Whether you are single, widowed, divorced or about to be, pursuing love can be can fun when you are open to the many exciting opportunities it offers.  The dictionary defines a Date as: A social engagement between two people of the opposite sex.  I define Dating as: A time to meet different people for the purpose of selecting a love-partner.  Think of yourself as interviewing for the most important opening in your life – a spouse. It's a time to gain new knowledge, experiment with new activities, have fun and learn more about who you are.  What sort of people do you truly respect?  What sort of people enhance the quality of your life?  What do you want from a relation¬ship, and what is fair to expect from it?  My advice is to enjoy the process, focus on having a good time, and, lo and behold, the prize will present itself.
 In order to assist you in deciding what your goal is, what kind of partner you are seeking,
I recommend that you first need to be truthful with yourself about where you find yourself in the present, right now.  The future cannot occur in a vacuum, without a firm acceptance of the present state you are in. For example, if you wished to travel to Duluth, Minnesota you would get lost without first knowing your starting point. Because from San Jose, California the direction to Duluth is east, whereas, you would travel west coming from Washington, D.C. So only when you know where you are, will you be able to get to where you wish to go.  
 Chances are pretty good that you are already doing some of the very things that will help reach your goal of getting married and staying married.  I would like to suggest that your ability to expand on these existing, and perhaps hidden, inner resources requires that you be aware of what they are.  The following "I AM..." exercise will reveal to you exactly what your present status is in life, and in love. 
          The THE "I AM" FOR SELF-DISCOVERY task consists of repeatedly completing the words: “I am…”  Here's an example:

I am my mother's daughter
I am a talented interior designer
I am scared that I'll never get married and will disappoint Mommy.
I am upset that I let my mother run my life
I am a little girl inside
I am a beautiful, desirable woman
I am not so confident about being a beautiful, desirable woman
I am basically shy around men who interest me
I am attracted to powerful, gorgeous men who abuse me
I am afraid I'm never going to be with someone that I want to be
 with
I am more secure with men who are less desirable
I am most comfortable with men who other women would reject
I am someone who ends up with men I can't truly respect
I am disgusted with my choice of men
I am frustrated with the types of relationships I end up with
I am usually someone who gets attached to men who aren't good for
 me
I am getting  depressed
I am friendly, warm and have many good friends
I am confident about my ability to make money
I am a woman who soothes herself with shopping
I am going to mend my ways and take control of my spending
I am embarrassed about my materialistic orientation
I am someone who appreciates art
I am closest to god when I am at the ocean
I am a woman who loves warm weather and hot men
I am afraid of getting  married and being stuck
I am afraid that marriage will obliterate my autonomous

Once Natalie witnessed the wisdom and insight of her unconscious mind, she gained clarity and appreciation about the many assets she possessed, as well as identifying the work she still needed to accomplish.  Her strengths which had previously gone unrecognized were impressive.
All the best,
Dr. Rita

    Avoidance is a defense learned to protect us from dealing with issues that are too hot to handle. Most of us grow up in families where we, at least occasionally, get angry and upset with a situation that we can do nothing about. There are limited methods that we can use to cope with those upsets and one of the most successful is Avoidance.
    Imagine growing up in a family with an angry, critical father  who engenders fear in everyone including yourself.  As a child, there is very little you can do to change the situation or your father who scares you to death.  You probably try to be good, erroneously believing that it’s your fault that he is like that, just because he blames YOU when he gets angry. 

    One patient remembers his father yelling when he was five years old, “You little ungrateful shit, you purposely left your scooter in the  hall.” And then, he slammed you one across the face. Now, chances are that you surely didn’t leave the scooter there on purpose. Chances are that when you were five, you just weren’t paying attention. Your mind was somewhere else by the time you were done with the scooter, you were already thinking of taking out your puzzles. However, you were just a little kid, and you believed your father because he was older, bigger and far more powerful than you. So, you started paying attention to being really really good. Somehow, regardless of how good you were, he found other reasons to get angry.

     Another of my patients remembers her mother getting furious with her, slapping her, and then not talking with her for three days when she was eight years old because she shoved her little brother when he ripped the hair out of her favorite doll’s head. 
     Parents can be difficult. Despite how much they may love you, they come loaded with their own baggage and aren’t always on their best behavior as parents ought to be. As the parents you deserve to have, ought to be. Living in a family, leads to having to learn how to cope with our parents’ bad behavior. In comes Avoidance. One of the most effective defense mechanisms that exist. Avoidance allows us to stop thinking about things that are difficult. Stop feeling what hurts. Stop talking about what’s uncomfortable. Not deal!
     The consequences of Avoidance, however, go way beyond childhood, in that it becomes a way of life in dealing with other people even when we grow up, and when there there is no longer anything to fear, as there was during childhood.

    Take for example another patient who is extremely passive with his wife, never brings up an issue that bothers him, and in general is usually angry with her, and therefore often acts in a passive-aggressive manner with her. (Passive-Aggressive behavior is when someone does something negative in a sneaky manner and denies his or her responsibility for that behavior.) He is angry because she is the only one who brings up issues, and he feels picked upon. He feels much like he felt as a child with his parents. Yet he avoids telling her how he feels, the anger between them grows, and eventually they end up in divorce court, or if they're lucky, in my office where I teach them three thing.

     1. When you feel upset, realize that you are an adult now and you can confront people - even your parents.

     2. What you feel upset about is legitimate.

     3. How? Find a way to express it in a respectful , kind manner.

All the best,

Dr. Rita

     On your second date you have sex, make breakfast together next morning, and feel like you're going to get married. In this addictive society of the quick fix and magic solution we tend to jump into relationships faster than you can say Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

     For all the positive gains that we have made, the resulting tendency of becoming physically intimate before falling in love, can also mask what is really in the best interest of intimate relationships. Just because we have the freedom to have sex outside of marriage doesn't mean that we have to sexualize our dating relationships so quickly. The problem is that we then tend to bypass the crucial steps toward developing a healthy and loving connection. 
     Sex masks intimacy. It blinds us from knowing if a particular relationship is really good for us, one that will meet our needs or even be there in the morning. All too often, two people meet, are attracted to each other, yet like a plane that takes off before the wings have been attached, the relationship can come crashing down all too quickly.  
      Many people jump into intimacy without giving themselves a chance to truly know the other person, and often aren't certain that’s what they want in the first place. To the uneducated observer nothing seems to be wrong with this picture, it may even seem like love at first sight! 
     The truth of the matter is that a good relationship is a lot like a really tasty stew. It takes a great deal of preparation and then needs to cook for a long long time on a very low flame, in order for all the ingredients to blend together.                            
    Many people are so intent on becoming coupled, obtaining a partner, that they don't sufficiently examine the qualities of that new someone, nor the entity of their togetherness. Others fail to listen to their own inner voice, and instead become instantly glued together and carelessly allow themselves to be sucked up into couplehood. It's a dangerous game - someone will get hurt and it could be you. 

     Today, sexual interaction is no longer limited to a committed  relationship, and people often confuse the superficiality of a sexual attraction for the real thing. Ideally, it takes reason, heart and strategy,instead of gonads to make good decisions regarding something as important as finding an appropriate life-partner.
     Yes, I did say strategy. The dictionary defines the word as: a plan, method, or series of maneuvers...for obtaining a specific goal or result.

     Surely you strategize when confronted by a business or career-related goal. Why not apply the same ability that you already possess toward something as important to you as dating and marriage? Here's my advice:

1. Take your time.

2. Take your time.

3. Take your time.

All the best,

Dr. Rita

     Many people wonder how Traditional Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, Holistic Therapy – which include Mind/Body, and Creative Therapy differ. I suppose the most important difference between any type of therapy , and any other, is the PERSON who dispenses the therapy and the RELATIONSHIP between the patient or client,  and the clinician. Creativity, which is a right brain activity, can be accessed by those of us who are interested in balancing our thinking left brain – an elegant and impressive computer which  solves intricate mathematical problems, promotes abstractions, and organizes our lives into manageable units of time. In other words, EVERYONE has the capacity to utilize our amazing asset of imagination, emotion, and art which lives across the Corpus Collusum – the little bridge that connects our left and right brain hemispheres, and be creative, whether it is as a psychotherapist or as an artist. Some people say that psychotherapy is more of an art than a science.
     Creative Therapy has a history founded on sound scientific evidence that our right brain, though under-utilzed, contains a treasure chest of powerful healing. Let me give you an example. I work with a man who has a history of isolating from intimacy, from relationships, partly because of his temperament – which is mostly shy,  gently laid-back, but also because of his family history which includes a father who mostly hid out in his work, and a mother who was distant, and violent, because of unrelenting depression and a possible Borderline diagnosis.

     After John (fictional name) and I got to know each other, I asked him to draw a picture of how he felt in his life. I often use art as a way of drawing out right brain functions in an effort to bypass resistance and over-thinking. John drew a shockingly powerful picture of a very tiny cowering person hidden in the midst of many layers of barbed wire. Outside the barbed wire everything was black. In talking about the picture, John connected to his feelings regarding living in his original family, and in the world today.  Instead of just bumbling around that past, we also began to connect to John’s resources which turned out to be quite powerful and included his love for playing guitar, writing lyrics, cooking and tennis. In supporting John’s amazingly wonderful hope chest of inner resources, we worked both ends of the puzzle. His power would in turn absorb some of his pain, and soon John felt comfortable enough to confront and work through some important issues that had been hounding him his entire life.

     Effia (fictional name) came to me with depression that paralyzed her and included a difficult eating disorder. Along the way of finding the path to unlock the door to her healing, we happened on her talent for art. Each time we met and discussed an issue, she went home and translated her understanding into a piece of art: collage, cartoon, painting, puppets, poetry, music, cookies, there was no end to her talent and to the way we allowed her natural creativity to become our co-therapist.
     Creative Therapy in the way that I work, includes utilizing the best of traditional and experiential work. I like to do whatever manages to assist the dislodging of stubborn, painful symptoms, requiring a fund of intuitive, scientific, and humanistic connectivity that can bridge the chasm of a variety of painful trauma. With the help of a warm heart , an active imagination, care, and an open mind, great strides can be made in the interest of healing and growth for both couples and individuals. Words are not always the easiest or shortest distance between two points. 

All the best,

Rita