Meet Your Oakland Couples Therapist, Dana Cole, LMFT

How to Reach Your New Year’s Relationship Goals

It’s easy to start off the year with lofty goals – personal, professional, and in your romantic partnership. It feels good – especially exciting relationship goals! “Let’s go running every morning together! Let’s travel without a hitch this year! Let’s work our way through the Kama Sutra!” Even setting more serious, mature goals, like building greater trust, shine with a new year’s promise. Oops…What Was My Goal Again? But we all know that steep rollercoaster drop from setting a goal to realizing you have no idea how to achieve it. Pretty soon, you’re fuming at each other in an RV...

Cultivating Your Relationship: Would You Say That to a Friend?

We often forget that our mental health as an individual has a huge amount to do with the health of our relationship. In other words, you can read all the relationship advice you want, but if your self-care doesn’t change, you may not affect the changes that you want in your relationship, either. In this vein, one simple way of cultivating your relationship is to examine your self-talk… And how that translates into conversations with your partner. The key question here is “Would you say that to a friend?” Why Self-Talk Matters To put it simply, self-talk is like...

5 Ways to Make Your Partner’s Day Better

We all want to feel appreciated and loved in our relationship. It is far too easy to take your partner for granted. Especially in a committed and established relationship. Busy work schedules, raising children, volunteering, and just life in general can contribute to forgetting about your partner. How can we show our love and appreciation to our partner? Simple: take action. Making Your Partner a Priority Involves Taking Specific Actions of Love To make your partner a priority, you need to be deliberate about your actions. When you show Love towards your partner you are taking action towards cultivating the...

Couples Hygge – “Self” Care for Relationships

You may have heard the Danish word “hygge” come up several years ago, when it was a finalist for the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2016. Or in Disney’s Frozen – the musical version has an entire song about hygge! But the concept is much older, a staple of Scandinavian culture. And it works both for self-care and couples care within a relationship. What Is “Hygge”? And How Does It Apply to Relationships? Oxford Dictionaries defines hygge as “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” Imagine if your relationship became...

Newly Empty Nest? Optimize This Time to Reprioritize Your Marriage

Here is the most obvious nugget of knowledge ever: Having kids drastically changes your life. Priorities change. Your focus changes. And how you spend a large amount of your time changes. Often, couples who have children put their relationship on the backburner by necessity. They have to make sure their kids’ needs are met. That they are successful in their jobs so they can continue to provide for their now-larger family. That they at least marginally maintain their own health so they can actually do all of those things. Only after all that is their relationship a real consideration. As...

Reading Love: What Do Connection Bids Look Like?

“Love is simple.” “Love is complicated.” Both feel true at different times. If you could make a roadmap of love, what are the stops along the way? Researchers John and Julie Gottman broke down the gestures of love (and rejection) into small interactions called “bids.” Bids are moments when you ask your partner for connection. Because of that, we’re just going to call them connection bids. Noticing Connection Bids Means Getting Good at Subtext The tricky part is that connection bids are more often indirect rather than direct. When we become stressed and distracted by life, we might miss our...

Romantic Vacations Mean Managing Relationship Expectations

If we’re being honest, many of us have felt some of our lowest moments while on vacation. These didn’t make it onto the camera roll, but you probably learned something about yourself, like what renders you desperately existential. Many of these emotions stem from disappointment of grand relationship expectations. Combine this vacation existentialism with your partner’s own expectations, plus some romantic fantasies – shifting your relationship into a new gear, reaching a commitment milestone, or just imagining a 24/7 happy and stress-free trip – and you are bound to feel some sore disappointment. Especially after you’ve spent even just one...

Change Your Language, Change Your Relationship

Have you ever wondered how some conversations with your partner can descend into bickering so quickly? It’s true that conflict in relationships can be caused by deeper, underlying tension. Sometimes it might feel impossible to change your relationship. But conflict can also arise from misunderstandings. And those can happen from the simple mechanics of word choice – and how we choose to talk about things in general. In other words, if you “fix” your language, it can change your relationship for the better. A Simple Change Can Go Far The next time you feel tension in an exchange with your...

You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Identifying Needs vs....

You’ve heard the adage “Pick your battles,” but that can go out the window when your partner leaves dishes in the sink for five days… again. Do they not value your time? Do they not care about the house you share? You mention it, and they’re upset – nothing they do is enough. But everyone has relationship needs, and you feel like you haven’t asked for much at all. Have you? Acclimation, Criticism, and Appreciation In the same way that we adjust to a hot bath or a cold winter day, we get used to our partners and what they...

How to Restore Joy in Your Relationship

“Click.” A door closing as you retreat to separate rooms. A remote turning on the TV to fill the silence. A phone call trailing off. These are the sounds in a relationship that has lost its spark and connection. This sort of relationship languishing can feel terrible and confusing. What even caused it? And more importantly, how do you restore joy in your relationship? Sometimes the answers are simple. Or your relationship might need more examining and professional help. But there are solutions to the relationship rut. Read on to discover ways to reconnect with your partner. Start with Small...