Excellent communication also helps increase our bonding

Excellent communication also helps increase our bonding

Communication skills and tools are not just necessary for getting on the same page, making joint decisions and problem solving effectively. They are also indispensable for more deeply understanding each other and warmly flowing in our interactions with our partner. Excellent communication also helps increase our bonding.

Feeling understood is an existential human need… In feeling that the other “gets” us, we feel Known and that we exist… Feeling understood engenders feelings of belonging, being accepted, and safety. This is pretty much at the core of things! This is why it’s super important to use our skills and tools to make sure we get our partner, and others, when we are in our interactions with them.

And, with that it goes without saying how super important it is to show them that we got them… This is where the validation step in the Intentional Dialogue comes in. This is the step that partners forget in interactions that crashes the conversation and possibly even leads to a fight.

Equally important is to communicate so our partner can understand us, and to seek confirmation that we were understood.

Interactions don’t have to go south… Most of the time when couples refer to communication problems, they are actually referring to emotionally charged issues and conversations. They can’t communicate well when they are triggered… Which makes complete sense! Employing communication tools and skills has a lot to do with managing ourselves and being mindful to not trigger our partner… Removing roadblocks to communication goes a long way.

And most importantly, when we are mindful of how we show up and how we communicate we are investing in protecting, nurturing, and strengthening our bond

 

Strengthening Our Bond

Therefore, it is imperative that we are very intentional and mindful about how we communicate with our partner and what the focus of our conversations are. For who doesn’t want a lovely and strong bond with their Lovey? Right?

I invite you to add having Meaningful Conversations to your Couple TimeLet’s not use couple time for just more binging on Netflix.

Awareness and consciousness about yourself

Do you know what triggers you and why? Do you know what core wound and defense mechanisms you keep playing out, what you contribute to your repeating patterns? Do you know what your needs are and how to meet them? Do you know your Love Language? Getting a deeper understanding of yourself in this way is enlightening and a great investment in your personal development…

Then, sharing this with your partner and integrating your new awareness into your interactions is truly transformative…

Awesomeness and uniqueness about yourself

How well do you know yourself? Your personal strengths and characteristics, values, and dreams? Exploring these for a fuller awareness and knowing of yourself is a beautiful undertaking to enrich your personal experience.

Then, you can share your understandings, discoveries, and what you make of them with your partner. Isn’t this a gorgeous conversation?

Aspirations and passions about yourself

Have you identified your Purpose, what drives you? Are you focused on that purpose daily? Do you have a vision of your future and your life? Do you have clear goals and milestones? What are you working on? Are your projects, tasks and routines in alignment with your Vision? Getting some clarity around these and aligning your life accordingly makes life so much easier and pleasurable…

Then, share what you are up to, your desires, fears, and possible roadblocks with your partner for additional alignment and meaning…

Aren’t these delicious? Imaging these are the topics of your conversations most of the time… This is what gives our interactions depth and meaning. These interactions are what strengthen our bond, bring us closer and guide our relationship and life. This is how we create radiance and meaning in our relationship.

 

APPLICATION: Select the area about you that you want to explore, gain a deeper understand, more clarity and direction to play with… Set some time aside to indulge in this exploration, and then bring your discoveries, insights, and desires to your Couple Time

  • Awareness and consciousness about yourself
  • Awesomeness and uniqueness about yourself
  • Aspirations and passions about yourself

 

In developing ourselves and owning our sparkle, with bring more radiance to our relationship…

Be curious, be playful, be vulnerable, be available…

Share yourself more in your interactions and communication, strengthen you bond!

Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…

With Much Love & Light!

 

Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.

 

Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?

Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com

Does it feel like you Love TOO Much?

Does it feel like you Love TOO Much?

Do you think that you love your partner more than they love you? That you care more? That you do more for the home, the family, and the relationship? That if it weren’t for you, things would fall apart? You are not alone in this. It is very common for one partner to do more nurturing, caring, and making sure everything is ok. Does this sound like you? Do you do the caretaking for the family and the relationship? Does it feel like you Love TOO Much?

If we care more and love too much, then by implication it feels like the other cares less… Nobody wants to feel like their loved one doesn’t care as much… It doesn’t feel good to feel less cared about… It doesn’t feel good to love too much…

When we love too much, we lose ourselves in the caring and caretaking… Everything we do is for the other/s, with the other/s in mind, and we don’t even think about our needs, preferences, and wishes. We don’t even figure in the equation.

What happens next is that our whole routine revolves around our loved one/s, our whole week and lifestyle revolve around our loved one/s, our whole life revolves around our loved one/s… We lose sight of who we are, what we are meant to do, of our growth, of where we want to go and who we want to become, and of our actual Journey…

We become myopic, we miss the forest for the tree. We focus on the minutiae of the everyday. We get distracted by others’ whims and agendas and by bright shiny objects. We bang around without purpose.

We fill our days with crap – a bunch of meaningless tasks and a lot of running around. Our tasks are not related to projects. Our projects are not related to goals. Our goals are not related to our vision. We are just wasting are precious time, our precious limited Life Energy…

Some don’t even have outlined tasks, clear projects, established goals or a driving vision… So, you see how easy it is to get lost in the everyday. To focus on what our partner is doing or not doing. To micromanage our home and our loved one/s. To get overly involved in other people’s business. To care about the concern of others. To take over other people’s responsibilities. To take it all on because it’s easier to fill in our void with others’ stuff…

Then we wonder why we feel overwhelmed, anxious, lost, blah, bored, resentful, exhausted, taken for granted, lonely, alone and the like.

It’s easy to distract ourselves from ourselves by loving too much… This is easy to do when we don’t fully own ourselves, for what else are we supposed to do… If we don’t have ourselves, at least we have others…

We have nothing else to care about so we put all our care on them… But then we feel bad because we care more than they do… Then we don’t feel cared about enough…

We create a super hurtful and harmful cycle… We neglect ourselves and our lives. We feel stuck, empty and unhappy. We wonder what’s the meaning of it all… We are missing the forest for the tree!

If we were to just stand still, be present, and look inside ourselves, we would find the answers. We would feel safe, connected, inspired, abundant and see the purpose of our life…

So…

    • Stop doing for your loved one/s what they can do for themselves.
    • Stop micromanaging.
    • Stop obsessively checking in and on everything.
    • Stop redundantly tracking everything.
    • Stop doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff.
    • Stop filling your life with junk.
    • Stop doing stuff that doesn’t serve you.
    • Stop saying yes to other people’s agendas.
    • Stop __________________.

Stop wasting your precious Life Energy on pursuits that don’t enhance your Journey in some way… Minimize the chaos, the mundane, the minutia, the redundant, the excess, the spinning, the grind…

Stop loving too much, for when you do you also enable others to not do for themselves… This is actually not helpful, you cheat them of the possibility of them figuring it out… Being too helpful is not helpful… Just stop.

Focus on what brings you joy and helps you create your Best Relationship and Life. On what moves the needle forward in your Journey. What enriches your life and the life of the people you love… Not by fishing for them but by teaching them how to fish and by collaborating… 

Loving TOO Much is not a great quality, it’s not a character strengthIt is actually a sign of codependence, a quality that holds back the people involved…

When we love too much, we become codependent where the members of the relationship/s are held back from their full potential by the dynamics they create. The helped person can’t learn and have self-agency. The helper becomes obsessed with the other at their expense. Neither side wins. This contributes to stuckness in relationships…

 

APPLICATION: Find three behaviors/tasks you do on a daily basis that are Life Energy sucking and Signs that You Love TOO Much… Figure out how to stop engaging in those behaviors by replacing them with healthy, effective and productive ones, for example:

    • Have a system for doing food and other shopping so you don’t run out of things
    • Prep food and snacks
    • Teach children how to make their bed and make it their responsibility
    • Teach children / discuss with partner how to pick up their stuff and put dirty clothes in hampers
    • Agree on who puts the dishes in the dish washer and who empties it
    • Design lunchboxes duty and agree on who is responsible for putting them together
    • Create a morning routine where everyone is responsible for getting themselves ready and ready to go
    • Have a place for backpacks, lunchboxes, school papers, school activities supplies/equipment, etc. (to have been packed up or prepped the day before!)
    • Have a place for coats, gloves, scarves, shoes and such
    • Don’t run stuff your children forget to school
    • Prioritize money producing tasks at work or completing your important project’s tasks
    • Block off time to do focus work
    • Don’t have a million errands to run after work
    • Have a streamlined afterschool, evening and bedtime routine
    • Block off selfcare time, couple time, social media engagement time, etc.
    • Have a system for doing laundry a couple of times a week only
    • Select a recurring time to do home admin tasks and synchronize with your partner

Loving too much is not the way to go. To create a radiant and successful relationship, and meaningful life, we are to fully own ourselves and empower others to do the same… We are to shoot for Interdependence in our relationship/s with extreme personal ownership, reciprocity and collaboration.

We want to love compassionately and passionately and give our relationship/s our best, not our worst by loving too much…

Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…

 

Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.

 

Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?

Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com

Overwhelmed, how is your support and collaboration? (PT5)

Overwhelmed, how is your support and collaboration? (PT5)

It is not easy to live a successful and meaningful life. It takes intentionality, focus and dedication to stay the course. Our life Journey has ups and downs, and at times it can feel like an obstacle course.

With the many demands of today’s modern life and specially recently as we’ve weathered a global pandemic, things can be challenging. It can be overwhelming to manage all the demands and responsibilities. This is why it’s so important to uplevel your support and collaboration.

Imagine having world-class support and collaboration protocol to help create your Best Life. Then the Universe becomes the limit…

It is no fun going it alone. And most importantly when we don’t have the proper support, we hold ourselves back from creating the life (and relationship!) we desire… For you see, when we try to do everything by ourselves in a vacuum, it shows in our results…

When we go it alone:

  • We are limited by how much we can do, by our knowledge base and by our skill set
  • We are focused on doing and forget Being
  • We elude our creativity and our knowing
  • We are flooded by the minutiae of life and miss the forest for the tree
  • We miss savoring life experiences, the simple pleasures and amazing people 
  • We cheat ourselves of connection and intimacy
  • We hold ourselves back from the potential that leveraging and connectivity can afford us…

These limitations have a massive impact:

  • We hold ourselves back from our true potential and from living our full Human Experience
  • We settle for less and can’t even imagine having something special to contribute
  • We erode our connection and bond and jeopardize the essence of our relationship
  • We subscribe to subpar parenting tactics
  • We neglect, abandon and even abuse ourselves

We end up:

  • Settling for a job we hate and merely getting a paycheck to live from month to month
  • Creating a mediocre relationship, tolerating our partner, missing out on our epic love
  • Missing out on the synergy inherent in our partnership
  • Misparenting our children to the point that they become ill, symptomatic, misbehaved, maladjusted
  • Damaging our body, mind, and spirit

For those that are still carrying the badge of honor for: Sacrificing themselves, exploiting their every ounce of living, and running themselves into the ground – I implore you to reconsider your approach!

It behooves partners to crack the code on how to better support each other and implement a Collaboration Protocol into their lifestyle to create the life of their dreams. They can easily accomplish this through the Relationship Enrichment Lifestyle™.

What does support and collaboration look like in a relationship? Every relationship has their own flavor of this, but the essence is to have a divide and conquer approach. Where one partner picks up where the other leaves off. And, where both partners are in the loop and current on everything that’s going on in their joint lives. But, most importantly where the partners are working together to achieve a common goal.

The partners designing and working together towards a Joint Life Vision is the key towards creating your Best Life and having your fullest Human Experience…

Check out this super inspiring video: Taking Visioning to the next level!

 

Create a Strong Partnership

 

Ok, so how do we create a fabulous life and epic love relationship when we are already stretched thin and overwhelmed? You set yourself up for having better support and collaboration, you create a Strong Partnership.

 

Setting Up for Success

Success and creating awesomeness doesn’t happen by accident. We have to be intentional and proactive about it.

FIRST – Clear: Decommit, eliminate distractions, outsource, declutter, streamline, simplify, automate

SECOND – Envision: Design your Joint Life Vision that flows from your values and has clear goals

THIRD – Structure: Create your Ideal Day (daily routine) that you’ll follow as a template

FOURTH – Systematize: Set up systems for sharing responsibilities, completing tasks, building Habits

FIFTH – Flow: Include buffers and transitions into your routines

This formula helps reduce the overwhelm and set yourself up for a productive, meaningful and joyful life. It:

    1. Creates space to operate differently
    2. Identifies your North Star to guide your aspirations
    3. Provides a structure to contain your endeavors
    4. Promotes an effortless approach to managing your days and the business of life
    5. Supports operating with ease and joy

What’s important to note here is that our ability to implement this depends heavily on: Our mindset, communication skills, how we meet needs, and bond with our partner. Partners who jump into problem solving and changing up their lives have a hard go of it if the other relationship Elements are not robust

FEELING STUCK, HOW IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP MINDSET? (PT1)

BICKERING AND FIGHTING, HOW ARE YOUR COMMUNICATION SKILLS? (PT2)

REPEATING ARGUMENTS, HOW ARE YOUR RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS? (PT3)

MISSING LOVE, HOW IS YOUR CONNECTION AND INTIMACY? (PT4)

If it was easy to create a fabulous life and epic love relationship, then everybody would have these things. Our job is to invest in ourselves and our relationship so that we are in good shape to create our Best Life. And so that we have an amazing Human Experience.

 

ASSIGNMENT: Identify where the weak link is in your life and relationship right now. It can be within one of the Elements, or in one of the steps in the Success Formula.

Decide how you will go about addressing your weak link… Take an immediate action to get the ball rolling in creating your radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life… 

 

As with anything, when you bring consciousness, focus and attention to something, Awesomeness happens. I wish this for you in your life and your relationship.

Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…

With Much Love & Light!

 

PS – Related Posts:
Tired of feeling stuck in your relationship?
Tired of fighting without resolution?
Tired of the same old issue?
Tired of feeling disconnected?
Tired of feeling overwhelmed?

 

Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.

 

Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?

Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com

Missing love, how is your connection and intimacy? (PT4)

Missing love, how is your connection and intimacy? (PT4)

Nobody likes to feel disconnected from their partner. Partners might like to have time to themselves and do their own thing. But they like to have that while still feeling connected. Feeling disconnected, not in a good place, not on the same page, not in alignment, not together or not close, intimate and special – doesn’t feel good. Missing love, how is your connection and intimacy?

We’ve already established that we have not only been in a Pandemic but also undergoing, and this is not just during the pandemic, a low desire and lack of intimacy Epidemic

After the Infatuation and honeymoon period of a relationship, couples then enter a Power Struggle. While in the honeymoon period the partners are all about pleasing and wooing their partner. In the Power Struggle stage, the partners are all about making sure they themselves are pleased, their needs are met, and they get what they want.

As you can imagine as partners are usually opposite in their relationship, their needs are usually also opposite… This leads to a power struggle as to who gets what they need and want… The partners get stuck in trying to meet their opposing needs…

This is exhausting as this is the nature of their dynamics and they keep looping in this never-ending cycle. Unless of course they bring intentionality into their relating…

As if this is not challenging enough, during this time the relationship is usually also a bit more mature where the demands just keep piling up. A home needs tending. Children come along. Jobs become more demanding. Community and other commitments are added to the mix. There is a lot going on.

This state of affairs is so draining and stressful that it takes a toll on the partners’ mood, energy, desire, libido, intimacy, and fun. The couples start to run on empty.

It behooves partners to become more intentional in their relationship and their lives to minimize the impact of stress and demands on their connection and intimacy. They can easily accomplish this through the Relationship Enrichment Lifestyle™.

The key to having a rich, loving, caring, connected and loving relationship is focusing on minimizing the culprits impacting desire and intimacy, and embracing a Relationship Nurturing approach in their relationship.

 

Relationship Nurturing

 

A Relationship Nurturing approach to your relationship means you prioritize your relationship and your partner. It means you are super intentional at safeguarding and strengthening your bond. And it means you are proactive about caring, connecting, having fun, and being intimate.

We don’t leave feeling good in our relationship and with our partner up to chance!

 

Safeguarding and Strengthening Your Bond

Regardless of how strong our love is for our partner, the bond between us is still delicate. It is vulnerable, sensitive and susceptible. Our job is to protect this bond at all costs and to foster it if we are to create the relationship we want.

We are to safeguard our bond in our:

1- Thoughts and how we choose to see our partner – minding to keep a Relationship Enrichment Mindset activated to keep our Partner in our highest regard in our mind.

2- Communication and interactions – minding to avoid the Dirty Dozen of Communication and using enriching communication skills and tools

3- Approach to meeting needs – minding sensitivities and triggers and appropriately addressing them to meet needs

4- Balance between togetherness and separateness – minding how we pursue our individuality while remaining a solid unit

5- Choices for doing our lives – minding how we set up our Ideal Day, routines, habits and collaboration systems to fully support each other and our dreams

We are to strengthen our bond by:

  • Cherishing our Partner for who they are
  • Being present, being vulnerable, and Being with our partner
  • Sharing our internal world and our experience
  • Holding a safe space for our partner to share their internal world and their experience
  • Having dedicated and protected time for our partner

 

Proactively Cultivating Love

Love doesn’t last if it’s not cultivated… It can actually be eroded by how we tend to do our lives and how we approach our partner and our relationship. It requires mindfulness, intentionality and caring for it to thrive.

A garden gets overrun if it is not tended. A plant dies if it is not watered.

We are to be proactive about caring, connecting, having fun, and being intimate in our relationship:

Caring – Sprinkling TLC, loving gestures, courtesies, little gifts, thoughtfulness and giving love in our partner’s love language.

Connecting – Building in Connection Habits into your daily routine. Implementing a Delight Partner Habit.

Having Fun – Planning fun of all kinds – couple time, outings, trips, experiences and such and embrace Dating Your Partner.

Enhancing Intimacy – Planning and embracing Sexy Time & 3Gs: Grace-full, Grateful and Generous… Seduce your partner. Be open, explore, expand your repertoire.

Nurturing your relationship is a huge part of creating a radiant and successful relationship. You can do a lot of other work on yourself and your relationship but if you don’t cultivate your love, it gets stagnant, it shrivels and it dies… Make this a top priority in your relationship!

 

ASSIGNMENT: If you are feeling like you would like to feel and enjoy your Love more, decide if you first need to address the 5 Culprits to Low Desire, and then dive into Nurturing Your Relationship!

  • Safeguard & Strengthen Your Bond – Create and protect couple time. Attune to your partner, be present…
  • Cultivate Your Love – Whole heartedly embrace one of these at a time: Caring, Connecting, Having Fun, Enhancing Intimacy. Play full out!

 

As with anything, when you bring consciousness, focus and attention to something, Awesomeness happens. I wish this for you in your life and your relationship.

Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…

With Much Love & Light!

 

PS – Related Posts:
Tired of feeling stuck in your relationship?
Tired of fighting without resolution?
Tired of the same old issue?
Tired of feeling disconnected?
Tired of feeling overwhelmed?

 

Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.

 

Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?

Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com

Repeating arguments, how are your relationship dynamics? (PT3)

Repeating arguments, how are your relationship dynamics? (PT3)

It feels terrible when we have the same arguments over the same disagreements, over and over again… Doesn’t it? It’s so frustrating to feel like we are living in the twilight zone, or that we are having a Groundhog Day experience… It’s tough to know that we’ll have the same conversation without resolution, yet again. Feeling like beating your head against the wall? Having repeating arguments, how you’re your relationship dynamics?

Having the same fight, or conflict, over and over might have to do with communication skills, but most importantly it has to do with your relationship dynamics… For you see something happens before a fight ensues, before a conflict is identified or sometimes even before verbal communication is started. And that is being triggered

Being triggered means our sensitivities get perturbed. Or that core or old wounds or trauma get poked. The poking engenders strong emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, numbness, or feeling out of control.

When these feelings come on strong, they are accompanied by higher activation of neurotransmitters in our brain and hormonal release. The cocktail floods us and monopolizes our brain activity, becoming less engaged with our higher executive functioning. This is where the amounts of skills or tools you have don’t matter as they become inaccessible…

Our getting thrown off might result in our isolating, shutting down emotionally, becoming argumentative, or becoming physically aggressive. At this juncture the partners resemble toddlers in their ability to manage themselves.

This is why it’s so important to do our personal development work. For healing and growing ourselves up, so we don’t walk around with gaping wounds and sensitivities that are easily triggered. And that drive our approach to life and our relationship, and our relationship dynamics…

In interactions with our partner, we have the opportunity for healing and growing ourselves up. This is the bonus benefit of being in relationship with our Partner and their perfect imperfections that perfectly complement our own…

It behooves partners to not lose sight of this gift, and to transcend the recurring dissatisfying patterns by addressing their triggers through the Relationship Enrichment Lifestyle™.

When getting triggered in our relationship, there is a built-in opportunity to now get what we didn’t get growing up (to heal)… And, for learning how to stretch ourselves to meet our partner’s opposing needs (to grow up, become whole)…

Once we integrate this into our relating, we are able to tap into our inherent relationship synergy… This is when the waters part, and life is our oyster… LOL

Learning what drives the dynamics (our and our partner’s triggers) and how to work with them for our evolution and more meaningful Journey, is a marvelous lens and mindset to embrace in our relationship. This is when we stop the power struggle and becomes allies. This is when we become a true Partnership…

This is then our conscious and intentional relationship. Being aware of our triggers and being mindful and intentional about addressing them, is the way to change the relationship dynamics and to create the relationship we want. This is the key to our transformation…

 

Changing the Dynamics

 

It’s very easy to feel stuck, frustrated and hopeless when it seems that we just go around and around in our conversations, if we even have them, without getting anywhere. The same issue/s keep creeping up and no matter what we do we can’t seem to crack the code. But with a little mindfulness and intentionality we have the keys to the kingdom.

 

The Reactivity

The key is to pay attention to the reactivity. Start noticing when you get prickly, what gets on your nerves or annoys you, what are you sensitive about, what touches your sensitivities, and such. Now do this by observing what happens to you, what comes up for you. Don’t do this by focusing on what your partner is doing or not doing, and taking yourself on a ride about them…

Then notice how you respond in the interaction or situation. What do you do outwardly and inwardly? What are your “emotional behaviors”? Shut down, withdraw, distance, dismiss, minimize, and the like? Or pounce, attack, pursue, nag, control, maximize, and the like?

The set of reactions you identified are your go-to Defense Mechanisms…

You can be on a spectrum from Distancer to Pursuer… The higher the conflict in the relationship, the more the polarization…

What are you feeling behind your defense mechanisms? Controlled, smothered, suffocated, cornered, unappreciated, inadequate? Or, abandoned, rejected, unwanted, unworthy, unsupported, alone?

These feelings are your Wounds…

The Distancer feels – Controlled, smothered, suffocated, cornered, unappreciated, inadequate

The Pursuer feels – Abandoned, rejected, unwanted, unworthy, unsupported, alone

Share the instructions with your partner and have identify their Defense Mechanisms and Wounds… I’m sure that by just doing your side, you can probably identify your partner’s as well. But it’s best for them to identify and own their own experience…

Regardless of how you arrive at identifying your partner’s side, I’m sure you’ll notice that you are opposites… A little or a whole lot.

Now, don’t let this scare you as Opposites Attract… And, once you start doing your work, you’ll become less polarized and learn to work with your differences to the satisfaction of you both.

 

Your Reciprocity Loop

Your dynamics is a reciprocity loop, a recurring repeating pattern. Actually, it’s a beautiful dance between the oppositeness…

  • You want closeness, they want space.
  • You want to discuss things to process, they need time on their own to think to process.
  • You want to be flexible, they want to run on schedule.
  • You want to do things together, they want to do things on their own.
  • And, so on…

Partners might get triggered in the face of the different preferences… Specially if there is already some disconnection and unappreciation going on at the moment…

The Looping: Something happens. Partner A gets Triggered and responds with their Defense Mechanism. Which Triggers Partner B, who responds with their own Defense Mechanism. Resulting in Partner A having their Wounds/Feelings additionally triggered, to which they respond with more of their Defense Mechanism. Additionally, triggering Partner B’s Wounds/Feelings. And on it goes…

Let’s say:

  • Partner B announces they’ll be away for the next three days.
  • This makes Partner A feel unwanted, rejected and abandoned.
  • They react by demanding why the partner is going away, asking a million questions about the trip, requesting a gazillion things get done before  they go away, asking them to come back early, and such.
  • Partner B now feels controlled, nagged, and trapped.
  • They in turn don’t want to provide details on the trip, are evasive about the possibility of coming back early, forget to do some of the tasks requested, and such.
  • This makes Partner A feel more unwanted, alone, dismissed, unsupported. So, they become more controlling, demanding and such.
  • Now Partner B feels more controlled, unappreciated, and suffocated.
  • And it can really escalate…

Does this sound familiar? I know, you are not alone!

 

The Transformation

Without spelling out therapy sessions here, the first and most basic thing to do is keep your understanding of your dynamics top of mind.

So, when your partner does something that triggers you, you can put it in the right context for yourself and address what comes up differently…

And so, equally as important, is to be mindful to not operate or react in a way that triggers your partner…

Note, the Wounds that are triggered are actually rooted in childhood experiences. See if you can connect them back…

Giving each other a different experience, especially a different outcome in the face of a trigger is what’s healing… These are reparative experiences.

Another way to be healing is to ongoingly and proactively do behaviors that are antidotes to the Wounds. So, what’s needed is provided without having triggers making noise to get needs met.

For example, build-in couple/connection/togetherness and individual/alone/separateness times into your routines…

The additional beauty here, is that in stretching to give our partner their preference, we grow… So, it’s a win-win.

And that’s how you do it. Hang on to this golden ticket my friend, play with this concept to transform your relationship. You’ll be amazed at what’s possible once you crack this code! Enjoy!

 

ASSIGNMENT: Make a concerted effort at becoming a conscious and intentional couple… Keep your dynamics and working them top of mind!

  • Identify your Defense Mechanisms and Wounds
  • Identify your Loop
  • Identify behavior and attitude changes to avoid Triggering each other
  • Identify and implement ongoing Habits to tend to the Needs related to the Wounds

 

As with anything, when you bring consciousness, focus and attention to something, Awesomeness happens. I wish this for you in your life and your relationship.

Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…

With Much Love & Light!

 

PS – Related Posts:
Tired of feeling stuck in your relationship?
Tired of fighting without resolution?
Tired of the same old issue?
Tired of feeling disconnected?
Tired of feeling overwhelmed?

 

Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.

 

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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com

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