Thoughts of the new year bring up hopes that this will be your best year yet.  And of course there are inevitably things we don’t like about ourselves or our lives.  So sure as winter brings cold and snow to us up here in Boston, you feel a determination bubble up within you to make changes.  “This will be the year…”  And like lots of us you feel on the verge yet again to make a New Year’s Resolution.

Well, don’t!  UNLESS… (more…)

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, a free-lance writer named Elizabeth Weil tells us about what happened when she and (with prodding) her husband decided to try to make their marriage better. 

The man-bites-dog part of this is that their marriage wasn’t in trouble.  They weren’t fighting all the time.  There’d been no infidelity.  They just had a normally imperfectly happy eleven-year-old marriage, the kind of marriage anyone unhappily married would want.  There were little issues—he’s too into cooking, she doesn’t like to French kiss—but mostly all they were suffering from was the is-this-all-there-is? syndrome: “Our marriage is good but not great—so now what?  Do we just endure?  Or do we try to make it better?” 

Many of us feel the same way.  Most of us actually.  Most people, it turns out, have good-enough marriages: there are problems, they’re not ecstatic, but they’re happy.  So we wonder, Could we do better?  (more…)

I wish I didn’t get letters like this.  But in fact I get them all the time.  ALL THE TIME!  It’s so sad.  I don’t want to be gross, but if you put food in your mouth and it tastes rotten, you spit it out.  But for so many of us, if we’re in a relationship that feels rotten, we just keep swallowing.  Here’s an example of the kind of email I keep getting:  (more…)

There is nothing more common to the human condition than to be unhappy and not know why.  Nothing is more common, and nothing is more dangerous: it is out of that nameless misery that a thousand demons fly. 

This was brought to mind be a recent Stanley Crouch column in the Daily Beast.  It was about Solange Magnano, a 38-year-old former Miss Argentina and mother of two who died as a result of a cosmetic surgery procedure designed to give her a bigger, rounder ass.  (more…)

No, this isn’t about Tiger Woods.  It actually comes off a Time piece on the ’00s, “the decade from hell.”  The piece is about how we (that is, the nation and the world) went wrong in the last ten years.  And boy, did we go wrong.  As you well know. 

But what does this have to do with the stuff we do here at Chestnut Hill?  A lot, it turns out. (more…)

We all like ogling the trashiest parts of the private lives of celebrities.  And we all love being as judgmental as hell.  But what does the Tiger/Elin blow up really have to do with us?  A lot, it turns out. 

Many of us (the ones who say the least, I think) see this painful drama playing out and think, “This is me.  I am going through this right now.” 

And I wish a lot of us would think, “This could easily be me,” because a lot of us are an accident just waiting to happen when it comes to infidelity blowups. 

And that means WE NEED HELP! 

Now over the past many months, we’ve offered a lot of help right here, both for dealing with a crisis like this and for preventing such a crisis from happening.  Here’s a sampling: (more…)

There is some new research out on loneliness (and here’s another take on this research) that I think is going to cause a lot of confusion and pain.  But that’s only because it’s been misunderstood.  If we understand this new research the right way, I think we’ll find it brings help and hope to a lot of us.  (more…)

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, while Elin chases your ass into the night. 

Well, we don’t know for sure what really went on between Tiger Woods and his wife Elin Nordegren.  We just have rumors.  (Although now we have some confirmation from Tiger himself.)  But widespread, and widely believed, reports have it that Tiger cheated on Elin and Elin got enraged and in some way physically, perhaps golfically, attacked Tiger. 

Of course it’s not funny.  It’s not funny at all.   This scenario is how countless marriages and lives are terribly, and too often irreparably, damaged. 

What are the lessons we draw from this incident?  (more…)