A lot of times, men are pretty hesitant about coming in for counseling. Sometimes they think that there might not be a problem, and other times when they finally get around to coming in for counseling, they are scared that seeing a female therapist will end up making them regret their decision. Some guys think that a female therapist will align with their wife or girlfriend, and make the problem “all about them”.

What I offer is a unique perspective on couples counseling in my private practice. I work with many couples that want a male counselor, especially if that type of scenario would prevent their guy from coming in to see counseling services. I think that wives and girlfriends figure out that there is this window of opportunity, where if their guy finally says “Okay, yes. Let’s go ahead and get counseling,”, then those women have to act quick and strike while the iron is hot. Working with a male therapist, it’s easier for the guys to want to come in, and gives the wives or girlfriends a better chance that their guy will commit to patching up the relationship or marriage.

I’m not saying that this is the only dynamic that happens between couples, but as a counselor for men working in Phoenix, Arizona, I see this happen quite a lot. I think that guys are hesitant to admit that there’s a problem, and sometimes more hesitant to seek out help for that problem. I think guys naturally will feel more comfortable working with guys, especially if they fantasize that they will be the “problem child” in marriage therapy together.

My relationship counseling services offer something different, and many couples that I work with report success through being able to communicate more effectively, lessen the fighting and arguing, work towards common goals within a relationship or marriage, and generally feel happier and have more time to improve on the quality of their relationship.

It’s 7:35 AM, and you’re slamming down a couple cups of coffee and a bagel. You’ll be late for work again, and your wife is back at it, nagging and harassing you. The trash is overflowing from last several nights of dinner, and the dishes are still sitting idle in the sink. She wants them done. You’re exasperated that these things keep causing fight after fight, and end up in defensive mode time and time again. Does it get any better than this?

A lot of people find themselves reacting in response to the problems in their lives, whether it’s in their relationships, work, friendships, personal or self-care. Problems do arise, granted. All of these things — when properly balanced — provide happiness and success, but all too often people slide into “reactive living.”

What happens is that choices beget other choices, and we both lose sight of that snowball effect, and sometimes shun responsibility for doing anything about it to change some of the original choices. We get lazy, or rely on others to lean on or take care of our messes.

When we live reactively, we live in response to our environment and the people within it. We allow other people and situations to dictate our lives, as opposed to assuming responsibility for ourselves. Life becomes a series of ” call and responses.” Something happens in our environment, or with someone we love, and we react sometimes mindlessly to troubleshoot the problem or situation.

We are constantly putting out fires, where we could be using that psychic energy to build well controlled fires that create life, energy and renewed power. We create a lot of unneeded stress, tension, depression, and interpersonal conflict with those closest to us.

Stepping back from our lives and differentiating between reactive living and proactive living is very important in a variety of different ways. When we can admit that there are some parts of our lives, we wise up to the fact that we have lost control and responsibility in some facets of our lives.

There are many examples of this: from becoming a better husband or boyfriend, to paying our bills on time, to proactively taking in our car in for maintenance so it doesn’t fail us, or to going out of our way to develop relationships that had been unattended to for a while. It could even mean coming up with a better organization system, either in our homes or offices, or in our minds.

Learning where the cracks are in the various facets of one’s life is important. Then, understanding how to fix things so you can play a more participatory part in your own life, instead of reacting to problems and situations that are thrown at you, is critical to turning the ship around.

(My article appears in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix Online (and print) in the September 11, 2009 edition)

Dating success, like success in life, is often a function of our attitude. Carry optimism, hope and openness, and your chances of success are infinitely greater than when you’re dragging around negative, limiting beliefs.

As much as most daters don’t care to admit it, they are unintentionally undermining their own attempts at success with internalized and destructive messages, or IDMs, about their dating lives.

IDMs can come in one of two forms: either as negative self-talk (such as how we talk to ourselves about dating) or as critical or judgmental assumptions and beliefs about the potential mates in our dating field. When we listen to IDMs, we either abruptly stop ourselves short, or stop others short, and destroy opportunities that have not yet been created. We shut down and say “no” before we’ve had an opportunity to say “yes” to others or possible dating opportunities.

To date or to be in a relationship is to risk getting burned, and a lot of daters can’t let go of some of those previous fiery experiences they’ve had. They’ve been hurt, and to help prevent themselves from being hurt again, they generate limiting beliefs about themselves or about their potential dates. In some cases, these messages have been there all along, from childhood, in different ways.

Fear and vulnerability drive many IDMs, and keep us caged inside our own heads. We generate unconscious and irrational stories to keep us from having to deal with the pain, anguish and fear that may come up in another dating situation. Dating has not been kind to us, we say to ourselves, and we’ll go to great lengths to see that we’re not hurt like that again.

One popular IDM I hear a lot is, “Well, there are no good men/women out there in the world anymore. They’re all taken.” I find that one disputable, and it’s a negative message that guides all too many people through dating, unfortunately.

The problem is that those destructive messages get communicated either verbally or nonverbally to people in our lives (including possible mates). Others will feel turned off or generally uninterested in learning more if those messages are communicated to them, intentionally or not. Or we may attract other negative people or toxic dates into our lives. Most of the time, though, we are so unconscious about what we speak verbally and say in our body language to others that we end up turning others off.

Maybe you’ve been rejected by a mate, or have suffered a recent divorce. It’s possible that your last relationship was awful, and you’re still nursing your war wounds. If so, IDMs may be floating around inside your mind and ruining the possibility of a relationship. Change your negative beliefs, and you change the way you relate to your dating life. People are far more attracted to people who are positive and open-minded.

If you’re ready and willing, turn around the IDMs, and you’ll attract a whole new kind of person into your life.

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

“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.

Making up stories and assumptions about people and about situations often times get us into trouble. When  our minds go to devising stories — as colorful and intriguing as they are — they’re often times wrong. This presents a major problem when dealing with other people, because through these assumptions and stories we engage with the world.

What ends up happening is we create the reality that we didn’t really want in the first place. Like the books when I was growing up, it’s a grown-up version of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series. You know, the books where you can pick from a different variety of endings. Unlike the books though, sometimes it’s hard to retrace our steps and select a different ending. This is especially true when we keep picking the same ending over and over and over again.

Learning to live in the present moment counteracts the tendency to live within our heads, where those stories and assumptions often come to life. When were in relationship, it’s easy to grasp onto those stories about our partner, and we work to convince ourselves that it’s true. Although our partner probably triggers our own process, we cling onto history and use historical reference points as a way to ensure that our partner will act that way again in the future. This is limiting, and ends up creating a future that’s no different from the past. Those stories and assumptions are created in our minds and reside in the past or the future, whereas ideally, we should be living in the present moment (where our minds cannot).

What helps is checking out those stories and assumptions that you have about someone else with that person. Investigating through communication is always better for grounding in reality then is living through the filters that we create for our life. Understanding the fears, worries, and pain that lie within us emotionally is important, because it’s those feelings that drive and create those are rational stories and assumptions that we then place on to the people that we love. It’s the emotions that drive us to create those realities that we think are true, and yet are not.

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.

Money helps, but if you don’t have the right foundation to creating a marriage or relationship, you are building a house cards. I talk with too many guys who still are committed to the idea that working their asses off, making money, and providing the right lifestyle for themselves and their wives or girlfriends is what is going to create happiness and a successful relationship. Wrong.

Money is never all satisfying. Even though it has evolutionary roots, the idea of being a mate who can acquire access to resources (i.e. money) has its limitations. And yet guys don’t seem to get this. They seem to think that they can buy their mate’s happiness, which may be true in a fleeting sense.  The sense of material acquisition can never be fully experience — there always has to be more. Money cannot become a surrogate for lack of the emotional connection or expression, or as a substitute for love and respect.

When we fight about money, it may be true that were fighting about other issues in our relationships. When we have no money, that may be absurd proposition, but I think that money is often the materialization of power and control dynamics within a relationship or household. When we try to gain control or power over our mate (to distract us from our own powerlessness or feelings of being out of control), there are various ways that we can do this. Sex and money are two common “power currencies” that keep tension between two people who are vying for more power and control in their relationship.

The psychology of money between couples is very subtle, and requires a keen eye and willingness to change behaviors to remedy this type of problem. Even just considering that money, or the lack of it, is the tip of the iceberg, and has many primary causes and secondary symptoms is a great start. Seeing money in this way, as a form of a psychological currency, is difficult, but it may shed some perspective on the way that you have traditionally dealt with it in your relationships.

One thing that guys have a very hard time doing is expressing affection to the women in my life. Small acts of kindness go a long way. For a lot of men, showing their wives and girlfriends how they are feeling about them, or communicating to them positivity through verbal validation and affirmation is the hardest thing under the sun to do.

When an end up feeling neglected, angry that they are working too hard in their relationship or marriage, and often don’t know exactly how to communicate what they’re wanting from the men in their lives. This frustration or anger often gets mutated, and expressed back to their men in unhealthy ways.  The needs that women have from men should be met, and men should know how to meet them, but when those two things don’t happen, a lot of unnecessary conflict ensues.

What guys need to know about The Affection Factor is that affection — whether it’s physical, sexual, emotional, or through validating statements — is an essential nutrient to the growth of your marriage or relationship. Without it, it’s like you’re failing to feed the relationship, or her, and neglect the very thing that you may feel most proud of.

To help, try creating the time that you and your wife or girlfriend need to spend together. Regularly creating the time, and prioritizing your marriage, is essential. How you spend that time together is even more  important. As a guy, you can begin to listen with more intention, and ask your partner if indeed she needs affection from you and how she needs from you. A lot of women respond very positively to you being assertive physically, and not waiting to take her lead. Whether that means putting her arm around her, holding her hand, kissing her, or generally communicating interest and energy in her are all good things. Doing the same things sexually towards her is also showing affection. She likes when you take the lead and display your assertiveness.

The hardest way for guys to communicate affection towards their women is by verbally validating them, or making them steal special through words. Women love this. And if you’re not doing enough of it, you and your relationship are really missing out. Telling her how good she looks, how special she is to you, praising her efforts or the work that she does, or  generally validating her are all examples of verbal validation. This is where guys fail to mine the potential in their relationship or marriage. They’re missing out on a whole lot of undiscovered happiness, if their wives and girlfriends do indeed thrive on hearing these things from you.

Try some of these tips to deepen  the strong bonds you’re looking to create with your wife or girlfriend. Be aware that simple things can make a lot of difference, and employing just a few of the strategies could change a whole lot.

For women, trust and hurt are intertwined. I speak with a lot of women who hold tightly onto their hurt towards their husbands and boyfriends. This creates a “freezing out” effect, where guys become pretty confused, reactive and angry, and often do things to aggravate the situation. Our reactive patterns get us into more trouble, and for women, their hurt grows and gets compounded. Many guys don’t really know what the hell to do.

Simply put, women need their feelings heard and acknowledged. They often need to feel understood by their guy, that he “gets” it and that he understands my hurting and how it is related to something that you – my guy – might have done. Women don’t want or need the following: reactivity, problem solving, fixing, sarcasm, belittling, superiority, avoidance, laughter at their expense, or any combination of those things.

The problem is that guys do exactly those things, often in some combination, and unknowingly create more of what they don’t want in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t really stop, and manifests itself in the “little things” that trigger fighting and conflicts, the everyday types of issues that come up between couples.

Trust is very much related to all of this. Trust is earned, as she starts to feel comfortable, safe and received. Women need reception, and need to feel that you will respect her words, feelings and the trust that she is giving to you. She needs to know that that trust – while earned – will be safe kept, and won’t be compromised by the things you say and do in your relationship with her.

Obviously, great communication is a vehicle for real change here, but personal awareness is more important. Becoming aware of how you – as the guy – interact with her, how what you do triggers that hurt (which often comes out as anger) and how you can change your behavior and the way you listen to her will help you in the long run. Understanding that you may not be the original cause, or that you are not responsible for her hurt, is helpful. What’s different is, although you may not be responsible for it, you may be triggering it with those words, actions and behaviors that you’re not in the know about.

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.