It’s official! Or at least one study, the Framingham Offspring Study ‘Marital status, marital strain, and risk of coronary heart disease or total mortality’, shows that women who bottled up their feelings during arguments with their spouse were four times as likely to die during the 10 year study period as those who told their husbands exactly how they felt.
According to an overview of thousands of psychology studies, men and women are psychologically very similar. So why are so many of us convinced that women are from Venus and men are from Mars?
The most important relationship we have in life is probably the first one, with our primary caretaker, usually, although not invariably, the mother. It is in this first relationship that we get our first taste of how to exchange love, care, pleasure, comfort, nourishment, in which we learn whether the world is a safe place that responds to our needs, or not.
It is of no surprise to anyone that women in their thirties or forties coping with work, young children and ‘running a home’ are exhausted to an extent which is dangerous to their health. What can we do about this dramatic state of affairs?
So much of the pain we go through with loved ones is down to communication failure — to each person assuming that the other speaks and thinks in the same way that they do. I thought of that today as I had a rerun of one of the top ten conflicts I have with my husband…
We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here.
