Life, Refracted

On relationships and more.

Roni Beth Tower Ph.D., ABPP

Does Your Companion Share Your Travel Style?

Make your travel, especially vacations, more rewarding by appreciating ways in which your own and your companion's style (and temperament) affect experiences and your relationship.

Does More Time Spent on Screens Lead to Depression?

A new study shows that, for teens, the impact of time spent on screens may depend on the use: Doing work? Playing? Seeking entertainment? Learning about the social world?

A Refresher Course on the Importance of Touch

A tendspotter predicts that consenting human touch is due for a comeback.

When an Emergency Leads to a Shift in Priorities

Many experiences can derail your intentions and priorities. Here are five tips to reclaim a sense of stability and direction quickly.

When a Best Friend Moves Away

Our first non-family love relationship offers opportunities to grow in new ways, putting another's welfare ahead of our own. Changes affecting that friendship challenge us.

Connecting When A Child Becomes an Adult

When a child or grandchild becomes an adult, do you feel them drifting away? Show them that you recognize their maturity and status to lay the foundation for new love and respect.

In Praise of Play: Personal and Social Benefits

Play offers rich personal and social benefits. Embracing whimsy, ambiguity, transformation, and diversity helps—as can several specific rewards.

Is Fear of Intimacy Becoming the New Normal?

Intimacy discomfort may reflect insecure attachment, a transactional worldview, new perspectives, anxiety, fear of energy, nervousness about expectations, or reciprocity unease.

Notre-Dame, Grief, and Trauma

Notre-Dame's fire on April 15 drew reactions of horror, disbelief, grief and trauma. Memory, attachment, and a need for meaning all help explain the reactions and support.

When Ordinary Life Spins Out of Control

When events of daily life overwhelm, consider whether you can delegate, delete, delay, re-prioritize, extend, recharge, replace, find a hidden opportunity, or identify a message.

Learning to Love and Be Loved

When we do not grow up with love, we need to learn it. Practicing curiosity, attention, compassion, and kindness makes loving oneself possible—and with it, loving others.

Consider These Human Consequences of Mobile Phones

The near-universal use of smart-phones poses threats to our well-being. By using screens as distractions from our own needs and experiences, we risk losing our integrity.

How to Organize a Life: The Three Pots Perspective

Maintenance, commitments, and nourishment for the soul make claims on your time. Recognize their price-tags and allocate your attention and energy mindfully, consciously.

5 Tips for Tranquil Holiday Travel

Contemplating the holiday season with dread or delight? Insights into your own personality and that of your traveling companion may help you expand your capacities to cope.

Lessons from Mr. Ravioli

As fresh as when written in 2002, Adam Gopnik has given us an essay filled with observation, wisdom and curiosity about the role of imagination in a three-year-old's development.

3 Family Styles: Which Best Describes Yours?

Can you identify your family's style? How do you use time, space, energy? And why do you do it the way you do? Consider three styles of organization and their consequences.

Know Thy Couple: The "We" as Its Own Entity

Try considering your relationship as having a reality beyond the individuals who form it. Examine intimacy dynamics, boundaries, strengths, vulnerabilities, and healing.

Know Thy Partner: Temperament as a Key

Mystified by your partner's reactions or behaviors? Consider thinking about them through the lens of temperament. It can bring insight into why they respond as they do.

Know Thyself: Bring Back Temperament

How well do you understand your own and a loved one's impulses, motives, behavior? Consider the nine dimensions of temperament and ways in which they affect us to provide insight.

7 Steps to Sane Seasonal Celebrations

When seasonal tasks and events overwhelm your natural spring optimism, take a deep breath and try these seven strategies for preventing or mitigating overwhelm.

Even Committed Partners Can Cheat. Here Are 7 Reasons Why .

Triggers that can lead dedicated lovers to betray a partner abound.

Are Your Valentines Up-To-Date?

Valentine's Day prods us to question ways in which we express our love and through which others experience it. Here are some thoughts about keeping your love language fresh

The Joy of Keeping a Promise to Myself

I fulfilled a 2017 New Year's Resolution to myself and now reflect on three benefits of having made the commitment. Next year I will rely on knowing I have done it to do it again!

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Getting Ready Together

Often a couple faces an important change, perhaps of role, of home, or of responsibilities. They show love when they prepare for the transition and impact together. Here is how.

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Prepare for Change

When change is thrust upon us by internal shifts, the contexts of our lives, or conditions in the larger world, we can show our love by ways we confront challenges together.

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Receive Graciously

Childhood experiences with our caregivers and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, fear, and disappointment can influence the ways in which we receive others' expressions of love.

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Provide Pleasure

We can give a gift that costs money, time, or energy, to fulfill an expectation, provide delight, underscore our recognition of who a loved one is, or to recognize a bond.

52 Ways: Learn How to Deal with People Toxic to Your Couple

After you identify a third-party threat to your couple, you can take several actions to limit current and prevent future damage. Many describe expressing love to the third-party.

52 Ways: Identify Threats to Your Relationship from Others

Identify behaviors that undermine the integrity of your love relationship, create conflict between partners, or destabilize one member in a way that throws a couple into chaos.

52 Ways: What Motivates Others Who Threaten a Relationship?

A couple's relationship can be threatened by others. To minimize potential damage, explore conscious or unconscious motives that a third party might have.

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