Some people have been called "too sensitive" for so long that they stopped asking why. For many of them, the answer has a name. Complex PTSD tends to develop after trauma that went on for months or years, most often in childhood. People with it have the usual symptoms of PTSD. They also have lasting trouble managing emotions, along with a damaged sense of self that spills into their relationships (Maercker et al., 2022). Because these patterns started so early, they can feel

Two people can put in the same 60-hour week and be in completely different places. One is absorbed in the work and looks forward to it. The other keeps going because stopping brings on guilt or anxiety. From the outside, they look identical. Researchers have spent two decades separating these two groups. Their findings suggest that long hours say very little about which group a person is in. Same effort, different fuel Organizational psychologists call the first pattern work

"What you tolerate, you teach" gets shared because it feels true. Researchers have tested a version of it, and the results are more interesting than the quote. What happens the day after you forgive James McNulty (2010) asked 135 newlywed couples to keep a daily diary for a week. Each day, spouses recorded whether their partner had done something negative and whether they forgave it. The analysis focused on 165 people who were upset with their spouse one day and then describe

Nobody walks into my office and says, "We're here because of the dishes." They say they feel alone in the marriage. They say their partner doesn't see them. About twenty minutes later, we get to the dishes. Resentment rarely starts with a betrayal. It builds out of small things, repeated until one person is keeping a quiet ledger the other doesn't know exists. The research on feeling taken for granted keeps pointing to the same seven habits. 1. Not thanking them for the house

After a breakup, most people know they should stop looking at their ex online. Most look anyway. New research shows what that habit costs, and the answer is more specific than "delete everything." Social psychologist Tara Marshall ran four studies with 762 people who had recently been through a breakup (Marshall, 2026). She used follow-up surveys, an experiment, and nightly diaries to track what happened when people saw an ex on social media. Seeing them versus searching for

Your phone buzzes on the kitchen counter, and your partner goes still. You haven't done anything wrong in months. You know it, and on most days your partner knows it too. The buzz still lands like an alarm. If you're the one who had the affair, moments like that can feel like a verdict on everything you've done since. Research on betrayal points somewhere more useful. Triggers are predictable, and the way you respond to them matters more to recovery than the number of good we

When John Gottman was asked what advice he'd give his younger self, he said, "Get out of bad relationships sooner" (The Gottman Institute, n.d.). It's an unexpected answer from the researcher most associated with keeping couples together, and it raises a practical question. How do you know you're in a bad one? Gottman's answer came from an unlikely source: asking couples to tell the story of how they met. How the story predicts the ending Buehlman, Gottman, and Katz (1992) in

People usually ask me this question months after the relationship started to slip, long after the first signs showed up. By the time someone is scanning their partner's texts for clues, something has already shifted, and the research suggests it shifted earlier than either of them noticed. The person leaving checks out first Researchers Janina Bühler and Ulrich Orth followed relationships across four large national panels. They tracked satisfaction backward from the breakup i

Most couples who come to see me arrive with a scorecard. Each person has a version of the fight that is airtight, well rehearsed, and obviously correct. The argument turns into a trial where both people act as prosecutor and nobody sits in the jury box. Taking your partner's perspective asks for less than people fear. You keep your opinion. You set it down long enough to learn what the argument looks like from the other chair, and you can pick it back up when you're done. Agr

Three dates in, they're talking about Paris in the spring. By week four you've heard about their mother's Thanksgiving and the dog you'll get together. By week six they're gone. Future faking is when someone talks about a future with you early on to get you attached now. The plans feel like proof that they're serious, so you start giving more of your time, trust, and feelings. Then none of it happens. You are left confused, because you didn't realize that creating a future wi

Chemistry feels like something that either happens or doesn't. Research on conversations between strangers suggests you have more influence over it than that. Three bodies of work point to two things you can do, and one mistake you can stop making. Go one layer deeper than feels safe Kardas, Kumar, and Epley (2022) ran 12 experiments with more than 1,800 people. Participants first predicted how a conversation with a stranger would go, then had the conversation. The real conve

More than a third of American adults are currently cut off from someone in their family. In a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 adults, 38% said they were estranged from at least one relative. Siblings topped the list at 24%, followed by parents at 16% and children at 10% (YouGov, 2025). A national survey led by Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer put the figure at 27% (Pillemer, 2020). The two numbers differ because the questions differed, but either way, the person missing from your

On Survivor, the player at the center of every alliance usually doesn't win. When a researcher tried to predict winners by how connected each player was within the alliances, the predictions were worse than random guessing. Winning takes different skills than most players expect, and psychology has a name for each one. The center of every alliance rarely wins Across the first 40 seasons, alliance network centrality identified the winner 32.5% to 37.5% of the time, below the 4

Ever have trouble getting started? You know there’s something that you want to do, but for some reason, you just can’t bring yourself to do it. Most people assume motivation comes first. You feel like doing something, then you do it. Depression reverses that order, and anyone who waits for the feeling to return before getting up can wait a long time. Researchers have spent years trying to pin down what goes wrong. A systematic review of 43 studies found that people with depre

Every October, the world divides into two camps. One camp is counting down to the American Horror Story finale, planning a haunted house trip, and queuing up every scary movie they can find. The other camp would rather do their taxes. I have friends in both camps, and neither one understands the other. As a psychologist who treats phobias, I find this split fascinating. Fear is supposed to be something we avoid. Yet millions of people pay good money to have a stranger in a ma

If you and your partner keep having the same argument, you have plenty of company. Gottman's research suggests that about two-thirds of relationship problems are perpetual and come back no matter how often a couple discusses them. The problem itself may stay. What can change is the fight around it. Couples get stuck when each person argues for a position. Underneath every position is something that matters to the person holding it, such as a hope, a value, or a piece of histo

Most couples who come to me feeling distant can't name the day it started. There was no explosion, no affair, no slammed door. Somewhere between the second kid, the promotion, and the refinance, they stopped talking to each other about anything except what was going wrong: the dishwasher, the credit card bill, the tone someone used at dinner on Thursday. That kind of talk keeps a household running. It does very little for a relationship. When the only time you hear from your

Let's talk about something I have seen every fall for more than twenty years. Right around now, relationships start ending. In my practice it starts in late October and builds through November. Then the holidays arrive and everything goes quiet. Come March, it starts all over again. We are in breakup season, and if you are in the middle of it, I want to help you through it. The calendar is real Researchers have noticed it too. Back in 2010, two data journalists combed through

It doesn't happen right away. That would be easier. There is no defining moment you can point to, yet you know it's there. You went from lovers who couldn't wait to be in each other's arms to roommates, or silent ships barely passing in the night. The monotony runs as automatically as a robot vacuum. Why does this happen? The statistics are against every couple. The longer two people are together, the less exciting the sex becomes. Marriage lowers it further, and so does a ch

If you've ever caught the sadness behind someone's smile, sensed tension the moment you walked into a room, or known a friend was struggling before they said a word, this is for you. You aren't imagining it, and nothing is wrong with you. You have a well-studied trait that Carl Jung called innate sensitiveness and psychologist Elaine Aron calls sensory processing sensitivity. You're also far from alone. Nearly a third of adults share it (Lionetti et al., 2018). Understanding