How Relationships Work
How Relationship Therapy Works
Relationship therapy helps you answer three questions:
What is going on in your relationship?
Why is it happening?
How can you make it better?
Every relationship goes through difficult times. With the right tools, you can emerge from these challenges with a more thriving, passionate marriage.
Our first three sessions will focus on these topics:
effective communication
conflict resolution
how to feel safe
how to create trust
I work with over one hundred couples every year. Most couples reach their relationship goals in ten sessions or less, but some take longer. Rebuilding your relationship might be the most rewarding thing you have ever done, and I will be with you every step of the way.
Some thoughts to consider
You aren’t more mature than your partner, you’re just immature in different ways.
Your relationship will improve when you change your input into the relationship system.
Your partner can also change their input into the system, but why wait for them to go first?
Your partner knows more about your personal flaws than you do.
It’s easier to see your partner’s flaws than your own flaws.
Your relationship distress is your responsibility, not your partner’s responsibility.
Your partner is not the cause of your distress, and they will not be the solution to your distress.
You can only control your own contribution to the relationship system.
You can’t control your partner’s behavior, but you can change the environment they are operating in.
Most relationships consist of a two people reacting to each other in a never-ending loop.
When you stop reacting and start changing, your relationship starts to change.
If you wait for your partner to go first, you might be waiting a long time.
You can’t break the loop unless you’re willing to accept and manage your own anxiety.
Relationship Dynamics
There are three common self-reinforcing relationship dynamics:
Victim/manipulator: one acts helpless while the other acts superior and controlling
Victim/rescuer: one carries responsibility for the other, who acts helpless
Pursuer/distancer: one deals with anxiety by withdrawing, the other deals with anxiety by seeking connection
In each case, your own behavior encourages and enables your partner’s behavior.
Most relationships incorporate all three dynamics.
The further you back into your corner, the easier it is for your partner to stay in their corner.
When you leave your corner and come out into the middle of the relationship, it makes it harder for your partner to stay in their corner.
You might feel like you have to keep playing your preferred role, but you don’t actually. You can stop at any moment.
You probably learned your preferred role in your family of origin.
How to Improve Relationship Communication
When you defend yourself, you reinforce the idea that your partner is the one who decides whether or not you’re good enough.
Most arguments are just attempts to extract validation from each other.
Meaningful communication begins when you stop needing your partner’s agreement and approval.
Intense emotions are mostly used to manipulate each other.
When you start arguing, say “I’m gettting defensive, I’ll be back in 20 minutes” then go calm yourself down and try again.
Ask for what you want and tell your partner what you see. This is called “perception/preference communication.”
You haven’t been asking for what you want because you don’t want to give your partner a chance to say no.
If you’re saying a lot of words, you’re probably trying to manipulate someone.
It takes three words to describe how you feel right now, and eight words to describe how you felt in the past. When you use hundreds of words to “share your feelings” you’re just trying to manipulate your partner.
If you don’t feel heard, your partner probably just disagrees with you and you don’t want to deal with that.
If you’ve already explained something twice, doing it a third time isn’t going to help.
The Family you Came From
Your brain is wired to see your parents as more innocent than they really are, and that makes it easy to see yourself as more innocent than you really are.
Your brain was designed to survive childhood, not to thrive in adulthood.
If you want to thrive in adulthood, you have to rewire your brain.
You don’t get to choose the family you grow up in. Your family’s emotional burden is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
You will pass your family’s emotional burden on to your children unless you deal with it.
You can’t see yourself clearly until you can see your parents clearly.
Parenting
You aren’t as innocent as you think you are.
Children learn from what you do, not from what you say.
You are responsible for regulating your emotions and for helping your children regulate their emotions
Families are anxiety-management machines.
In a low-functioning family, children act as anxiety absorbers.
In a high-functioning family, parents act as anxiety absorbers.
When you don’t deal with your own anxiety, you pass it on to your family.
Family anxiety concentrates in the family member who has the weakest emotional boundaries. This is often the youngest child, or the most vulnerable child.
Your child will always operate at fixed percentage of your own maturity. If you want your child to be more mature, you have to become more mature first.
You don’t get to blame anything on your children.
Sexual Problems in Committed Relationships
There is always a higher-desire partner and a lower-desire partner (HDP/LDP)
The LDP controls sex, whether they want to or not.
All long-term relationships experience sexual desire problems.
Bad sex is high anxiety and low intimacy
Good sex is low anxiety and high intimacy
You can’t negotiate desire.
Things that kill desire: anxiety, neediness, shame, guilt, immaturity, dishonesty, cowardice, fragility, and using sex for validation.
Things that nurture desire: courage, kindness, honesty, compassion, growing up, and settling down.
The HDP and LDP contribute equally to sexual problems.
