(Transcript of video)

This is Jason Fierstein with Phoenix Men's Counseling. I wanted to spend a couple of minutes with you today talking about the decisions that we've made from our past that continue to haunt us, especially in an intimate relationship. I work with men and a lot of times men, when we are young, just like anyone else, we make bad decisions or we're impulsive, or we do things that we don't imagine our future selves would approve of.

For a lot of guys that could be using drugs, it could be seeing prostitutes. It could be just general things that 10 or 15 years later you look back and you feel ashamed about. You want to hide from those things. You feel embarrassed. And you certainly don't want to talk with your partner about them because you're afraid of some kind of backlash, or that they might lose faith in you or trust, or that you might be rejected by your partner for the things that you did in the past.

This has come up a couple of times here for me in therapy. I do believe that if a relationship is strong enough it can pass the relationship stress test. Meaning that a lot of times, when I work with guys, I try to help them work through the shame and the embarrassment to get to their truth. Because we can't change what happened in the past, but we can reconcile our emotions around it so that we can bring ourselves, our authentic selves or our transparent selves to the relationship and just show up with that and learn how to work through those things. Because I think every relationship is faced at some point in time with things that we're not proud of, that we're ashamed of either from one partner or the other.

I think that's part of being human. We make mistakes, especially when we're younger. But learning how to talk with our partners about that and deal with the shame, and learn how to confront those things and not hide from them. I do think it has the ability to strengthen the tethers in one's relationship to make them stronger, to develop better intimacy and communication and trust.

I think those are like turning lemons into lemonade. You have lemons and you're turning it into something that works for you. Again, based on the tenacity of your relationship, through what I'm referring to as a relationship stress test. Does the relationship have enough tethers in it? Is it strong enough to endure things that will inevitably come up? Are you the stronger person? And are you the stronger couple to be able to work through those things productively to learn to accept those?

Those are some ideas about leaning in and making yourself vulnerable and taking the risk with your partner. Conversely, sometimes relationships won't be able to deal with that effectively. And so, sometimes that is an indication of the lack of strength in a relationship. If you have any other ideas, please feel free to comment here. But I do really believe in the power of dealing with shame and bending into a relationship to try to make it stronger, even if there are not such good things that we look back on our lives about having done. I hope you have a good weekend and thanks for tuning in.

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