I know I’ve been in sick relationships, but I don’t know what a healthyrelationship looks like.

In the years I’ve been counseling and coaching, many people say, “I know I’ve been in sick relationships, but I don’t know what a healthyrelationship looks like.”

There are many long and complicated answers to this, but there is also a simple one: healthy relationships make your life larger and happier; unhealthy relationships narrow your life and make you crazy.

Healthy relationships do not include mind games, mixed messages, or control. There is not a back and forth or continual makeup and breakup, or “I’m sorry, please forgive me” every week or so.

In healthy relationships, there is a partnership and a nurturing by both parties of that partnership. At the same time, each person recognizes the need to have interests and time away from their partner to nurture themselves. They don’t need to have the same interests, but rather the same view of life. Healthy love is about taking care of yourself and taking care of your mate… and those things are in balance to the point where they seldom collide.

What is Real Love?

Healthy people lead to healthy relationships and healthy relationships lead to real love.

Real love does not seek another person to fill up what we are lacking. It takes a complete, whole person to really love and overly needy people cannot do it. Real love is balanced. Both partners love in fairly equal amounts. While the balance may shift back and forth, it is not lopsided. If you love someone who is not loving your back, or not loving you the way you love them, then it’s not real.

When you place expectations on people to fill your empty places, that is not healthy. It’s nice to have a partner, a companion, someone to help you weather life’s storms, but it is not okay to look for someone to complete you or fix your broken places. That is not real love; that is dependence, co-dependence, and unhealthy neediness.

Real love does not play games, cause us to lose sleep, friends, jobs, money, time and value in our lives. Real love is an enlarging and not a narrowing experience. And finally, real love does exist. But it is true that in order to find the right person, you need to be the right person.

To be the right person you have to do your work, examine your failed relationships and, find the patterns. Go to counseling if you have historical issues. Find out why you are attracted to a certain type that is not good for you. And, at the same time, build your life so that you are an independent, interesting, and attractive person. You will attract other independent, interesting, and attractive people who are capable of good and loving relationships.

As I say over and over again, water seeks its own level. If you are attracting and attracted to unhealthy and dysfunctional, you are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Do your work so that real love andlasting love has a chance to walk in.

A million Britons live with the hell of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Nadine Stewart was convinced she was going to die. Just ten minutes after setting off for a pop concert with her sister, she felt a tingling sensation in her arms and pain in her chest. ‘I knew I was having a heart attack,’ says Nadine, 41, a customer services adviser from Morecambe, Lancashire. ‘I begged my sister to take me to A&E: I ran in and screamed that I was having a heart attack. ‘They put me on a monitor and my heart was fine — what I had suffered was a panic attack. I have no idea to this day what caused it, but it terrified the life out of me.’ Nadine Stewart has to do everything nine times or fears her husband will die But worse was to come. ‘Afterwards, I developed a fear that if I didn’t do something nine times, something terrible would happen to me, my husband Paul or a member of my family.’ says Nadine. ‘If I made a drink I had to stir it nine times. If I locked the door I had to check it n...

To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human.

Liver deaths at all-time high

Liver disease is killing more people than ever before in England, especially in deprived areas, shows a report out today. Deaths from liver disease: implications for end of life care in England, the first national report into the problem, finds that between 2001 and 2009, deaths from liver disease rose by 25% – and that more than a third of these were from alcohol-related liver disease. In England in 2001, 9321 people died from liver disease, but by 2009 this had risen to 11,575; at the same time, deaths from other major causes fell. The report, from the National End of Life Care Intelligence Network, also showed that liver disease was a disproportionate killer of younger people, accounting for one in ten of all deaths in people in their 40s. Death from liver disease, especially alcohol-related, was much more common in men than in women – 60% of all deaths from liver disease occurred in men. Alcohol-related liver disease was responsible for 41% of deaths from liver ...

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