THE CHESTNUT HILL INSTITUTE

Wrap your mind around this, if you can: women who try to help men get out of supposedly bad marriages by having affairs with them.  Shocked?  Surprised?  Sadly, I’m neither shocked nor surprised.  I see it happen all the time. 

This may well be what happened to John Edwards, based on a Newsweek piece by Jonathan Darman.  (more…)

Is forgiveness possible after an affair?  YES!  And how do you find it?  For some good answers, read this article about our new book When Good People Have Affairs.

(This is the first of a series of blogs on affairs: why they happen, and what to do if you’re at any point in a love triangle.) 

“I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that we had a happy marriage, that my husband was a good man, and that he would never cheat on me.  Never.”  Janice was an attractive woman in her late thirties.  “So when I found those emails on his computer (I wasn’t snooping, honestly; he asked me to do some work for him and they were just there), I was devastated.  I was physically sick.  It was like every time I thought about it was like a kick in the stomach, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  It was so humiliating.  Things like this don’t happen to people like me.” 

But of course affairs can happen to anybody.  There is a 40 to 50% chance that a person will be affected by an affair over his or her life.  If this were a disease, it would be the most common painful, life-altering disease we know about. (more…)

Let me tell you about the smartest man I ever knew.  No, he wasn’t a rocket scientist.  In fact, he owned a small produce business.  But here’s what made him such a genius. 

One day he met a woman.  Not his wife.  This woman was a buyer for one of stores he sold to.  But he got the hots for this woman, and she did for him.  They were about to have an affair. 

That’s when this guy got the idea that made him a genius… (more…)

So there was Elliot Spitzer, the previous governor of New York, resigning because he was consorting with call girls. Now it turns out that the new governor of New York, David Paterson, and his wife Michelle were both unfaithful to each other during a bad patch in their marriage. Let’s not judge the Paterson’s. But note this … (more…)

Trust took a big hit in America yesterday.

Let’s be honest: this affects all of us. Forget the political scandal: the hypocrisy of a crime-fighting, clean-as-a-whistle governor of New York getting caught visiting prostitutes whose services went for up to $5,500 an hour. This kind of thing has happened many times before. Gov. Spitzer has  resigned, it’s not over.  And make no mistake, this affects us personally, particularly if you’re a woman. (more…)

Depression affects millions of people.  That means that there’s a good chance, over the course of your lifetime, that you will either experience significant depression or find yourself in a relationship with someone who’s depressed.  What do you do about it?  (more…)

Hey guys — please check out this great, new review of one of our books. (more…)

I know what you’re thinking. Here comes another new year, and there are those things you don’t like about yourself or your life (and who wants to think about that!). And sure as winter brings cold and snow to us up here in Boston, you feel a determination bubble up within you to change things. “This will be the year…” And like lots of us you feel on the verge yet again to make a New Year’s Resolution.

DON’T! Unless … well, how have your past resolutions worked out for you? (more…)

All couples have problems. But how can you tell when those problems are just the normal stuff we all manage to live with, and when they’re signs of trouble?

We’ve learned something very important over the years we’ve worked with couples, something that means we now look at couples very differently if we want to figure out if a relationship can be saved. (more…)