The Website of Dr. Mark Goulston

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How to Stay Happy in your Relationship
and Keep your Weight Manageable

by Mark Goulston

Weight management firm, Slendex, studied about 3,000 women and found that their weight fluctuations are highly correlated to their happiness. And their happiness is often connected to their relationships with the men in their lives.

As a neuroscientist expert in emotional intelligence, that doesn’t surprise me. There is an area in the prefrontal lobes that contain mirror neurons. The cells fire when you see someone do something, imagine yourself doing those things or doing those things. They are also thought to be responsible for empathy according to UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni.

What’s the relevance? The more you empathize with others and conform to their emotional needs (be it men, parents, children, bosses, friends) the more you develop an ache to be empathized with. When men show their caring by turning everything into a problem and then solving it, it feels hollow to most women who want to not be figured out, but who want to feel “felt.” At the moment you feel “felt” you no longer feel alone or lonely. That causes you to mentally and physiologically exhale and you feel grateful.

When you feel grateful, you feel whole and as if nothing is missing in your life. And your hunger goes down. On the other hand, when you want to feel “felt” but instead are “figured out” you feel like a problem to be solved instead of a person to be related to. That increases frustration, aloneness, loneliness and the need to “fill the hole where the pain gets in.”

And the solution? You need to find a way to accept that it’s not another person’s responsibility to make you happy. And the more you nag them to do so, the more they withhold the very stuff you need. Instead find other ways to fill yourself to cause you to feel and act less needy. Neediness is the kiss of death in relationships.That said, you don’t have to be withholding either.

Give love freely to those you love and don’t keep score of what you are getting in return. Givers will naturally reciprocate; takers will just keep taking more. My mantra in life is give to everyone once, but don’t give to takers a second time. And forget about what you have already given them and just feel grateful that you cut your losses so early from someone who will only make you miserable.

Now since I have given so freely to you, but received nothing in return, please pass the M&M’s.

Mark Goulston, M.D., is a well-known psychiatrist, speaker, business trainer and coach as well as author of “Get Out of Your Own Way at Work.” He writes a regular column, “Getting through to Anybody,” for divorce360.

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