How to Keep Fights from Destroying Your Relationship
First thing's first: Are you even fighting about the same thing?
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Research has demonstrated time and again that it is not what couples argue about that matters but how they argue. In other words, the main problem is the communication about the issue rather than the issue itself. Further, couples whose arguments tend to escalate are significantly more likely to separate or get divorced than couples who can manage their disagreements and prevent them from becoming too toxic.
Therefore, it is vital for couples to learn how to prevent arguments from escalating once they become heated. In over 20 years of doing couples therapy, I’ve seen how the majority of couples’ arguments go south due to two simple yet unfortunate disconnects.
It sounds like you disagree with one another but, in fact, you don't: Couples are often convinced they know what their partner thinks, means and intends when a certain topic is broached. People are often so convinced of their mind-reading abilities that they stop listening and begin formulating their responses, rebuttals, or excuses almost as soon as the other person starts speaking.
They then respond with a tone and manner that sounds hostile, defensive or accusatory, which causes their partner to respond in kind, and off to the races they go. I cannot begin to describe how often I’ve stopped a couple mid-argument and challenged them to define where they disagree. When they cannot, they feel awkward and confused—they were certain the other person totally disagreed with them.
You're actually arguing about two different things. An even more common scenario is when couples believe they’re arguing about the same issue but in fact, they’re not. The issues might be related but substantially different nonetheless. For example, one partner might be arguing about whether their preschooler should go to school A or B, while the other is arguing about not having enough of a say in childcare decisions.
Since they’re each arguing about something slightly different, the argument can easily escalate as they each feel the other person isn’t addressing their concerns, which frustrates them even more and causes the argument to get even more heated.
How to Prevent an Argument From Getting Out of Hand
Because so many arguments involve miscommunications about where the disagreement actually lies, clarifying the issue is the key to getting the discussion back on track. Therefore, when you feel an argument is unproductive or escalating—pause! Take a five-minute break in which each person writes down the following:
1. Define what exactly you think it is you’re arguing about in that moment and what about it is making you angry.Don’t just define the broad issue (e.g., money); be as specific as possible. One partner might write: "I’m annoyed that we agreed to cut spending and you purchased X without discussing it with me first." The other might write, "I’m annoyed you’re monitoring what I spend as I find that controlling and I don’t do that to you."
2. Define what you think your partner is arguing about and what he or she is bothered by.This is a great way to put any mind-reading skills you believe you have to the test.
3. After you finish writing down your answers, show them to each other.If you are not arguing about exactly the same thing, agree on the one specific issue you both think is important to discuss or decide to have two separate discussions to address each of your concerns. Please do not argue about whose issue was ‘correct’ or 'first.'
4. Make sure your discussion stays focused on the agreed upon issue. If other issues come up, shelve them for a different day. (One big discussion per day is plenty for most couples).
5. If this kind of disconnect happens frequently, define the issue at hand as soon as you begin to argue. It is best to cut off an unproductive miscommunication-fest and avoid emotional hurt before it festers.
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With the recent and apparent suicide of beloved actor Robin Williams, it seems depression is making headlines—as it should have been and should be.
Mental illness effects a large percentage of the world's population. It is high time that the stigma around people who suffer from these diseases—yes, dis-eases, just like diabetes and cancer, just as severe—be done away with so that our fellow humans can get the proper care and respect they deserve, just like a patient with any other debilitating sickness. Check out some lesser known facts about depression and pass it on, be a part of the solution, not the problem. Knowledge is power:
1. Most of the things people will say to help you are profoundly and dangerously unhelpful.
Thanks to a plethora of misinformation about what depression actually is, people often seem to think that saying things like “just be happier,” “don’t be depressed,” and “just try harder” are legitimate pieces of advice. They are not.
In the human body’s least amusing attempt at metaphor, many depressed people report physical symptoms like muscle ache, joint pain, and stabbing sensations in the chest. If you are depressed and feeling pain, check with your doctor to discuss possible causes.
One of the many lies depression will tell you is that nobody cares about you, so you won’t want to “bother” people by reaching out to them. Fight this lie. Wrestle it to the ground. Punch it in the face. Somebody will listen to you.
pablographix / Via Thinkstock
4. Your relationship with food changes to “it’s complicated.”
Whatever moderation there is between “forgetting to eat for a day” and “eating all of the things” just isn’t on the menu anymore. Poor eating habits can make depression worse, though, so seek medical help if your diet becomes worrisome for you.
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5. Some “friends” might ditch you (and that is OK).
Some of your so-called friends won’t know how to be around you and will vanish in the haze. Let them go and keep doing you. It’s the people who stay that will make a difference.
6. You feel like you are absolutely losing your mind.
Depression is a shape-shifting mental disorder; it co-manifests with panic attacks, compulsive thoughts and habits, social phobia, and any number of other issues. Remember that you are not “crazy.” You are sick and you can get better.
7. Everything will start to annoy you. Even you will start to annoy you.
Irritability is a symptom of depression that doesn’t get enough attention. Feeling grumpy is just a part of the process, and you shouldn’t be made to feel bad about it.
9. It’s nearly impossible to tell when it’s just your “depression talking.”
Trying to tell your healthy, rational thoughts apart from the stuff that wouldn’t cross your mind if you weren’t depressed is like scooping only the pee out of a swimming pool, but being able to tell that difference is an important step on the road to recovery.
10. Depression will wreak havoc on your sleep schedule.
You can’t sleep when you want to, but when you actually have somewhere to be you get knocked out with a completely unplanned, five-hour nap.
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11. Depression can also mean not feeling anything at all.
If you’re depressed it’s assumed that you’re sad, but depression can also make you feel numb and/or emotionally exhausted. No matter what other people say, that’s still depression; if you feel emotionally numb or blank you should report it to your doctor or therapist.
Imagine that you can only watch one thing on Netflix, and it’s an 80-season show with 24-hour episodes. Imagine that you have no interest in this show or its characters or its plot. When you are depressed, your life might feel like that TV show. Try to distract yourself for brief periods of time with anything that will hold your attention and stave off the boredom, however temporary the distraction is.
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13. You’ll feel guilty.
What’s worse than being depressed? Feeling like you’re a selfish, ungrateful failure for having a disorder you can’t control. This is a common depressive thought, and is not true. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you identify depressive thoughts and emotions (like guilt) and can give you tools to work through these feelings.
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14. Probably because people will tell you things that make you feel judged.
Yes, people are starving. Yes, there are people with “real problems.” That doesn’t make you any less sick.
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15. Your dreams get weird.
Some studies say that as people move through the stages of their depression, the content and quality of their dreams fluctuate.
Low self-esteem is a symptom of depression, so your mirror can remind you of how much you dislike the way you look or who you are. Sometimes it’s best to just cover them up for a few days.
17. Depression will seem like a “logical” state to be in.
Some studies show that depressed people have an unusually realistic worldview, so you might rationalize your depressive thinking (“I am a bad person”) as an incontrovertible fact. This is not true, and therapy can help you understand how depression flaws your logic.
20. You won’t be able to think clearly about your future.
Not only does this nuke your capacity for hope, it also renders meaningless the idea that at some point things will get better. If you feel like this, please take steps to seek medical help or talk to a trusted friend or counselor.
Devonyu / Via Thinkstock
21. Depression will make you feel that you are alone. You are not alone.
Out of harm’s way … woman is carried to safety by brave fighter Channel 4
By EMILY FAIRBAIRN, The Sun
published
WEARY women are helped to safety by armed rescuers as they flee IS in a feat to rival the Great Escape.
They are among 34 mums and daughters who were kept as slaves by jihadi soldiers for eight months.
The victims, the eldest 60, suffered appalling sexual and physical violence.
Their daring exit, which saw them trudge barefoot across mountains for two days with little food or water, was made possible by an underground network of brave resistance fighters.
Guides based inside IS risk their own lives to free women and children from the terror group’s strongholds in Syria.
They lead them to the border, where they are then smuggled into Iraq by lawyer Khaleel Al Dakhi, who co-ordinates the dangerous rescue missions.
Their amazing work has been revealed for the first time by new Channel 4 documentary, Escape From Isis.
Khaleel is from the Yazidi community of the Sinjar Mountains in northern Iraq, which last August was the target of a devastating IS attack.
Hundreds were killed and thousands of women and young girls captured.
The Islamic extremists consider the Yazidi minority to be infidels.
Yazidi women are bought and sold as slaves among twisted IS fighters, with girls as young as nine subjected to torture and rape.
It is these victims that Khaleel and his activist cell do their utmost to rescue.
Khaleel, who has a five-year-old girl, says: “I can’t imagine not seeing my daughter — to talk to her, to hug her.
“Now hundreds of children like mine have been taken, we have to keep going.”
He adds: “No one has said they will rescue our people. No government. Imagine if one of your people was captured. You’d do everything you could to save them.”
Relief … woman is reunited with relative Channel 4
The operation began after some girls managed to escape the barbaric regime on their own.
Khaleel started gathering their testimonies in the hope of using them as evidence in a future war crimes trial.
Then he realised that the escapees had valuable information that could help others to flee.
He started collating a map of IS positions and Yazidi prisons. Then he developed contacts within IS who were prepared to lead captured women to freedom.
His heroic guides range from political agitators who will do anything to undermine the regime, to penniless shepherds who will help in exchange for a few hundred dollars in expenses.
Most of them are Sunni Arabs — the people IS claims to represent.
The girls they have successfully rescued tell harrowing stories of the abuse they endured.
Amal, 18, was held by an IS commander and his six bodyguards, all of whom would rape her daily.
She reveals: “I’m still in pain. I can’t sleep. I wake up at 3am smelling them.”
Secret mission … Khaleel Channel 4
Life is little better for the four million women in IS with its ruthless oppression and medieval controls. All females are forbidden to go outside without a close male relative.
When they do, they must wear gowns to hide their body shape, gloves to cover their hands and three black veils to hide their face.
Even a small infringement of the code results in brutal punishment.
A Syrian former teacher who fell foul of the regime’s enforcers said: “‘They said my eyes were visible through my veil. I was tortured. They lashed me.
“Now some of them punish women by biting. They give you the option between getting bitten or lashed.”
She added: “We have no freedom. We cannot go out on the balcony or look through the window. They will arrest a woman if she wears perfume or raises her voice. A woman’s voice cannot be heard.”
A savage female police brigade, known as Al-Khansa, persecutes fellow women.
As many as 60 of these morality fanatics are British.
Film … activist at checkpoint Channel 4
One former enforcer, Umm Abaid, a Syrian woman who has since fled IS, admitted: “Anyone who broke the rules, we would lash. Then we would take her male guardian, her brother, father or husband, and lash him too.”
Women have even been buried alive for dress code infringements.
Grisly public executions are also commonplace. After taking over the Iraqi city of Raqqa, IS stoned a woman to death for adultery.
Despite this barbarism, there are still hundreds of educated Western women, including Brits, who are voluntarily making the journey to IS to join the jihadists.
The documentary’s director Edward Watts, said: “If this film does anything, I hope it makes those girls think twice about what they are doing.”
The crew risked their own lives to record the footage while activists within IS filmed themselves to show everyday life, including being stopped at a checkpoint for ID.
Edward added: “When we were up on the frontline it was nerve-racking. You hear stories from the soldiers stationed there.
“IS attack them every night at 3am. They come at them in great numbers with mortars, suicide bombs and rocket launchers.
“The way the soldiers describe them, it is as if IS is some sort of zombie army you just can’t stop.”
This poor girl needs help with an abortion asaps. Otherwise both the mother and child will endure be a lifetime of an open wound and resentment against a child that reminds her of her captor every time she looks at it.
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‘The virgins were taken to a room with 40 men. They lined us up and pointed who they wanted': Yazidi girl, 17, made pregnant by ISIS fighter reveals her nine-month ordeal as a jihadi sex slave
Teenager revealed how she was sold to Chechen fighter with her sister, 10
Made to recite Koran verses while fighter and his ‘bodyguards’ raped them
When teen tried to fight back, she was scaled with boiling water by rapists
Girl finally escaped when her captor was killed by the Kurdish in April
By Sara Malm and Jay Akbar For Mailonline
Published: 08:26, 29 May 2015 |
A Yazidi teenager has told how she and her little sister were raped daily by depraved jihadists after they were sold into slavery at an auction of virgins – as she revealed she is now pregnant with the vile extremist’s baby.
The girl, who is just 17, revealed how every day of her nine-month ordeal was ‘like choosing between death and death’ as she was faced with beatings and sexual assaults by the ISIS militant and his team of ‘bodyguards’.
The teenager told how she was gang-raped, whipped and even scalded on the thigh with boiling hot water if she didn’t keep with her ISIS rapist’s depraved sexual demands.
Sex slaves: Yazidi women and girls have been separated from their families, forced to convert to Islam and repeatedly raped by ISIS fighters
Horrifying: The teenager told how she and and her 10-year-old sister were handcuffed and taken to a hotel where other scantily dressed women and girls were auctioned off to jihadis Picture: A sex slave victim of ISIS, many of whom say they try to kill themselves so that they won’t be raped again
The girl recalled how she was forced to recite passages from the Koran while her ‘owner’, calling himself Al-Russiyah, and his ‘bodyguards’ molested her.
Now, three months pregnant with Al-Russiyah’s baby, the girl says she gets flashbacks and nightmares about what he did to her.
‘It was like choosing between death and death… It was terrible,’ she said.
‘He beat me and would be with at least one other man every time he had sex with me.’
The teenager was kidnapped last August, after ISIS fighters overran the town of Shingal, also known as Sinjar, in an onslaught which sent thousands of Yazidis who had been living on the Nineveh Plain running for the mountains to escape the extremists.
The teenager was handcuffed and held in a hotel by gun-toting ISIS fighters, with a number of other scantily dressed women and young girls in Mosul, Iraq.
She was then moved to Islamic State’s adopted capital of Raqqa, Syria, where she and dozens of other women and girls were underwent an intrusive examination to confirm that they were virgins.
Vile: The girl described how the fighter used to smell her and the other sex slaves each morning, before deciding which one he would take for himself
Horrifying: The girl revealed how she was sold at an auction of sex slaves to a jihadi fighter who raped her repeatedly over nine months. This picture from ISIS social media channels purports to show one such market.
Kidnapped: The girl was captured when ISIS overran the Nineveh Plane last August, which sent thousands of Yazidis fleeing for the relative safety of Mount Sinjar (pictured).
IS ‘were looking for women and they took them for themselves’.
‘The virgins were taken to a room with 40 men,’ she recalled.
‘They lined us up and pointed who they wanted… I thought I might be lucky: I was not as beautiful as the others.’
The girl was bought byAl-Russiyah, originally from Chechnya, who purchased her, her 10-year-old sister and two other girls in 10 minutes.
But it was not only the prospect of what the horrors they would face once they were taken away from the auction house which left the girls distraught.
‘The day me and my sister were sold was the last day I saw my mother. I will never forget when she started crying and pulling her hair when they took us,’ she said.
They forced me to say things from the Koran during the time they did their actions, and if I didn’t they whipped me.
Girl, 17, who was kept as a sex slave
Once at their new ‘home’, an abhorrent daily routine from which they could not escape began.
Each morning, Al-Russiyah would strip the girls naked, then smell them and decide who he wanted to have sex with that day, she said.
After the he had made his choice, his bodyguards would select one of the remaining girls for themselves.
But the bodyguards were so rough with her that the teenager felt relief at being picked by her captor, who would ‘beat her less than the other men’.
It was hopeless to resist: on the one occasion she did, one of Al-Russiyah’s men poured boiling water on her leg.
‘They forced me to say things from the Koran during the time they did their actions, and if I didn’t they whipped me,’ she said.
‘I didn’t feel anything. I just felt numb. I wanted it to be over. I wanted to kill myself.
‘We were forced to cook, clean and do anything that they told us. We had to obey their orders. Sometimes we had to dance and sing for them.’
Sex slave: The girl is not the only one to speak about her horrific ordeal. Hamshe, a Yazidi girl from Iraq, spoke to documentary maker about being held as a sex slave by Isis militants for 28 days with her baby
Freedom: The girls finally escaped in April, when their captors were killed. They then joined thousands of refugees, like these ones, in hidng from ISIS, who believe Yazidis are infidels who are barely human
But then finally, after nine months of torture which no one should have to endure, a chance to escape arose.
In April, Al-Russiyah was killed, together with his bodyguards, by Peshmerga forces near Sinjar, northern Iraq – and the girls were finally able to flee.
She said: ‘[Al-Russiyah] and his bodyguards were wounded when they fought against Kurdish soldiers. He died immediately and the guards also.
‘That was when we fled.’
Some of the girls ran back to ISIS because they were so afraid. One girl who tried to escape had her legs cut off by the militants, it is claimed.
The girl says life is now difficult for her because the Yazidi community is very patriarchal – and those who have fled ISIS are considered ‘tainted’ – even though their highest cleric has urged families to accept them.
Her uncle has threatened to kill her if she had been sexually abused by Islamic State fighters, and she is now preparing to terminate her pregnancy.
Delal Sindy, a 23-year-old aid worker from Sweden, has helped tell the 17-year-old Yazidi girl’s story.
Ms Sindy, who has been in Kurdistan since October last year, is determined to stay and help in the face of ISIS getting stronger in the region.
‘They are growing stronger in certain areas but here they are being pushed further away by the Kurdish military. And they really need help, this is why I am staying,’ she said.
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