Your current job scenario is something you can compliment yourself on being practical. When the immediate crisis is taken care of you can think of other possibilities. Our problem often is our expectations and our actions do not match. Our expectations are way ahead of our actions. We may lack the discipline to focus on priority areas and get distracted into petty issues and perfectionisms. We get bogged down with our fears. We need to have the capacity to take the risk of focusing in on priority areas and let other areas go and this risk is both psychological – ‘after so much effort for my main passion I may reach nowhere’ stops us from going all out and saying ‘no’ to the small tasks; and there is the economical risk of whether you can let go a job or you have a space for your project or you have family to support. So respect your risk taking ability and think of smaller plans that can accommodate these. Stop the comparison tapes as everyone’s possibilities are different. The comparisons are only a distraction and different people get their success at different ages anywhere from 10 years to 80 years! Sometime it’s a good idea to think of the end of life and what you would regret the most of not doing. It can help to think also that if all was very suitable to you what you would be doing. With both the answers you get here you can make your vision more concrete. You can go ahead in it by thinking big but acting step by step. Instead of focusing on your weakness, think of ways to do things with your limitations and using your talents. Your success path can be very different from others. It can help to keep lists and keep up hope.

Sometimes holding something tight we lose it all and holding it lose we have it all. Take sand or water in your hand and if you close your fist tight you lose it all. Cup your hand loosely and you can have so much of it stay with you. Love and friendship are like that and we have to be ready to let go some moments for them to have fun without us to bond with others where we are left out. We need to be able to share our people with others else it loses its value. You may promote lies from your husband with an untenable demand that he cannot be shared with anybody. As he senses this he will want to protect you and fulfill a natural need to connect to others and then will solve it with lies. When you hear lies you become more insecure instead of realizing that you are partner to creating these. When you are easygoing you bond over the conversations of each others’ experiences with others. When you are insecure there are walls of secrets and silences. These are times for trusting that that bonding with others means nothing in terms of the bond you both share. Often there is no competition it is just different aspects of our life. In fact we spend so many of lives’ hours at work totally away from our family yet no one would say the work colleagues are whom you care for more than your parents or your children or your spouse. We know at the level of the heart the levels of bonding. All people will sometime or other gossip or talk behind our back – we can accept they need to vent about us to get along with us and need not bother with it! Like you saying now that ‘your mother in law must be talking bad of you’ is not that you are maligning her it is that you are venting and problem solving what you feel and this can actually help you be nicer to her instead if you just suppressed your thoughts. In any case if your jealousy and insecurity feels too strong you may need to understand where these feelings come from – they can be related to a present life or past life incident or experience that may need resolution and healing so you could go in for therapy.

Sometimes in a relationship our challenge is to respect another person’s need for privacy and feel content with only letting other know we are available when ever they wish to open up and we do notice something is bothering them. Insisting they tell us and getting hyper when they don’t is pressurizing the other and will add to the unhappiness. We may also suggest that if they cannot open up to us this is ok and they can consult a therapist if they wish. Sometimes facilitating therapy though without forcing is better than forcing them to open up to us. You said you both love each other and when person keeps their privacy trust they love you and do not take it personally. Move on with your routine and focus on keeping yourself productive and happy. Stop only focusing on their sadness and on getting them to open up. Sometimes create conversations about other current happenings and conversations about your day, your plans and happenings and as this talk is going on they may share some things with you that give you clues to their stresses. Reverse the situation and instead of trying to be too helpful occasionally ask for their help in some practical tasks or ask them to accompany you for some pleasant activity. Also in relationships one of the problems is feeling too responsible to make the other happy. We also need to let the other have their unhappiness without us taking it personally. Else they can feel more pressured and claustrophobic and unhappy. So sometime instead of suggesting how they can be happy we could just let them know we notice it, it happens and we are there for them and we are ready to be guided to do anything that can help the feeling. We are also ready to leave them alone for the time they need. His sadness may not be about you – it may about his own needs in other areas – purpose in life, career, other friendships etc. When you take the other person’s happiness as your job and then think if they are not happy you are failing them leading you to now be sad, very strangely too much care for their happiness means they cannot tell you as you will be hurt. Whilst it is true that we can contribute to the others happiness and also we need to keep ourselves happy so as not to burden our partner, we also need to be easygoing about this too. As you yourself mentioned you feel tired of impressing and it can be good to stop impressing. Otherwise people do not open up as they feel you will be hurt and upset. People can get unhappy in a relationship from being too much needed or too much pressure. Like you are feeling tired of impressing he may also feel the same. The solution is allowing each other to be natural and to say their ‘yes and no’ to us with out taking it as a rejection or requiring elaborate explanations. Instead problem solve this and come up with mutually acceptable ideas for ‘together times’ and ‘leave me alone times’ Since your marriage is in a temple and your divorce is not yet through maybe your relationship has to be kept private and secretive and this means sometimes we get cut off from others in our lives as we cannot open out and have to have a secret area. This can also be a source of tension fro him and you may need to problem solve possibilities around this. Take care of your happiness independently of the other. When your partner is unhappy you may need to do little caretaking to be supportive to the other and also little detachment and let yourself gain happiness from your own pursuits. So you may suggest to your partner to come out for a walk but if he remains sad and refuses you can go for a walk on your own or with a friend and enjoy yourself. This detachment at certain times is valuable for your partner to search themselves and keep healthy space in the relationship. After returning from the walk you are around your partner again so you can allow some guilt free detachment moments.

This is a state of mind that can be caused without intention by both of you or deliberately by the other person. However they cannot cause it deliberately unless you are carrying the wish for others to take over and manage your life and wish you didn’t have the headache of it! Keeping a sense of ownership and responsibility for making our lives work is the best protection. Others can be helpful though whilst we remain in charge of working on our issues. Sometimes this is a situation that can happen where we feel very well understood by the healer. As a comparison others do not stand up to our ideal. So we feel more dissatisfied with them & distance from them. What we miss is that to some extent it is the ‘role’ in which a person is placed that determines their behaviours towards us. Most people we relate to we would find disappointing us in some way sooner or later because they are not going to understand us beyond what they feel is possible for them with their other tasks. The healer on the other hand is in the role of being the understanding person and does not have any shared responsibilities with you that your family or friends may have. Due to not recognizing this we may distance from others and create a vacuum for ourselves. Then we get more dependent on the healer as the only social source of support and feel lost unless we have spoken to the healer. Hence it is better to make the necessary effort to keep up other relationships. This means we may keep up with others even when not in the ‘mood’ sometimes and accept that others cannot be like the healer. We would have to tolerate their ‘imperfections’, keep a generous view of them as also develop our communication skills to encourage them to behave nicely with us. The healer can have their own needs of getting self esteem from being the ‘helping caring person’ and have the ‘ego’ of being special for you. So they may also be attached to getting attention from you as their solution provider. You could be careful that the healing is not only one of supporting, allowing you to vent and giving you solutions, but one that gives you insights and skills that lead you to developing your solutions. If we are passive recipients of healing this does not help as much as when we do the healing methods on ourselves. Additionally your feeling too much in the need can make you actually lose your ‘energy’ to the person and then you feel lost of your own energy unless you can connect with them. The healer may also lose their energy to you or take away your energy if they get over attached to making sure you get better or being the special helper. This creates a fragmentation of our energy. Sometimes a healer who is not watchful of their integrity may do this to you purposefully for their gains. So the main thing is for both healer and client to keep the boundaries to helping, hope, dependence and expectations by keeping some disciplines and distance in the relationship

Your brother’s wife seems to have high level of anxiety about trying to do things perfectly and also to prevent anything untoward. This makes her actions extreme and sometimes difficult to live with. It can be useful that some household chores are shared by family members. It can be beneficial to reduce expectations and also to do spontaneous gestures to reduce work for her by suggesting something easier. It will be useful for you to encourage them to take counseling and many therapies can help such as hypnosis, cognitive, family therapy, regression and many others before encouraging medications. By taking a non judgmental approach, she can be helped to see her problem behaviours and her having high anxiety. This needs to be addressed by talking to her one on one and first acknowledging what she does well. Sometimes when the person who is affected refuses to take the counseling, it can be beneficial for the spouse or caring relative to take the help. That way they can communicate with the anxious person more therapeutically and firmly rather than reactively. It is helpful to tell a person that they need to go for counseling not because they cannot manage or they need to improve or something is wrong with them but they would benefit from counseling help because of the stress they are facing. Sometimes effective insights and skills through counseling and coaching can improve effectiveness, thus reducing work load and thereby reduce anxiety. Reviewing and letting residues of past traumas can help person to let go the anxiety with which they approach life tasks.