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Expressing your love through flowers, gifts and dinner on Valentine’s Day is great, but identifying ways to connect and revisiting your shared values and experiences with your partner can offer long-term strategies for strengthening your relationship.

As humans, we tend to be harder on ourselves than we are on others. We support and encourage friends who didn’t get their dream job or who are going through a breakup, but should we find ourselves in those same situations, we often judge ourselves as inadequate, flawed or any other negative label we can find.

The amygdala is a collection of nuclei near the base of the brain – the limbic system - where emotions are given meaning, remembered, and attached to associations, as well as responses to them (emotional memories). The amygdala is also known for its role in the processing of fear. In infants, a distress cry helps signal to caretakers to come “save” them. It toddlers, this same response may show up, or they may attempt to “flee” the danger by crawling away. Later in life, a “fight” back response might show up in anger or conflict.