In this first New Year’s post, let me congratulate you with the beginning of 2012 and share wiht you a very warm letter from Olga, Budapest.

“On these sacred days I would like to send my gratitude to my new family, to my in- laws. It is not the first time I celebrate Christmas in a different country and with different people. I like traveling and  celebrated Christmas and New Year in Austria, Italy, Poland. And this Christmas I am in Budapest with my new family, so Boldog Karácsony!

I am happy to be among these kind people and very grateful to them for understanding, love and patience. Though we do not speak a common language, each of us does a lot to make our conversations easier. My mother-in-law has put a Russian-Hungarian dictionary on the table and uses it when wants to tell me something important. As for me, I am doing my best to learn Hungarian words and use them in every – day life, they sound a bit funny for me sometimes but I try hard! And amuse my new relatives, it seems my Hungarian sounds like a balsam for them or something like that because I saw their faces then and want to please them again and again.

To tell the truth, my husband has never been on friendly terms with his relatives. Sometimes I try to understand why and it seems I am a success but sometimes it seems I do not understand anything at all. And then I want to leave everything up to him because I see nothing bad in these people. They treat me in a friendly way, doing their best to please me. They are like my natives. They often call me ‘angel’ and give me their love and care. I do not know, maybe I am really an angel for them who has come to unite them, to make them closer to each other. Time will tell us all.

Maybe I look like a curious child but for me it is really interesting how they celebrate holidays, how they treat each other. The people I see every day are very kind and thoughtful, I can say that I love them and want to thank them for my feeling at home among them.

My best wishes to all my in-laws on Christmas and coming New Year!

Olga”

With the  best wishes in the year just begun,

Julia Latypova

A question one would like to ask me, “Why I got married to a foreigner?” Well, I cannot say that it had been my dream since my childhood. I was married to a Russian man but unfortunately we both were too young for it and our marriage was too short. I have a daughter after that marriage and now she is 22.

So for more than twenty years I had been living alone, working hard, bringing up my girl and sure that once I would get married, I was not meant to live alone. But I had never known where my husband would come from, where we would live together in our future. The only I knew, I felt for sure that he was living somewhere in Europe  as I had been travelling a lot and felt comfortable there as if I had left a part of myself  somewhere in those places before.

When my daughter became an adult I understood that it was high time for me to look for my man or the only perspective in front of me could be getting older, then retired and looking after my grandchildren. Oh, no! It is not my cup of tea yet! I would like to live my own life, to be happy, to love and feel my man’s love, to find myself in another life sphere not only teaching.

I cannot say that the process of meeting my man was an easy one. I had been serfing the dating sites for hours, learning a new business for myself, meeting different people, making mistakes believing sweet  words of scammers. But now I can say it was a great experience! And I am grateful to it.

Once among other men on that site I met a man who got my special interest. There was something unusual in him. I felt at ease talking to him in e-mails and in skype. And very soon we met at my place and felt that we were soul-mates. About a year later we got married and now we are living in Budapest.

There were a lot of lovely, touching days and events during this year. And many more are will be written in our life love story”.

We will continue publishing Olga’s stories on her experience of living in an international marriage in the future. If you’d like to contribute your own stories to this project, please write to my email:  jlatypova@mail.ru

Yours,

Julia Latypova

Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy

Original source at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-leahy-phd/how-to-talk-to-someone-yo_b_804980.html

Imagine that the person that you love is upset about something — her job, his health, her feelings about the relationship. Let’s say she is worried about her health, worried that she might have some terrible illness — and that even if you think she is going to be OK, you want to comfort her, make her feel better. What are the worst ways and best ways of talking? What should you say, and what should you avoid saying?

Let me give you a hint. The most important thing in talking to someone who is upset is to communicate that 1) you understand they are upset, 2) you care about how they feel, and 3) you respect their right to have their feelings.

What Not To Say

Let’s start with the biggest mistakes in talking with your partner. For convenience, I’ve broken them down into six problematic styles:

1. Minimizing. This is the style where you treat your partner’s concerns as trivial: “It’s nothing. Why are you making a big deal out of it?” You are trying to tell them that their feelings are not related to anything real or important. So, the message they get is, “My feelings don’t matter to you.”
2. Rationalizing. You treat your partner’s concerns as evidence of their irrational and distorted thinking. You try to argue away their concerns. This is a specific kind of minimization, and it sends the same negative message: “Your feelings are based on nothing real. Get over it.”
3. Competitive complaining. In this little game you don’t want your partner to “win” by being the one with the biggest complaints. So you start bringing up your own: “You think that’s bad? I think I might lose my job!” Again, your partner feels there is no room for her feelings. You matter more.
4. Fixing. If your partner has unpleasant feelings, you jump in to try to solve all the problems. Laying out your well-thought-out plan, you get frustrated when she doesn’t buy into your solutions. This makes her feel less understood and she thinks, at times, that you are patronizing.
5. Defending. In this scenario you treat your partner’s emotions as a personal attack on you. If he is upset, you feel that you are to blame, so you turn it into a trial and start defending yourself. This goes nowhere; you get more angry and dismiss his feelings.
6. Stonewalling. In this case, you just withdraw. Feeling frustrated listening to her feelings, you withdraw, become silent and sullen and may leave the room. Now she is all alone, feeling abandoned.

What To Say

So, what should you say?

Hint: Your partner wants to feel that 1) you understand that they are upset, 2) you care about how they feel, and 3) you respect their right to have their feelings.

Consider some of the following. Would you like to hear any of this when you are upset?

• “I know it must be hard for you feeling this way.”
• “I can see that it makes sense that you would feel down, given the way that you are seeing things.”
• “A lot of times you may feel that people don’t understand how hard it is for you.”
• “You must be thinking that this really down feeling is going to last a long time. It must be hard to feel that way.”
• “I want you to know that I am always here for you.”
• “I don’t want to sound like I don’t want to hear about your feelings. I do. But if there is anything that I can do to help you feel better, please let me know. Your feelings are really important to me.”

Here are some simple guidelines (from my recent book, “Beat the Blues Before They Beat You: How to Overcome Depression”):

1. Help make sense of feelings. Tell your partner how you understand that her emotions make sense given what has happened and how she is thinking. “Others have these feelings.” “Your feelings make sense given the way you are looking at things.” “You are not alone.”
2. Expand the range of feelings. Help your partner understand that there are many feelings — not just the current one. Feelings come and go, there are mixed feelings, and feelings vary in intensity. “You have so many different emotions — some feel positive and some seem negative.” “I know you are feeling sad, but are there other feelings that you are having as well?” “Are you having mixed feelings?”
3. Reduce shame and guilt. Help your partner understand that feelings are not a sign of being weak, but rather a sign of being human. “We all have difficult feelings at times. Your emotions are a sign that you feel things intensely, because things matter to you. You are most human when you have your feelings.”
4. Accept your partner’s pain. When you love someone, it’s natural that you want to jump in and make that person feel better. Sometimes that can be helpful, but at other times it may convey the message that your partner’s pain is too much for you to hear. You can communicate acceptance by saying, “I know that you are having a hard time, and I accept that you will not always feel upbeat.” Acceptance and validation go hand and hand.
5. Link emotions to higher values. Sometimes your emotions can reflect the things you value — competence, love, belonging or responsibility. You can support your partner emotionally by saying, “I know that these things bother you because you truly value them. Things matter to you.”

Your partner needs your love — but your love is an active verb — to love her or him in a way that they understand that you care, that you get it and that you are there for them. No one wants to feel that their emotions are a burden, or based on some irrational idea, or that every problem has to be fixed by you. Maybe solving the problem might be helpful — if they want it solved. But showing you care involves making time for listening, being there to hear, respecting the right to feel bad at times.

Today, at our forum, I saw this picture taken by one of the Life Winner Program participants. Here’s her comment to it:

“I have just remembered that a couple of weeks ago I left the crocuses to sprout in a closet. Have just pulled them out of the dark to the light of the day. Here they are!

That’s how the tubers  planted in a fertile soil give strong roots and begin to grow – as if by themselves, but still, they require a constant care from us. And then, very soon, they will surely turn into lovely fragrant flowers!”

Indeed, every moment of our lives contains a huge latent potential, and it depends only on us to choose whether to turn it into a desert of problems or into an enormous field of possibilities.

• What are you turning in your life into?
• What are you going to do to make it a blooming garden, not a palisade of thorns?
• What have you already done in these early days of the New Year to improve your life?

Dear Friends,

Wish your holidays are as special as you are!

Happy New Year!

The team of the “Happy Life with a Russian Wife” project