Your partner tells you that you don't understand things properly

And eventually I decided that, since I did not have the ability to say no thanks after one or two drinks like most normal drinkers, it was time to stop poisoning my body (especially the brain I had always relied on to serve up just the right words at the right time) and to take this problem by the reins. I sought help from our family doctor, who agreed that an antidepressant might be what I needed, embraced physical activity again and have now been sober since the beginning of the second year of our new life here. Although it was easy to use Lauren's death and the upheaval in our lives as the best excuses possible to indulge in a habit I knew was doing me physical harm (and who was it hurting but me, this time around? How could I have let all of that go? It was easy. No one could really blame me. But it wasn't the right thing to do. If Rob and I were to live the lives that Lauren would want us to, until we can be with our daughter again, then changes had to be made. And they were. I had seen my shadow and it foretold a world of hurt. In the example of Sara and Robert, Sara's response is based on the expectation that Robert will deprive her. Let's say Robert does object and adds, How can you expect to buy more furniture when we haven't put anything aside for our vacation? Now Sara could respond, I just want one nice set of furniture--everything we have is so ratty! Notice that Robert and Sara have engaged around the issue of deprivation. Robert feels deprived, so he can't respond to Sara. Sara argues that she is more deprived. Stories of their impoverishment will probably continue to escalate. We use deprivation to play on guilt and force a response. This approach is characteristic of vulnerable narcissism, in which fragility justifies entitlement. While extracting a response through guilt may appear temporarily effective, it ultimately shuts down engagement and drains satisfaction from the relationship.

These reminders act as a trigger to recognise how you are behaving and whether that's different from how you want to behave. One friend changes the names of difficult customers on her mobile phone to instructions on how to behave. For example, if she speaks to a demanding client, the command `Stand tall and speak confidently' indicates his phone call and offers a quick prompt before she answers. If you're trying to change the way you behave - to be more confident or more thoughtful, for example - it might be that this is a short-term step until the way you want to behave has become so ingrained that you don't need reminding. This said, all of us need a reminder sometimes. When a couple I know got married, one of the wedding presents they received was a beautifully handwritten extract from the article Rules of Love- entitled `Be Nice'. The couple put it on their kitchen wall. We're talking about one of the most thoughtful, supportive, generally lovely couples you can imagine, and yet even they admit to checking and amending their behaviour towards each other when they happen to glance at it. Behaviour drives performance: teamwork So far these ideas have related mainly to individuals, but how do you use the self-consistency theory with a group wanting to make changes? So before I fell back into that hole, it was time to stop. I take nothing for granted about each day without drinking as it comes. I am grateful for each one. Yes, although they do get easier, the evenings can be hard, but the mornings--and their clarity--are so much better. I hope that, soon, embracing sobriety will feel as natural a part of me as it did for those ten years. Much of the time--perhaps most of the time--we come by it because there's simply no alternative. Someone wise once said that you don't know what you're capable of until it's the only thing left to do, and it's so true. I have lost count of the number of people who have said they don't know how they would survive in my shoes, or that they can't imagine how they'd keep going, or just how strong I must be. But to them, all I say is that I'm not doing anything different from what they would probably do. I just happen to be doing it on a stage, of sorts.

Engagement becomes life-giving when we risk putting our desires forward simply and honestly. In our example, Robert might say, I have really been wanting to put some money away for our vacation. Sara could offer, I want to make our deck more inviting, so we can relax there in the evenings. The more the two of them can be curious about their own and each other's desires, the more they open themselves to the possibility of ending up with more--not less--than what each of them started with. The deprivation-oriented version would have cut short this kind of exploration. Expect to Change--Slowly To make the most of a therapy process, I often need to help clients shift from experiencing sessions as isolated events to experiencing them as an ongoing conversation, as a colleague of mine put it. This shift allows them to use the between-session time to develop the session material and integrate change. It could be argued that it is in the between-session time where change happens. I believe that the same is true of conflict in an intimate partnership. Perhaps the most visible example of the kind of focused physical and mental energy which all teams look for is found in professional sport, where high levels of focus and concentration are the norm. At the top level, all participants have the physical attributes, skills and abilities of champions. The consistent winners, however, focus all their energies on the behaviours that lead to their goal and stop the behaviours that get in the way. Consistent winners focus all their energies on the behaviours that lead to their goal. One of the tasks I like to ask sports coaches to do is to describe the perfect game. Great coaches will quickly and easily outline the physical, tactical and technical aspects they consider essential. The best coaches will, however, then extend their description to include the winning behaviours on display. These are coaches who have often witnessed games where the difference has been the superior behaviours of the winning team. Although no game is ever perfect, this exercise is useful because it considers the end point of their work and allows a discussion about how a perfect coach would react to the many challenging situations that can occur. Dr Ric Charlesworth, the legendary coach of the Australian women's double Olympic gold medallist hockey team, the Hockeyroos, would do this.

Whether on the radio or through my blog, I've just lived out loud. But I've kept living, and that's the key--just as it has been for countless parents before us who have also faced devastation and gotten up to fight another day. The strength of women like Ellen Hinkley--who manage to dig their way out of the darkness to happiness after having been immersed in so many levels of pain that every day must have felt like a new circle of hell--is something that my own family and siblings are going to have to draw upon. You see, almost exactly two years after we lost our daughter, my youngest sister's son died--the victim of a suspected murder. Almost unbelievably, this is the second child that she has had to bury. Twenty-five years earlier, when Leslie told our mother that her baby would be stillborn, Mom responded in sadness and incredulity, This kind of thing doesn't happen to our family. She was right. Until baby Katrina's death, we'd enjoyed what most people would probably casually observe as an enviable life: happily married parents, four ambitious and achieving daughters and a comfortable and sometimes adventurous middle-class existence. There were challenges, to be sure, as there are in every family: divorce, disease and dissent. But nothing like the heartbreak Leslie suffered when she endured the stillbirth of her first child. When partners are interacting directly, they are limited in their capacity to take in each other's feedback. After the encounter, they have more room to toss around that feedback, struggle with it, integrate new learning, and arrive at new questions. Often the benefits of the struggle occur silently in changed behavior and new understanding. This contrasts with the kiss and make up format of conflict we have been taught to expect. This familiar format demands an unnatural, one-session emotional shift to harmonic feeling and sets us up for feelings of failure. Real conflicts evolve over time and pressure us to grow. Real conflicts also rarely get resolved in one round. If it seems you and your partner keep having the same fight, you are not alone. Working the territory between each other's desires is challenging and, like most skills, takes time and practice. My husband and I reminisce about our twenty-five-year fight about the relative importance of money versus passion--a fight that evolved alongside time spent raising children and enjoying each other.

He would get his players to work through hypothetical situations in groups and describe how the perfect player and the perfect coach would behave. Sir Alex Ferguson also champions this approach, suggesting that there are mechanics and dynamics of a team - or, as others have described them, the physics and the chemistry. He believes that as well as the rigorous skills training which players receive, working on the dynamics or behaviour of a team is equally important. I promised one leading sports team I was working with that they would change and improve their performance as long as they were prepared to be honest about each other's behaviour as elite players. Behaviour and personality are different factors (less than 10 per cent of behaviour is down to personality) and so, unlike the technical assessment of skills and abilities these guys had been subjected to repeatedly as players, they had rarely ever discussed the best behaviours. This time we sat in a circle and openly and honestly agreed upon the five behaviours that consistently brought them the best results. We then adapted an idea which Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, implemented with his customer service staff. He set up WOCAS (What Our Customers Are Saying) reports, which went straight to him, along with `customer verbatim' - the actual emails sent in by customers - on the behaviours which they felt were most important. In our sports team, our approach was to create a WOPAS (What Our Peers Are Saying) report, with everyone on the team assessing each other's behaviour after every game. There was a particular example that highlighted the power of this simple system. It could be argued--my self-imposed ban on comparisons aside--that nowhere is the loss of a child so amplified by the pain of broken and still limitless dreams as when a baby is lost before or during birth. No matter how much time a mother has had to bond with that baby before its arrival in the world, whether two months or full term, there comes with losing that child an inevitable, piercing pain--a realization of the unfairness of such a helpless human being not even having had a chance to take a breath. Whether we know it or not, someone close to us has probably suffered a miscarriage. In my own family, it happened to two of my three sisters, as well as my dear niece and my own mother (during the pregnancy before my arrival). The feelings of sadness that accompany this kind of loss are coupled with the hormonal changes the body experiences during pregnancy, only adding to the expected feelings of depression and other immense emotional distress. In addition to shock, anger and depression, a grieving mother-to-be often experiences sensations of guilt. A woman whose pregnancy has ended with the death of a baby (called a stillbirth after twenty weeks of gestation) may wonder if she should have known there was something wrong, or what she did to have brought about her unborn child's death. Certainly this was the case when my younger sister lost her daughter in 1993. Leslie was pregnant with her first child and had seemingly sailed through seven months. A busy phone article advertising sales executive, she looked like she was managing it all.