This spring I presented keynotes and workshops at The Couples Conference in Oakland and at a UCLA conference called Relationships and the Health-Promoting Power of Connection Across the Lifespan. Both events featured faculty that trained, enlightened and entertained participants.

I’m still reviewing in my mind some of the great things I heard there. And I thought I’d share a few quotable moments. It’s impossible to paint a complete picture using just snippets, but I think you’ll agree that these are some memorable ideas and turns of phrase. I hope you enjoy them – and remember them when they might be helpful!

Helen Fisher
Men are two and a half times more likely to kill themselves after a relationship ends.

Don’t make any major live decisions while madly in love. Let this wear off because people don’t make good decisions when madly in love. Love is indeed blind.

Esther Perel
Esther says, “Before I meet your problems, I’d like to meet the person.” And then she asks some good questions:

• What makes it difficult to live with you?
• What is a vulnerability your partner grapples with?

Terry Real

Masculinity is at war with itself.
Patriarchy damages both sexes.
Developmentally, men have only been allowed lust and anger.
Men fear subjugation not intimacy.

Stan Tatkin
Check with yourself. Does your approach fit the capacity of the brain in front of you?
Sometimes we interpret deficits as defenses. Defenses protect the self while a deficit has no purpose.
The autonomic nervous system is very fast. We make things up and our memories can’t be trusted. It is not about facts. It is about getting to repair.

Ed Tronick
Interactions are messy and filled with mismatches. It is repairing the messiness that leads to growth and change.
When a child or infant can’t repair, they get stuck in:

• I can’t cope.
• I am helpless and hopeless.
• I am not whole.

When repair happens, they recognize:

• I can connect.
• You can be trusted.
• The world is safe to explore.
• Something wrong can move to something right

And here are a few lines from my presentations….

Dr. Ellyn Bader
Tremendous growth happens when couples learn to “swim in anxious soup together. ” This means learning to tolerate anxiety for growth, rather than moving to control and manage one another or collapsing and complying in order not to threaten each other.

Sustained change often happens faster in couples therapy than it does in individual therapy.

Couples Therapy is a true specialty. Marriages and primary attachments are so precious.

It is too easy to do damage to a bond that is stressed or disillusioned. It is not a therapy be undertaken lightly by a therapist who only sees individuals or 1-2 couples a week.