Mercury News | 11/07/2003 | 'Toxic thoughts' can kill... -
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Published on: 11/7/2003
Last Visited: 11/9/2003
"We have these distortions in our heads about our partners," says Bernstein, co-author of "Why Can't You Read My Mind" (Marlowe & Co, $14.95), due in December."Intimate relationships, because of the intensity of romance, are fertile breeding grounds of misperceptions, miscommunication, misunderstandings."
Bernstein suggests couples think twice before heading to divorce court.
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Bernstein, though, has found that poisonous thoughts are usually part of most love implosions.
"Virtually every couple has toxic thinking," he says.The ones who do better are those who don't keep a running tally of wrongs and hurts.These couples learn to differentiate between insecurities that trigger false assumptions and negative thinking about a partner and actual slights committed.
Healing a relationship begins with a certain amount of introspection: You must examine first what is being played back in your mind before addressing all the awful things a partner supposedly has done to upset the once-harmonious coupling.
"Unless you get your own emotional house in order, unless you learn how to identify what these toxic thinking errors are, it's very hard to have an intimate relationship and sustain it," Bernstein says.
In his book, he recounts how one woman he counseled became suspicious when her husband of 12 years said he had enrolled in a personal growth workshop for an entire weekend.Initially, she thought, "This is how a man starts leaving you, in long weekends first and then separate vacations, and after that it's divorce city."
But then she realized her musings were unjustified.In fact, when her husband returned, he told her he missed his family.
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The 42-year-old Bernstein has learned from experience: He ties the demise of his marriage in 1999 to such thinking.He is now engaged to someone new.
"We all have a proclivity to have toxic thoughts," Bernstein says.
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Source: Psychologist Jeffrey Bernstein
Contact John Boudreau at jboudreau@mercurynews.com or (408) 278-3496.