Relationships are immensely important for both our health and our wellbeing ... for how long we live, our resilience to psychological stress, and for our levels of happiness & life satisfaction.  This is crucially relevant for pretty much all of us.  The post "Strong relationships improve survival as much as quitting smoking" clearly links the state of our personal social networks to how long we're likely to live.

I'm a big fan of Self-Determination Theory (S-DT).  For me it's one of the best ways into understanding flourishing and wellbeing.  I use the ideas all the time in my work and in my life.  The fine S-DT website at Rochester University in the States gives vast amounts more information.  I've mentioned S-DT many times in this blog - see for example the post "Self determination theory" from five years ago that gives links to the slides of a lecture I gave on S-DT and a whole bunch of relevant handouts.

"God guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone; he that sings a lasting song, thinks in a marrow bone."     W. B. Yeats

"We camouflage our true being before others to protect ourselves against criticism or rejection.  This protection comes at a steep price.  When we are not truly known by the other people in our lives, we are misunderstood.  When we are misunderstood, especially by family and friends, we join the 'lonely crowd.'  Worse, when we succeed in hiding our being from others, we tend to lose touch with our real selves.  This loss of self contributes to illness in its myriad forms."         Sidney Jourard

I wrote yesterday on "Mindfulness: the missing facet 'describe', and meeting at relational depth with self & others - theory" .  Today I'd like to take this into a practical example.

God guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone; he that sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone.  William Butler Yeats

In yesterday's post I discussed the first three of Andrew Christensen's "five principles" of a "Unified protocol for couple therapy". Today I'd like to talk about his fourth and fifth principles - foster productive communication (develop more adaptive communication skills) and emphasize strengths and encourage positive behavior. The five principles are illustrated in the following diagram (downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Powerpoint slide): 

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.) 

About every three months I meet up with one of my oldest and dearest friends and we spend twenty four hours or so together checking in on how our lives are going and what our plans are - this "work" links to the post "Building willpower: the eight pillars".  Our friendship goes back nearly 30 years and we've been doing these check-in's for a decade or so.  We know each other pretty well!  I'm just back from one of these times and it leads me to think a bit about friendship.