Last week's post was about repair attempts and how you can use repair attempts to de-escalate an argument. However, there may be one or more times when you may say or do something regrettable. Perhaps you destroyed a very valuable item that belongs to your partner in the heat of an argument, or perhaps an accidental confession of how much you hate your partner's family slipped out. Whatever the situation may be, today's post is about what you can do in the aftermath of a regrettable incident. 
           Repairing your relationship after a big incident is critical in moving forward and growing as a couple. Repairing in this post refers to a pattern of interaction that processes, acknowledges, and resolves the feelings and experience of both parties involved in a regrettable incident. Regrettable incident will be a general term used to encompass anything regrettable arising in your relationship and thus it can be defined differently for every couple. Many times couples fight and fight and fight some more to get their point across, but very little energy goes into making amends. So the following are some steps that you and your partner can take to process, acknowledge, and resolve a regrettable incident in your relationship. Prior to using these steps, it's very important that you and your partner are calm and open to listening to each other. If you or your partner does not feel this way, it would be better to wait for another time to use these steps.
           1) Take turns sharing your feelings and experience of what happened. The "truth" is subjective. Unless you used a camera to record the whole incident, all you have are your memories of what happened. And most likely, you both have different versions. This is not a police investigation so you both are right in your account of what happened. 
           2) Acknowledge your partner's feelings and experience of what happened. Listen without judgement to what your partner experienced and felt. This is such an important part of growing as a couple because it's about validating each other. You don't need to agree with your partner in order to validate that their feelings are theirs. In this step you can say, "I can see why you would feel....." or "So you felt.... when this happened".
           3) Take responsibility for your part in the incident. Probably the hardest step here because this is hard to do.  You aren't allowed to correct your partner's faults and you're not allowed to say "I take responsibility for not doing.....". Taking responsibility is about looking at what we did or said, so we can't take responsibility for the lack of our behavior. For example, "I take responsibility for yelling" is good vs. "I take responsibility for not holding my temper" is no good.
           4) Make a plan for how to better respond in the future. Also a hard thing to do, but repairing does not sum up to much without this step. This is the corrective step and the step that goes beyond "I'm sorry".  This only needs to be one thing you will do differently next time, but it conveys remorse for the incident and a commitment to the relationship. 
           Relationships will naturally have their highs and lows. Hopefully the highs and lows are staggered and grow further apart as the relationship progresses. Most regrettable incidents can be discussed and resolved, and can help your relationship become stronger. However, there are times when some incidents cannot be resolved on your own, and in those cases professional help may be needed. For the most part, you now have a few more tools to keep your relationship strong.

             One of the most common reasons people come into therapy is because they feel depressed. Most individuals that I have seen in my practice are battling depression. Depression is all around us and can sometimes go undetected. Many times it's not about how many friends a person has or how much money. It is more related to whether a person feels they have purpose and how hopeful they feel about this. Depression is another hard to talk about topic, so I hope this post will shed some light onto it. And hopefully you don't feel too depressed after reading it.
            It's not unusual to have ups and downs in the course your life. However when these "down" parts take a deep dive it can feel much more difficult to come up. This is one difference from having the "blues" and depression. The down part may feel like you have a ton of weight on your shoulders, your every thought is negative or hopeless, nothing (hobbies, people, food) is enjoyable as it used to be, you can't sleep or can't stop sleeping, and life just does not matter anymore. The deepest feeling you may have is despair that lingers for weeks and you just have a longing to end this torture. Depression can happen to anyone. It's a silent sickness because it's hard to admit feeling crappy when there appears to be nothing physically wrong with you. 
           The truth is, there are so many things that could happen in our lives that can bring on depression these days. We really have more at stake with the kind of lifestyle that we have. Loss of a job, loss of a family member/child/friend, divorce, infertility, infidelity, chronic pain or illness, and the list goes on. So I suggest for you to equip yourself with the best ammunition that you can for dark times in your life. This ammunition includes: a support system of individuals that you can vent or pour your heart out to, a routine for physical activity, a routine for self care that is positive, and a daily dose of positive thoughts. Having many outlets can help when depression sets in and one or more of these outlets are compromised.

             Nurturing the relationship you have with yourself is so crucial in the life and health of other relationships in your life.  This is not necessarily about being selfish, putting your own needs before others, or being narcissistic. Instead, you nurture yourself by taking care of your stress, mental health, physical health, and most importantly, being your own best friend. We are often our harshest critic (which is ok), but we often do not balance our inner critic with the praise and encouragement that we deserve (just like a bestie would). As a result, we criticize ourselves and condition ourselves to depend on others to validate our strengths.
             The relationship we have with ourselves is about self love. It encompasses awareness of our strengths and weaknesses, acceptance of our past and present, and encouragement of being better today than we were yesterday. When we fail to nurture a friendship with ourselves, we normalize that love needs to come from  others rather than from within us. Simple as it may sound, many relationship problems arise from this. Here are some examples.
When we do something special/thoughtful/nice for our partner and expect the same treatment because we assume that our action should signal to our partner the importance of this act for us. When our partner fails to decipher this message, we feel hurt and unloved. In doing this, we send ourselves the message that feeling loved is dependent on our partner's behaviors. 
When we blame ourselves for conflicts in the relationship, or we disregard our feelings/needs in order to compromise or keep the peace. In doing this, we send ourselves the message that our needs are secondhand in the relationship.
These situations are familiar to many of us. It is a fault we own, but simply means we are human and capable of growth. 
             Self love actually enhances our relationships because it gives us greater capacity to love and be loved. It allows us to feel lovable and valuable in the face of rejection, hurt, conflict, or criticism from our partner. And it's self love that allow us to feel lovable and valuable even when we feel all alone in the world. Love with others start and grow within us first. If we do not have self love, we will constantly seek someone who "makes" us feel loved in all the ways we believe we deserve to be loved. And sadly, there is not "one" person out there who will make us feel completely loved. Not because people are bad or incapable, but because it's unrealistic to expect someone to love us more than we love ourselves. Your spouse/partner will love you in the capacity that they can, and your feelings of love will be a combination of how much you feel he/she loves you and how much you love yourself. We must choose to love and this choice allows love to permeate our life.