Taylor & Russell: Relationship Advice Revised

It’s eerie, sad and even a bit disturbing to watch Taylor’s late husband Russell reveal his personal discoveries and beliefs on the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Look a little closer and the cautiously edited clips of their counseling session gives us something crucial to reconsider and recycle.

What do you do when you love each other, yet the pain of your past is blocking the path to your future?

Can you rekindle a relationship that’s undergone significant emotional damage? Is it possible to begin with a clean slate? Can you put past hurts and heartache behind you, so you can move forward and build from a new place? Well according to Beverly Hill’s finest, aka doctor of Osteopathy, Charles Sophy —such a notion is not only impossible, it’s also immature. YIKES! Impossible and immature?! People are wondering why Russell cut the counseling session short? So would I with that kind of hopeless response. While I'd imagine Sophy has beneficial tools in his psychiatric arsenal, this insight misses the mark.

When it comes to expert testimony like this —buyer beware. This is the kind of advice that should come with a money back guarantee.

Adopting the belief that you cannot create a clean slate in any area of your life will not only limit your ability to move forward… it will likely keep you connected to the very emotions you must release in order to move forward. Dr. Sophy may have appeared everywhere from The Joy Behar Show to Dr. Phil, but the only thing more sad than his inaccurate advice and disempowering statement about Taylor’s immature longings is the fact that Taylor lost Russell before finding out for sure what they might have been capable of achieving.

FYI, by definition Osteopathy is an alternative medical practice that “emphasizes the interrelationship between structure and function of the body. In layman’s terms “it recognizes the body’s ability to heal itself,” and the osteopathic practitioner’s role is to facilitate the process. Well whatever school of thought you’d like to entertain, the bottom line in life is that everything comes down to our actions and choices. Understanding what's driving us to do what we do is the key to creating what we want. We have the power to heal ourselves, thus our relationships. In Taylor and Russell's case, both openly admitted that despite the pain and heartache, nothing that had taken place between them was damaging enough to prevent a new relationship from forming —new being the key word.

When the relationship you’ve built is broken, find the cracks in the foundation, identify the weaknesses in the beams and then use what you learn to build a brand new structure that supports the relationship experience you want.

No offense to Dr. Sophy as we all have our perspectives, but as someone who was told years ago that the clean slate I’d imagined for my life after repressing rape was idealistic —on this hand I’m calling his cards and sweeping the game with my aces called results. As long as you extract the lessons you need to learn from where you've been, rebuilding your relationship on a clean slate is much faster and more structurally sound than trying to repair and reside in what’s already broken. People often view money as power because more money expands the number of choices available to you. In truth, choice is your greatest power. In the relationship realm the only value in revisiting painful or hurtful events is recycling them for insight. Choose to use them. Identify what caused the emotions and what drove each of you to act as you did so you can make the necessary corrections —and start fresh with that clean slate Taylor asked about.

If you are in a relationship that’s been on the rocks, creating a clean slate with awareness, intention and accountability is the only way to dump the drama, start fresh and build a new relationship portfolio that pays big dividends in love. Cheers to your best relationship ever! —Charly