If you suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), you’re not alone. Many of us usually don’t realize how many of the people around us suffer from the same condition and how it can affect a relationship, career, family and reputation. OCD was once thought to be a fairly rare but serious mental problem. Specialists saw it as serious mainly because the behavior of a person with this disorder appears quite abnormal to other people.
Dirty fighting can weaken and ultimately break a relationship in the same way that rust weakens a piece of metal. Dirty fighting breaks the bonds of intimacy and causes cracks in the foundation of the relationship. These cracks spread and just like rusty metal eventually breaks apart, at some point the relationship collapses. Both of you ultimately suffer. Here are some toxic communication patterns to avoid:
Arguments are not necessarily a sign of a failed relationship or that love is fading. They are often just a sign that the partners are expressing their own individuality, and this is healthy.
All couples argue. This is a normal and expected part of any relationship. Of course, some relationship experts say that arguing is healthy, while others say beware. While an occasional argument might be unavoidable and can even ultimately clarify boundaries within the relationship, a pattern of habitual fighting left unchecked puts the relationship at risk.
Granted, when couples first meet, they may experience no conflict. This is the infatuation stage of a relationship when both people may feel they have met the perfect partner, and happiness reigns supreme. But as time goes by any relationship is molded not only by the similarities between the partners but also by the differences that bring interest, mystery, and complexity to the relationship.
It is difficult to achieve intimacy in a relationship unless we have the ability to trust. We tend to focus on other people when we think about trust – that is, we might ask, who out there can be trusted and who cannot? But it may be more helpful to look inside ourselves and to think about trust as something that we either do well, or not.
The single most destructive threat to a committed relationship is when one of the partners engages in an intimate relationship with another person. This is not an uncommon event. Conservative estimates suggest that about a quarter of women, and a third of men, have violated their marital commitment to their partners. About 65 percent of marriages struck by infidelity end in divorce.
