How to Confess a Secret Without Totally Effing Up Your Marriage

/in /by

If you’ve been hiding something from your spouse and you’re worried it’s hurting your relationship, this expert advice will help you come clean.

Getty

Getty

Tara Fields was recently quoted in Cosmopolitan magazine. Read the original article here. 

Every husband and wife keeps secrets — they could be as minor as what your singing voice really sounds like, or more serious, like past infidelity or hidden debt. And while you might have been taught that it’s best to treat your husband as a Bachelor-esque confessional, that’s not necessarily the key to a healthy marriage.

“People keep secrets in the first place because they’re often afraid of what will happen next, or they tell themselves they’re protecting someone else but they’re really protecting themselves,” says Tara Fields, PhD, psychotherapist, relationship expert, and author of The Love Fix: Repair and Restore Your Relationship Right Now. “But one thing that people don’t realize is that there are major opportunities to heal old wounds and strengthen relationships when you’re open and forthcoming about things. Plus, something that seems small can actually have deep, rooted issues behind it.”

So if you ask yourself whether the secret is helping or hurting you — or you can ask a friend you really trust to gut-check you, suggests Fields — and if it’s hurtful in the long run, it’s time to get the process started so you can figure out as a couple how to move forward.

How to Solve the Most Common Relationship Conflicts

/in /by

When you hit a relationship rut—you and your partner argue about the same thing over and over again—it can seem like there’s no end in sight. So how to escape these exhausting conflict loops? On this week’s episode of “The Labor of Love,” host and RealSimple.com editor Lori Leibovich talks to Tara Fields, a marriage and family therapist and author of The Love Fix: Repair and Restore Your Relationship Right Now, about the five most common and vexing relationship conflicts—and the straightforward solutions that can help couples sort them out.

1. The Parent Trap. When one partner takes on the role of being the parent to the other, begins micro-managing, and insists on having things done a certain way.

The solution: Begin by identifying where these roles stem from. Is there an underlying anxiety or fear at play? If one partner has become so afraid of doing something wrong, he or she will likely shut down and not take any action at all. 

2. Come Close, Go Away. When one partner begins to feel abandoned—and doesn’t understand why the other needs so much alone time.

The solution: Find the healthy balance of being a “we,” and work to create an interdependent relationship. As a couple, you should be “one,” but both partners should also have a sense of autonomy. 

3. Blame Game and the Shame Spiral. When one partner begins to blame and shame the other, often reverting us to our most juvenile selves (name-calling and flaring tempers). 

The solution: Take ownership, practice mindfulness, and do your best not to be reactive. Speak honestly, and say “I’m not feeling good about what’s going on, so when you want to talk about feelings, I’m available.” 

4. Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3. When one partner has started to feel invisible, so he or she begins testing boundaries—flirting with somebody else, checking in with a former fling, etc.  

The solution: Find the emotional courage to ask directly for what you want. Start an open and honest conversation with your partner, and don’t wait for him or her to be the one to do so.

5. Growing Apart. When both partners have begun taking each other for granted, and one person is beginning to grow out of the relationship.

The solution: Be willing to change as an individual as the relationship changes. During major life events, strive to become a team and be there for one another. Start creating the kind of relationship that no one or nothing outside the relationship can destroy.

Read the original article here.

The Love Fix: Repair And Restore Your Relationship Right Now

/in /by
SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 – BY ROSE CAIOLA

Maintaining a lifelong relationship is often difficult, even under the best of circumstances. As a society, many people turn away from the obstacles that come up in relationships rather than learning to deal with them—one of the biggest challenges being conflict. While conflict is inevitable, it’s how you handle it that will make or break your relationship. It’s no secret that communication is the cornerstone of any successful relationship—being able to express your wants and needs in a healthy way separates summer flings from relationships that endure all seasons. To put it simply, a couple that can learn how to fight together, stays together.

While conflict can be the driving force behind breakups and divorce, it also has the potential to bring you closer together and strengthen your relationship. In The Love Fix: Repair and Restore Your Relationship Right Now, licensed marriage and family therapist Dr Tara Fields discusses the five common conflicts that couples experience and the ways to stop rehashing the same arguments.

So how do we break the negative patterns in our relationships? By figuring out what it is that you’re really fighting about, once you determine the root of the problem, you can move together toward resolving. Fields cleverly paves the way in this step-by-step guide to building and strengthening relationships filled with love, support and understanding. Here is an excerpt from the book on learning to move past conflict:

Part of my job as a psychotherapist is to see couples with fresh eyes—and to remind them that no matter how bad things have gotten, they can get better. How do I know? Because there’s a simple truth about all relationships that most of us miss: It’s not the fighting or the resentment or the icy indifference or the fact that “he never listens.” In other words, it’s not what you’re fighting about that matters. It’s the patterns you fall into when you fight that can tear a relationship apart. Clients come in and say, “Tara, I don’t get it. I have never loved anyone like this, and I have never had conflict like this. Am I with the wrong person? Should we just quit? Am I crazy? Did I make a mistake?”

No! If you’re feeling this way, you’re not crazy, and it doesn’t mean you have made the wrong choice in a partner. Most often it means you made a good choice. There’s a line I love from the book A Course in Miracles, published by the Foundation for Inner Peace: “Love brings up every- thing unlike itself . . . to be healed.” Love brings up everything you have kept hidden away: unresolved wounds and traumas, fears. Perhaps you feel safe enough, vulnerable enough, in love to allow these old feelings and experiences to resurface. Letting love take the lid off Pandora’s box frees those demons—and once they are free, they can be healed.

Here’s what happens: you get a ring or move in together or you join hearts—you become part of someone else’s world, and that person becomes part of yours—and

then the conflict starts. Maybe it was there all along, and you thought this next step of commitment would make it all go away. Whatever the case, when the conflict starts or grows, you make the mistake of thinking it must be because you’re with the wrong person. You say, “Hey, if I was with the right person, we wouldn’t be fighting, right?”

But the important truth is that it’s never all hearts and flowers. In fact, when you find the person you love and this person loves you back, that love will permeate the layers of protection you’ve built to keep yourself safe; it will get down to so many things you’ve never dealt with before. It may be exactly because you found the right person that you’re fighting—now your heart is open; you’re here in the moment, sitting with yourself in a way you never have before; and now you have the chance through this relationship to let these unresolved issues and fears bubble up from your past so that you can heal them in an authentic way. You have an opportunity: if you can reframe your relationship with conflict, not only can you find your way back to the passion and wide-eyed wonder you once felt in your relationship, but you can also use the safety of a relation- ship in which you reach out and your partner reaches back to learn more about yourself. Can you reframe this conflict as an opportunity not only to repair and strengthen the relationship with your beloved but also to heal your own wounds?

I have seen couples find peace, come closer together, save their relationships, and build relationships that last by simply understanding how they handle their problems and making some pretty straightforward changes to how they communicate. You would be surprised how many more relationships would work, how many more families would stay together, and how many more people would be happy and fulfilled in their relationships if they could take a step back from their conflicts. If you’re fighting or locked in conflict right now, right as you read these words, you have one of the greatest opportunities of your life to connect deeply with your partner and with yourself. My hope is that this book—which explains and explores the five most common fighting patterns couples fall into, offers insight from couples who have broken out of those conflict loops, and provides the tools to help build a lasting relationship—will be a guide for you and give you the courage to reach for the beautiful relationship that is within your power to create.

Read the original article here.

Relationship Author Dr. Tara Fields’ Love Advice: “The Happiest Couples Don’t Necessarily Have More or Less Conflict”

/in /by
Read more

Shrink To Fit

/in /by

Contra Costa TimesPsyche TalkShrink to FitBy Lynn Carey, Staff Writer

 

The following is a theoretical question of the sort that has been asked of radio psychologists:

“Um, hello, Doctor? Um, I’m seven months pregnant and I found out my husband has been having an affair with a neighbor. But it’s usually only after he’s been drinking more than usual. I quit my job when we got married, and I really love him. But now I don’t trust him and don’t know what to do.” Read more

House Calls

/in /by

House Calls

Dr. Tara Fields

Dr. Tara Fields says her “psych-talk” show is entertaining and helpful, but should not replace formal therapy sessions

“Radio psychologists provide listeners with a therapeutic blend of sympathy and insight”

Read more

The Doctor Is On The Air

/in /by

The Doctor is on the airDr is on the airInsta-therapist doesn't shrink from entertaining

“Start me up and I don’t stop,” says, Marin based therapist Dr. Tara Fields from the offices of KPIX-FM, where she hosts the new call-in “Dr. Tara Fields Show” for the all-talk radio station.

Fields couldn’t be better suited for the job. Hot off her three-hour afternoon gig giving advice, reality checks, comfort and a motivational prod to caller who seek her psychotherapeutic know-how, the doctor is riffing like a guitar hero in the spotlight. Several times during the interview, she brings her bullet-train of words to a sudden halt – to apologize for her talkativeness.

“Just jump in,” she suggests with manic glee. “I talk. That’s why they hired me.”

While Dr. Tara Fields of KPIX-FM is in some ways like Frasier, TV’s top radio-shrink, she insists: “I have more hair and a better relationship with my dog.”

While watching Fields do her insta-shrink thing behind the glass of her studio booth; it’s not hard to be blown away by her skill at practical chat. Calls come in concerning every domestic situation you can name – from a wife concerned about her long-time husband’s declining standards of personal hygiene to a woman stood up by her fiance just before the wedding – and Fields has something pithy to say about it. Snippets of advice roll off her tongue as if coated with Teflon.

“I’ve been doing this as a licensed therapist with a private practice for 12, 13, 14 years, so nothing really surprises me,” she says before hitting up the interviewer for a single snack chip. (“I can eat just one. Watch me.”) “The real challenge is to sift out people who really need to be referred somewhere else. I try to be sensitive to the fact that I don’t know who they are and then get them on the right path.

“I’m different from a lot of on-the-air therapists in that I try to get people to come to their own answers, which I think most of them have. Forget about what Aunt Tilly’s telling you or what society thinks.”

“I’m different from a lot of on-the-air therapists in that I try to get people to come to their own answers, which I think most of them have. How many of us grew up with someone saying, ‘You can trust yourself?’

Forget about what Aunt Tilly’s telling you or what society thinks.”

Judging by a short visit to the station, Fields’ read on things seem sound. The woman with the stinky husband, for example, was left to ponder the possibility that her partner’s infrequent get-to-gethers with Mr. Soap might be an indirect method of communicating his dissatisfaction with the marriage and an incredibly effective way of telling his wife to literally keep her distance.

“People call in because they’re stuck, they’re helpless, they’re crying and they think they’ve lost Prince Charming,” she recalls. “And by the end of the show Wes (Hendrix, her engineer) is playing ‘Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves’ and the caller is saying, ‘Yes! I’m so glad he’s out of my life.’ “It feeds me and I can’t deny that some of this is entertainment. When I was auditioning for this job, I decided that I had to acomplish three things. I had to help people. I knew I had to be entertaining or it wasn’t going to work. And I had to have fun doing it.”

Through the conversation, Fields repeatedly brings up the topic of ratings and what she won’t do to get them – belittle callers who are already suffering from poor self-esteem, tell women to get or not to get abortions, take advantage of extremely vulnerable people. If someone is struggling with something as extreme as suicide, they won’t get on the air. Instead, Fields’ producer and phone attendant Allyson Geller will refer the troubled soul to the appropriate agency. Fields – also a resident therapist for KRON-TV’s “Saturday Daybreak” – strives to keep her ethics sound and her ego in check.

She puts it this way several times throughout the interview: “If I wanted to be cult leader of the world, I’d want them to depend on me.”

But the frequency with which Fields alludes to ratings suggests that regardless of her status as a mental health care professional do-gooder, there is a bottom line: Fields must bring in loyal listeners. Her advertisers wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ordinary therapists see clients for 50 minutes at a time, often weekly, over months or even years. Most psychologists are keen to let their patients do most of the talking. Although both parties must watch the clock, neither must pause for commercials. If Fields behaved over the air in the time-tested prescribed fashion, the result would be radio-shrink C-Span. You can imagine how many fans that would attract.

Instead Fields is more like a real-life equivalent of “Frasier” – a personality to help the psychologically needy and chase big ratings.

“Frasier’s also not afraid to be human,” she says of the sit-com sensation. “You see behind the scenes that he cares and has a good heart. But let’s acknowledge that I have more hair and a better relationship with my dog.”

Before studying psychology, she pursued a life in the theater and even studied with the famous Method acting guru Lee Strasberg. Her current day career skills were honed in Los-Angeles, where she established a thriving therapy practice and facilitated women’s groups.

Her theatrical experience shows. Fields looks and speaks more like a movie star then you average Berkely-based touchy-feely type. And one gets the sense that Fields might just be a better talker than she is a listener.

“What people hear on this air is me,” says Fields. “But they may be surprised to know that there are moments in my life when I’m not talking.”