about is ensuring that guys stop this self-destructive behavior, and start to embrace their “shadow sides”. Shadow sides, you may ask?

Carl Jung talked about the concept of the “shadow” to mean those repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts in us. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

As men, the fact that we act on our repressed and unsatisfied sexual drives and urges, and hurt those we love, is testimony to the “blackened and dense” qualities of extramarital affairs.

Embracing one’s shadow side is not easy. It takes guts. It takes courage. And it takes someone trained in exploration of these matter, such as a counselor or psychotherapist. So long as your shadow side lurks in your unconscious mind, creating unconscious thoughts, words and behaviors, you’re as good as on autopilot. It’s really hard to seize control back from those impulses when your shadow runs the show.

Shadow Man

Where is your shadow lurking?

Upon assimilation of one’s shadow, the behaviors diminish and stop. The impulses drop, and the behaviors quit. With extramarital sex, which is often unmet needs in a marriage or relationship (not so much the actual sex), we lose the sense of personal responsibility, both for our actions and for communicating to our partner what we are failing to get within the relationship.

Most of the time, when guys are asked, the reasons for cheating on their women is not about the sex: again, it’s what needs are not being met in the marriage, which could include sex, but not limited to. Maybe a guy doesn’t feel seen or heard. Maybe they’re angry, and wanting to unconsciously “get back” at their wife. There are reasons that motivate men more than just the sex.

I’m aware of this contingent of men who are in marriages and who are having feelings for other men, or who are interested in exploring same-sex relationships, whether that’s an emotional relationship with another man, a sexual relationship or a full-out committed relationship.

The issues becomes twofold: first, these men need to deal with the emotional confusion that comes with being attracted to another man, yet feeling ashamed or resistant to admitting that to themselves, let alone their wives or girlfriends. Second, the issue of infidelity is just as pertinent to the discussion, as many times, women end up discovering their guy’s penchant for other men in an inadvertent way – maybe from visited web sites, or from phone calls, or maybe from gay-related materials (such as porn or community magazines) that they find there guy to have brought home.

These issues can be explored in counseling, but it’s important to differentiate the two issues, and understand that they are linked. To differentiate them is to peel them away from one another, as hard as this may be, because the confusion of lumping them together creates more pain, confusion and reactivity in both partners.

It can be extraordinarily difficult for straight men to come to admit that they have strong feelings for other men (whether those are emotional or sexual feelings), as well as admit to themselves that they have possibly wasted time living with their wife of x years, and experiencing the guilt that comes from not being honest about who they are to themselves or their wife.The fear of admitting to themselves their own truth is sometimes debilitating, especially when these guys fear that they will lose their whole lives as they know it.

Conflicts get fueled when one partner unconsciously reacts to the other partner’s behavior, and then the snowball starts. It accumulates, picks up speed, and, before you know it, the snowball is mammoth and careening down the mountain towards an imminent destruction of whatever lies in its path. Let’s work on ways to keep the snowball palm-sized.

1. When one person is angry or upset, watch your reactions. Are you able to be aware of your emotions and your tendencies to make the situation worse? What do you traditionally do or say, or, rather, what would your partner say that you do to contribute to their reactivity. If asked, what would they experience you doing to them that fans their flames, so to speak?

2. Be present to the feeling, not the thoughts, that arise in your body. 99.9% of the time, relationship partners speak from the head, which, for guys, is “natural and normal”, yet makes it all worse. When you’re angry, are you really angry? What does your body have to say about it. Are you heating up – in your chest, in your stomach, in your head? Stay with that feeling, and try to not figure out why it’s there. Stay in your body, and speak from wherever in your body is heating up. It’s a more direct experience of what’s going on, instead of talking from your head and messing things like you’re used to.

3. Take a breath. Hug your partner. Throw a joke into the mix (not one which might hurt your mate). The idea is to de-fuse the situation, and stop the snowball from careening down that mountain. If you can reset, start over, and depressurize from all that accumulated negative energy you both have helpd to create, you’ll have a better perspective on the argument. Most of the times, couples forget what they’ve been arguing about in the first place, and lose themselves in the details. So, breath, step out of yourself for a second, and stay present without avoiding your partner.

Try these tips to help you fight fair, and have more productive conflict. The fact that you want to argue with awareness says you care about the relationship, and even if those things don’t work, they will the next time. With persistence, keep going, and keep trying.

On this Father’s Day, what will you to to acknowledge the man that brought you into this Earth, and who showed you the ropes about how to be the good guy you’ve grown into? Remember your first little league game where he cheered you on from the stands? How about that first bike ride? Maybe you remember the fumbled and universally awkward sex talk from Dear Old Dad (D.O.D.)

It’s so rare for sons to have that “heart” conversation with their Dads, because in our culture, “it’s just something that guys don’t do.” It’s hard for guys to connect with their fathers through an emotional connection. It’s usually through activity, or sport, or some shared hobby or activity, that dads and sons can meet, connect, and come together.

So, on this Father’s Day, I challenge you to come together and connect with your Dad. Remind him how great of a guy he is, and how much he has given to you over the years. Say it in words or actions, not in another electronic gadget that he may not really need anyways. Say it in a way that he’ll understand. You may have negative feelings towards D.O.D., but can you push them aside (or deal with them) for trying to make a connection with him on this special day.

In addition, I also see Father’s Day as a kind of “Fathering Day,” where the things that dads aren’t quite able to give their sons – whatever that may be for you – you learn to give to yourself. It’s kind of a “self-fathering”: giving to yourself what you needed, and didn’t get, from your dad.

Maybe it’s money management. Maybe it’s the art of communication. Maybe it’s learning about different relationship survival skills. Good old dad may be the greatest, but there may be some things that he didn’t pass down to you that you needed to thrive in some of your relationships, or things that you actually needed to unlearn.

“Fathering Day” is helping yourself fill in the gaps to help yourself thrive in the places where Dad might not have been able to help you. It’s honoring what you have been given from him, and making adjustments to help you thrive and succeed on top of what you’ve already got.