You specialize in counseling people who have a ‘nasty inner critic.’ How common is this issue, who is most likely to suffer from it, and how can it affect our relationships?
A nasty inner critic, which Carl Jung called the inner thug, plagues almost all women and is less common among men. The sum of the attitudes of all the men they have ever known, including unknown distant male ancestors and cultural male figures, the inner thug attacks a woman’s self-love and self-confidence with its negative and mostly unfair and untrue whisperings. Unfortunately, it operates unconsciously and autonomously without the consent of the woman. Most of all, this psychic energy, besides plaguing a woman with negative feelings about herself she believes are her own, is adept at projecting itself outward onto a marital partner, making the woman unjustly critical of her husband and jeopardizing marital love and harmony.
How can peo
ple recognize that some of their relationship issues stem from having low self-esteem, self-confidence or self-love? Once they do acknowledge this, what should their next steps be?
It is difficult and often impossible for most people to realize that many of their relationship issues stem from a lack of self-love or low self-esteem. Rather than expend energy on trying to find out whether this is true or not, it is best for everyone to concentrate on developing a robust, unconditional self-love that is passionate and felt in every fiber of one’s being. This is difficult and requires conscious and repeated exercising of unconditional self-praise, self-forgiveness, self-rewarding and self-support. Often the services of a counselor are necessary.
What are the most common reasons marriages go into a state of sexlessness? 
Can this be prevented?
In my counseling experience, marriages commonly go into a state of sexlessness because of untamed unconscious forces like the projections onto the spouse of a woman’s inner thug and the unconscious negative whisperings inside of a man of what Carl Jung called the Anima. The Anima is a psychic force that is extremely displeased when a man does not recognize his feelings nor express them openly to facilitate intimacy in his relationship. Like the inner thug, this negative energy gets projected onto the wife, making her undesirable in the eyes of her husband. These two unconscious forces dull and often obliterate the sexual charm each partner found in the other, terminating sex in the relationship. This can be prevented by learning about the Animus (in a woman) and the Anima (in a man) and taming these powerful and often destructive forces.
Once a couple decides to recapture the intimate spark of their relationship, how do they go about doing so without it seeming awkward and forced?
Approaches to healing a relationship, if done with deep and honest feeling rather than with intellectual strategies which can seem stilted or forced, almost always have good results. Essential is reawakening the mutual trust that once existed between the partners. Once this is established and most especially felt, the sharing of deep wants and needs and fears can proceed in tandem in a natural and emotionally encouraging and satisfying way although, like all new habits, this can seem awkward at first.
What are your top tips for people who want to live full lives as individuals as well as have a strong, happy and sensual marriage?
Absolute to
ps are first, achieving a robustly healthy self-love and excelling in self-nourishment so that the heights of happiness can be enjoyed alone as well as with a partner. Second would be the elimination of psychic sludge composed of unsolved emotional problems and outdated attitudes that can be wittingly or unwittingly hurled at a partner. Finally, also essential is succeeding in draining one’s head and intellect from an overload of energy. Too much rational thought and worry can force a predominance of left-brain activity at the expense of right-brained emotional relatedness, sensitivity, creativity and ecstasy. In practice this means allowing the lower half of the body to receive at least half of one’s energy and focus in order to give sensuality and sexuality a fighting chance.
About: Francine Juhasz, Ph.D. http://www.evolvingtowardjoy.syncscapes.com
Francine is a psychotherapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology from Case Western Reserve University. She has an online e-counseling practice specializing in marital relationships, sexual health, emotional energy charts and anxiety-free senior retirement. A university educator and Qi Gong practitioner, she has taught courses in the psychological and emotional aspects of marriage, retirement and sexuality for more than thirty years.
During her many years in France, Spain and the Netherlands, she worked with post-Jungian psychologists, forming and testing avant-garde theories on why good marriages go wrong, and developing new solutions to this age-old problem. Her book, “Taming the Thug Within: Sure Cure for Women’s Self-Love,” outlines in detail, with many practical exercises, what a woman can do to bring sex back into her marriage.
Dr Juhasz is an accomplished author as well. Find her books at http://www.evolvingtowardjoy.syncscapes.com/E-Books.htm
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