DIve
In
Together
COUPLE’S THERAPY
Relationships are the most meaningful part of life. But sometimes they are so inconvenient!
Worthy relationships take work to build or remodel. Investing time and effort into transforming or reinventing how we interact, our relationships can become enriched and easier.
When we are willing to learn about ourselves and others and bring curiosity and openness to the process, our relationships improve.
Get Unstuck
Couples therapy helps us understand ourselves. With more self-awareness, we can recognize our ineffective patterns that result in our unmet needs. If we can’t identify behaviors and assumptions that interfere with our relationship, we are likely to make less effective choices and get stuck in cyclic dissatisfaction.
Couples therapy also helps us know our partners or spouses. Appreciating how they became the way they are (even the ways that are now difficult for us!) increases our empathy. When we have this knowledge and acceptance, we are more likely to feel patient and understanding.
Learn and predict their experience
Learning to recognize our partner’s unique cues and motivations makes it easier to predict their reactions and behavior, and proactively address or take care of things that could result in conflict. With better prediction, we are more likely to interact in ways that get our needs met.
By learning to recognize your partner’s motivations:
You can empathize with, track and predict their experience
which makes you effective giving and receiving care without self-distortion
and more likely to avoid conflict and productively compromise
increasing the probability that you will get your wants/needs met for affection, freedom, space, understanding, intimacy, and more.
Conflict in Relationship
Couples need specific support when they are locked into patterns of conflict and misunderstanding.
Transforming these patterns usually proceeds in the following steps:
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Establishing an objective description of “what happened” and “what is happening now” that you both can agree on. Conflict is a pattern, and the good news is that patterns can be broken down into each participant’s contributing elements.
This is created by both of you admitting that your perspective and memory is not the objective truth, and that you both have valid needs, interpretations and blindspots.
A good therapist helps recognize these blindspots and establish an intersubjective truth, a story that you both accept and understand.
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Despite our best intentions, we can still have a painful impact on someone else.
If we’d made mistakes or could have done things better, this is where you apologize with a depth of understanding and genuine care for your partner/spouse.
Our partner might believe that we’ve made mistakes, but this doesn’t mean we are simply capitulating, going through their perceived wrongs and apologizing.
There are ways to acknowledge impact that don’t sound like “I’m so sorry for…” It’s more like, “I can see how much this is hurting you. I wish that it didn’t. Your experience matters, and I’m going to try and be more tuned in to what you need.”
Of course, when we know that we’ve made mistakes, it’s much easier for us to bring humility and simply apologize. There is a difference between making a mistake and a missed opportunity for sensitivity, and a therapist helps you differentiate between these and communicate care in new, varied, effective ways.
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We may feel inconvenienced or even fed up by our partner’s idiosyncrasy, need or sensitivity. But if we are choosing them as a partner, it’s much worse if we resist this truth. We are making things harder than they have to be. Our energy is better spent learning how to take care of them in a balanced way, establishing an equilibrium between our needs and theirs.
Essentially, we need to accept our partner, forgive their mistakes and “who they are”, and fully choose them without the fantasy of cutting away or transforming the parts we don’t like. Of course, this is an ongoing process and can be difficult to integrate in a relationship!
To add, accepting our partners for “who they are”, doesn’t mean never requesting that they change. It’s normal to request a change when we are feeling pain, and sometimes these requests are more like demands or ultimatums. It’s tough to negotiate what is a reasonable expectation for what our partner could do versus a fantasy of their changing into our ideal image of what they should be.
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This is the part where you both set intentions to do things differently in the future, in concrete terms.
“When you ask for that, I’m going to remember that you like me to respond in this way…”, or, “I’m going to be better with this sensitivity, I can understand how you developed this from your family and last relationship, and I don’t want you to feel the same way interacting with me. In the future I’ll try to…”
Communicating our intentions to behave and communicate differently in the future gives our partners reassurance that we are able and willing to change. When we feel this we become more hopeful and less resigned and stuck.
Again, it’s important to distinguish between asking our partners to be willing to change and try to take better care of us (or themselves or our family), versus becoming who we believe they should be. Shoulding someone will likely be met with resistance and is usually conflict dynamic’s key component in the first place.
Polyamory
Ethical non-monogamy, polyamory and open relationships can be challenging, especially for those new to polyamory.
Open relationships often bring up feelings of insecurity, jealousy, possessiveness, and resentment. These are normal. There are ways of being in relationship that reduce the occurrence and intensity. You can learn how to be more aware, accepting, and confronting of these thoughts and emotions.
Communication and boundaries are particularly important in a poly relationship. If there is a primary partnership transitioning to an open relationship, specific discussions can prevent future painful situations.
Siblings
Relationships with family members tend to be some of the hardest relationships to transform. When we grow up with someone, we spend decades developing relational patterns, many of them maladaptive and unlikely to get what we really want out of the relationship. It’s reasonable to expect that it will be a long term process to detangle and shift these patterns.
I’m an identical twin and have an unusually close relationship with my brother. Growing together and attending to the evolution of our relationship has required tough conversations and self-reflection.
My desire to work with siblings, and especially identical twins, comes from my appreciation of my relationship with my brother. Even though he has been on a different life path, we’ve both been interested in improving the relationship and it shows. There is an ebb and flow to our connection, but we have deepened our relationship and understanding of each other over time.