control Archives ⋆ Mike and Susan Dawson

WHY DOUBT MAY KEEP YOU FROM HOPE IN YOUR LIFE

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:16:54+00:00Hope, Perspective|

Most of us have heard a variation on this story about the monkey but let’s revisit it. Monkeys were stealing food from a village. So the natives devised gourds that would trap them. The gourds have a hole just large enough for the monkey’s hand to slip into. They then weight the gourd with sand and one piece of food. The trap is set. The monkey sticks his hand into the gourd in hope of getting the food — but with the prize in its grasp, the monkey cannot get its hand back out. The hole is too small for the monkey’s hand to pass through so long as it’s [...]

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Control in Marriage – The Way it Really Works

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:16:56+00:00Control|

Control in marriage. Really? You hear about it all the time, but usually in a negative connotation. “He/She is controlling.” “Everything is his/her way.” “I can’t be myself.” That’s because control in this meaning is about pressure, force, power, manipulation and sometimes even domination. But we all desire to have some control over, or in, our lives. Control is a very natural part of who we are because we are created to live free. We have a free will that desires to manage our own actions or emotions, and even the overall outcome of what our life is to be. It’s really all about INFLUENCE Research on couples show that the [...]

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Focus in the Right Direction for Relationship Influence

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:17:38+00:00Relationships|

Remember Lucy in the cartoon “Peanuts” by Charles Schultz? She would always ‘tee up’ the football for Charlie Brown, convince him to try to kick it, and then pull it out before he did. Charlie Brown always ended up flat on his back. For all the times Lucy convinced him to try again, she always turned the blame back on Charlie Brown. It is often this way with couples and their relationship, the focus for change is in the wrong direction. Cade and Bea had difficulty talking, and when they did it would escalate and get negative quickly. They each had a laundry list of things the other did, didn’t [...]

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All Emotions are Appropriate, but not All Behaviors.

michaeldawsonlpc@gmail.com2024-01-08T01:17:52+00:00Emotion|

“You’re just being emotional” “You’re so emotional,you’re out of control” “People just use their emotions to get what they want” “Just be rational and think about it” Sound familiar? Years ago it was commonly accepted that our brain had a reasonable side and an emotional side; and some still believe that today. The idea was that we can control our emotions using reason. It’s the emotion vs. reason idea. Not True. We know today that the brain is integrated with emotion and reason, even in the Cerebral Cortex. Without emotion, higher-level problem solving does not happen very well. John Gottman says the “sense of the matter” is essential in problem [...]

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