Do This One Thing Today For Your Marriage/Relationship

This month’s Relating Well Newsletter is geared to those of you in long-term relationships or married. Read on if that applies. Skip or forward if this doesn’t.??

My last three newsletters were more generally about relating well:

1. On using your power wisely
2. Mental health awareness month and my snobbishness about it
3. On using play in our relating

This is an ode to all the couples I have witnessed fighting in airports in the last few weeks. Solidarity. My hope is that used well, this ridiculously easy practice might prevent you from ever needing to come see me, or anyone, for couples therapy.??

I am not taking new couples therapy clients until November…so if you get lit up by what you read I don’t want you to be disappointed.? But you can always get on my email list here or forward this newsletter to couples you know who would be served by my style.? A colleague and I are building some fab European Couples Retreats next year and would love you to add your email and share your thoughts/ requests on what we make for you here

First, A Primer: Why coupling is unlike any other relationship

Why is this so??

Because we often choose partners and mates unconsciously…yep you heard me.

• If you had bad stuff happen in your family you are likely to choose partners that light up the familiar “style of loving” that smells and tastes like home.? Flavors like; Unsafe? Doing it all by yourself?? Rigid and unbending?? Chaotic? Boring and predictable? Being good and well-behaved? Our collective neuropsychology says “giddyup, hell yes” to these familiar relating dynamics.
• Even if you are more conscious in choosing a partner, you have another hurdle to climb once you are in the relationship: your attachment conditioning.? Ever notice your romantic partnership lights up behaviors in you and your partner you would NEVER engage in with anyone else?? You aren’t alone.?
• Our neurobiology gets in on the action in the form of attachment behaviors that have us cling, push away, fight, cower, appease or sometimes even get care just right.? Where does this attachment stuff come from? Little kids are always on the lookout for where their caregivers are because biology designed them to keep close tabs on parents to survive.? Guess what?? We do the same with our romantic partners. It’s not just cuz we love them. It is full-on survival instinct wired into our biology, our brains, and our nervous systems.?
• The work in couples therapy is to have some conscious awareness of and then mastery over your attachment behaviors so you can choose just-right care without going on autopilot with clinging, pushing away, fighting, cowering, or appeasing that may not be so healthy.

A Particular Kind of Connection Can Make Your Relationship Uber Resilient

Helping couples untangle attachment muck and then find that sweet spot of a healthy “I” and healthy “We” is the secret sauce of good couples therapy.? The challenge is, most couples come into therapy after they are either so pissed and hopeless or so bored and uninspired that it is hard to get their attachment systems calmed down enough to start making sense of things.? It's about finding the soul of the relationship again buried beneath attachment patterns and bitterness.

But solid couples struggle too. My husband and I struggle.? What starts to build up the “bad blood” over time is transactional relating.? “Maybe if I am generous here, they will be generous there.”? “If I give them sex then they will do the dishes.” I mean sex and done dishes are nice but is that satisfying connecting?? The answer is nope.? Right after the first kid, the sheer load of managing it all makes transactional relating at an all-time high. And sneaky gender norms get in there around how couples share the load.? I see lots of couples after kids because they are feeling it bad.

But there is so much hope and possibility to make things good.? When your sense of self is stable and healthy enough inside and your attachment system isn’t jerking you around, you can tolerate and even celebrate;?

1. Your partner’s differences
2. That your happiness isn’t solely dependent on your partner (part of it but not all of it)
3. That your partner is a sovereign self who is this beautiful wild mystery you have no control over
4. That power-sharing and leadership in your relationship will grow you into an adult if you can stick with it

And when differences, fulfillment, sovereignty, and power are all liberated from the transactional “doing” of being together we can embark on one of the most joyful aspects of being in a long-term relationship: Getting into a heart space of total wonder (I preferred the word wonder over curiosity) and really embarking on the intentional journey of finding out who the hell this person is and getting energized by their poetic mystery (I am hyperbolic so you won’t forget it.)??

Do This One Thing for Your Marriage: Listen for Soul

So the one thing to start doing is to start listening for your partner’s poetic mystery or what I call “Listening for Soul”. ? I made this hyperbolic gem up so we never forget. Hee Hee Hee. I have refined it with couples over 18 years and couples in distress can’t do it but it almost always fends off distress for those doing ok.

How to listen for soul?

1. Set aside time regularly.? And either listen to a problem you need to face, a topic your partner chooses, or ask a provocative question like “What did you learn about yourself this week?” or “When did you feel most authentically you this week?”
2. Embody wonder.? I mean think of the last time you really felt wonder and awe…maybe looking at a sunset or out in nature?? Get into this state before you start.? Wonder is so much more right brain delicious than curiosity.? Curiosity is nice but we can cheat curiosity and still be kind of heady and transactional.? You can’t cheat on wonder.? So be full of wonder.
3. The goal is to have no goal and to solve nothing. Show up with the intention to solve for nothing and achieve absolutely zero.? What I mean is bring up a problem but when you are listening go out of your way NOT to solve the problem.? Instead, focus all your energies on this question “What is so meaningful and profound about this for my partner's soul/heart (you catch my drift I hope)?”
4. Elicit the history and story from your partner.? Use deep validating statements and questions like;? I can see how impactful that was.? When did this start for you? I can see your whole face light up as you say that.??
5. Bring awareness to the connection right now. Try a question like “What’s it like to share this with me right now and have me really get it?”??
6. Bring awareness to pulling back. If you sense your partner protecting or pulling back, gently name it by saying something like “It sounds like it is hard to share this right now.? What is getting in the way?? Or is there something I can do right now to make sharing this easier?”
7. End the conversation with gratitude and how you feel differently, as the listener.? “I feel more connected to you.? Thank you for sharing.”? “I feel so inspired by all that you have overcome.”? This is not the place to analyze, give feedback, or judge. That is back to transactional and a bit cold.? Stay heartful and share yourself. ? You are sharing how you feel so the sentence should start with “Thank you” and “I feel…”.? When in doubt, pretend like you have lips on your heart and you are speaking right from the center of your big beautiful sweet heart.??

Give it a try.? Message me back.? And don’t wait until things are rocky.? This is such a fun experience to be creating regularly with your partner.??

Photo Credit: Traci Ruble, Gus Moreta, Taylor Deas Melesh - Unsplash.com.