Almost everyone experiences some kind of traumatic event in their lives. If the type of trauma you experienced occurred in childhood, it’s likely you have experienced some amount of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But what are the long-term effects of childhood trauma? Do these events cause a ripple effect throughout our lives?

While there are important things to know about someone before dating them, there are topics that need to be discussed as you transition to a committed relationship. Being up front and honest in the beginning is better than surprising your partner later in the relationship.

The body launches a stress response when something threatens a person’s survival and sense of safety. Singular events such as accidents, illnesses, or acts of violence may be the source of this danger. Chronic, and oftentimes less visible, distress, may represent years of feeling rejected, bullied, or overlooked at home or in school. It may come from a history of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

The cyclical grief of loving someone based on their potential and watching them fall short over and over, in damaging and hurtful ways, which you excuse over and over, because of their impassioned apologies and vows of reform, or because of the partly noble, partly naïve notion that a truly magnanimous person is someone who always forgives.

More knowledge needs to be available for young women and men to learn about their bodies, learn about being emotionally vulnerable with others, and what is common (and not) about sexuality so that when they are creating their own sexual identities and sexual lives, they can create a sex life that feels good to them, rather than recreating the fictionalized, and sometimes risky, sex they have seen online.

Every affair will redefine a marriage, and every marriage will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. These days, many of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages. Often when a couple comes to me in the wake of an affair, it is clear to me that their first marriage is over. So I ask them: Would you like to create a second one together?

A very common issue that couples face in and out of therapy, is sex. One of the most common challenges about sex is differences in desire. When struggling with understanding or communicating about these challenges, frustration and resentment can build over time.

As a therapist, it is unfair to push people to divorce or think that divorce is always the better solution. Especially given that divorce dissolves all family bonds. Entire lives are intertwined with a marriage. It is social networks, children’s lives, grandchildren and economics.

Sexual abuse can leave a person feeling confused about their own sexual feelings. A person’s sense of healthy sexual desire and their trauma-related fantasy blurs the boundaries for survivors. Self-doubt can persist, especially if the sexual abuse occurred in childhood.

Betrayal trauma is likened to when a person you are significantly attached to, doesn’t only betray your trust but also lets you down in a critical way.

Your earliest attachments with parents or caregivers shape your abilities and expectations for relationships throughout your life. This first relationship impacts how your sense of self develops, and how you see relationships working.

EMDR is not hypnosis. You are awake and alert during the entire session. You have complete control of the entire session. In the event you do want to stop, there are safeguards in place.

The love languages are a good concept for nurturing healthy relationships, except for one thing. Love languages can only work when assuming both partner’s brains are able to think clearly and calmly. This is not often the case for trauma survivors who frequently exist in a state of alarm. They are living with a traumatized nervous system, and survival impulses have hijacked the brain.

Data from Pornhub, which has more than 15 million monthly visitors, indicates that a third of the regular users are female. While young men who watch pornography have struggled with erectile dysfunction and feelings of inadequacy, it is now being reported that young women also struggle with healthy intimacy, pain during sex and plummeting libidos.

Relationships can be challenging. There are obvious things that would break a relationship, such as physically cheating on your partner, having radically different values from your partner, or maybe one partner wanting children, while the other doesn’t.

Cheating is one of the most common betrayals that individuals discuss when to comes to relationship enders. With cheating the trust is broken and there is emotional betrayal. However, cheating is only one of many different types of behaviors that are a betrayal to your relationship and the commitment you made to your partner.

When discussing BDSM, most people talk about it in reference to rough, painful or kinky sex. In reality, BDSM is about power dynamics. This power dynamic can be explored without including pain or even sex

Past sexual trauma impacts an individual’s view of sex for the future. If any of your experiences around sex trigger terror and confusion, how can you enjoy healthy sex and intimate relationships? No matter what roadblocks or difficulties you may experience, they are not your fault. You can heal and move forward to find healthy love and sex, no matter what roadblocks or difficulties you have experienced in the past.

According to Dr. Judy Ho, there are self-sabotage triggers that lead us to self-sabotage. Self-sabotage triggers are negative automatic thoughts that keep us stuck in the same patterns of thoughts. Unfortunately, because these thought patterns tend to be so habitual, they are often undetectable.

The window of tolerance was described by Dr. Dan Siegel as an optimal zone of arousal in which a person would be able to function with day-to-day stress. While most people can deal with the demands of stress without much difficulty, individuals who have experienced trauma, anxiety or other mental illnesses can struggle to stay in the optimal zone.

When you are happy and have a positive experience, your brain releases happiness chemicals. By understanding how each of these chemicals work, you can trigger the release of one of the chemicals to improve happiness.