It’s very interesting to me to watch couples struggle and go around and around… I find that this happens with the ones where partners refuse to take ownership of their own contribution to their relationship’s status quo and are fixated with having their partner change… These are the partners that also are waiting for the magic pill and for me to fix their partner. I have a bit of news for these partners – it ain’t gonna happen!
When partners wait for the other to change, they are waiting. When they wait, they are wasting the moment and the opportunity to have something different – right there and then! If this resonates a bit with you, in that you are waiting for something different in the interaction, I implore YOU to do something differently, to mindfully, respectfully, caringly, and compassionately reach out to your partner about it.
When an interaction is going south, take a step back and see how you are provoking the situation. How you are inviting your partner’s reaction. How you are pushing their buttons, triggering them. How you are hurting your partner. Instead of focusing on how your partner is going about this all wrong, stop your approach and try something different – the more loving and compassionate approach.
We all just want to be understood, accepted and loved at the end of the day. Give that to your partner
I implore you to stop blaming, pointing fingers, and waiting. You will be waiting forever as you cannot change the other, nor drag them to change, push them to change, or beat them to change. Change can only happen when you change yourself! When you are frustrated and in pain because of your partner’s actions and attitudes, take a moment to see what you are contributing to the moment and in general.
Stop being the victim and take charge of what is happening! Take charge in a loving, giving, nurturing, forgiving, investing manner. I’m not suggesting aggression, punishment, ultimatums, control, threats and other ploys partners resort to when they want to take charge… These invite more of the same and escalate your situation.
Please STOP your approach NOW and try something different. Stop going at it from a wounded, deprived, violated and entitled perspective and be NICE! YOU invest TLC. YOU invest compassion, understanding, love, and affection. YOU start and continue to use your partner’s love language and stick to it no matter what.
YOU have the power to invite your partner to a different moment. YOU have the power to break the impasse and seduce your partner. YOU CAN DO IT!
Remember, challenging situations are opportunities for healing, growth, and change. Go about this as if this was a course on change you want to ace. Make believe each interaction is a test… Prep for it, research, get your resources, be at your best, and a have a plan of action to ace your test… Give it your all. Give it your genuine, Authentic all, not your egocentric all… Stop waiting and change your relationship right now.
Complete the MetroRelationship (sm) Assignment below to help you effortlessly implement this, make changes and immediately start experiencing your spectacular relationship. Share your thoughts and progress on our blog page!
Happy Changing!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™ Assignment
Identify your usual “fight”, conflict or disagreement. Think about what is driving the tension. What are you ultimately trying to get out of it? Think about what emotional needs you are trying to meet by holding your ground…
Now think about other ways to get this needs met…
Ask for concrete gestures from your partner that would meet those needs, not necessarily related to the topic of conflict… Share the reason behind your request and that you are stretching your approach to the relationship…
Add this to your tool kit…
Copyright (c) 2016 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 a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
There is a tendency towards passiveness in our relationship as time passes.
Couples get comfortable in their routine, whether it is an efficient and satisfying routine or not, and lax in their relating, whether they are on the same page or not. They settle into whatever relating they have developed and stick with it, becoming more and more passive in their efforts to keep passion, interest, mystery, and seduction alive.
This passiveness comes as a result of couples settling into and getting caught up in the everyday grind, being reactive because of their unprocessed and unaddressed wounds, and their just going through the motions in their relating. They come to not be in touch with one another. As this passiveness continues, the partners feel more and more disconnected.
The Rx for this is joint fun. Having fun together creates pleasure and safety intensifying the couple’s emotional bond.
So what is fun and how can you have more of it? Fun is any activity that requires high energy interaction and no skills, has no rules, can be done wrong, produces deep pleasure in the form of an orgasm, laughter or both, and is done in a short period of time.
This kind of fun, high energy, deeper breathing, blood and endorphins pumping kind of fun, creates a feeling of being alive, energized, charged. It is proactive. It adds life to the relationship.
Playfulness is one way of having fun and it’s a natural form of expressing our innate drive toward full aliveness. Playfulness can include singing songs with added funny wording, splashing in the pool or bath, drenching each other with water balloons, wrestling, racing up the steps or to the car, having food or pillow fights, or tickling each other.
Add fun into your relationship, enjoy new pleasures and a renewed sense of being alive. Allow passion and connectedness to resurface in your relating and savor a stronger emotional bond. Get playing!
Happy Bonding!!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™ Assignment
Create a Fun List: Sit together and brainstorm for Fun Activities that follow the definition of fun described above. Make it long. Get silly and have fun with the process. When you have a nice list, pick one making a date for when to carry it out. HAVE FUN!
Copyright (c) 2016 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 a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
There is no better way to create wonderful memories and meaning in one’s relationship than with rituals. Rituals are a special way to show love, appreciation and importance for the partners throughout time in the life of the relationship.
Relationships are made up of interactions between two partners which can be negative or positive. Their repetition provide the overall feel of the relationship. Rituals collaborate with this process.
Couple rituals play a central role in giving color, substance, and style to the relationship and mark off one couple from another, giving each a special character. They make a major contribution to the stability and continuity of the life of the relationship. They assist in creating and maintaining a couple’s identity (unique values, standards, role prescription, and perceptions).
Rituals encapsulate the essence of who partners are within their relationship through the reenactment of specified behaviors. This is a tool that can help change that overall feeling and enhance the meaning of the relationship and its satisfaction quotient.
There are specific characteristics to positive couple rituals. They are symbolic, consistent, respectful and meaningful. They have a sense of specialness and importance. They provide a sense of “weness” and organize partners’ behaviors. Partners feel a void when they are skipped or absent.
Rituals can be creative and exclusive to celebrate anniversaries of events and holidays, or repetitive woven into our routines. There are actually three categories of rituals:
1) Celebrations. These specific to the couple such as engagements, weddings, anniversaries and Valentine’s Day; and family celebrations in which couples partake. Family celebrations can be religious holidays such as Christmas, Easter, The Passover Seder or secular holiday observances such as Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, or the Fourth of July, within the American culture anyway.
2) Traditions. These are less culture-specific and more idiosyncratic to the couple and their family and recur with regularity. These might include: Summer vacations, dates, birthdays, parties of various kinds, special meals.
3) Ritualized routines. These are the ones most frequently enacted and the ones least consciously planed. To this category belong rituals such as a dinnertime, bedtime routines, leisure time activities on weekends or evenings, everyday greetings and good-byes, contact during the day, ways of staying current, etc. These interactions help to define partners’ roles and responsibilities and are a way of organizing daily interactions.
When rituals play out over time their richness reaffirm symbolism of values, affects, and perspectives hence their power to be conduits of change.
Which couple rituals in your relationship capture the essence of who you are as partners in your relationship? Which rituals promote positive feelings in your relationship? Which rituals promote meaningful and satisfying interactions? Which rituals allow your relating to create the relationship you want?
Use Positive Couple Rituals to change and enhance your relationship today!
Happy Ritualizing!!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™ Assignment
Create robust rituals to celebrate your coupleness. Revisit your rituals and see which ones you want to do away with, which ones you want to keep and why, and which ones need tweaking. Make sure your rituals help you create your relationship vision.
Copyright (c) 2016 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 a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
We are energy. We look like solid entities in our human form only because of our limited human faculties. We are energetic beings with vibrational frequencies. Imagine us as energy waves, reaching further than apparent by the illusion of our human form. We are all interconnected… We all feel and impact each other… It is our human duty to clean our energy, to make sure we raise our vibrational frequency.
The higher the frequency the closer we are in our Being to our Authentic Self (Soul). The higher the frequency the better we feel and the better we Love…
This might be a foreign concept to some of you. If this is the case for you, I ask that you stay open minded and keep reading from a place of curiosity.
Ok, so how do we raise our vibrational frequency? It is actually much easier than it sounds! First, you need to assess what kind of energy you have in the moment.
If you are feeling down, blue, sad, hopeless, powerless, scared (fear), insecure, guilty, unworthy, worried, discouraged, disappointed, angry, frustrated, overwhelmed and the like, then you know your frequency is very low – what I usually call “dirty”. This is not in alignment with your Authentic, Loving, Self.
It is your responsibility to make yourself feel better. You DO have control over how you feel. At any moment in time, you can make a conscious decision to change your mood and emotions. This does not mean you are living in la la land or that you are being delusional.
This means you are in charge of your Self! Stopping your negative and limiting script, changing your dirty lens and owning your self, and choosing what you focus on and what pictures you put in your mind are ways of immediately changing how you feel. Go back to prior issues for a refresher on these if needed.
Sometimes it is a little challenging to take charge of our Self in this way… So, while you are getting used to this idea, getting good at taking charge of your internal world and making it work for you, there is another approach to add to your tool kit. Now this might sound really basic, but know that when applied strategically it can make a world of difference in your life and relationship.
The trick is to literally remove yourself from your immediate moment: You can stop a discussion or task and schedule it for later, and instead engage in a different activity to get your resourcefulness juices going again. These can be any proven feel good activity in your book… The key is to shift the moment, engage in an activity that makes you feel good.
When we feel good, we raise our vibrational frequency – it’s this simple! Feeling contentment, optimism, hopefulness, belief / positive expectation, freedom, enthusiasm, eagerness, passion, happiness, joy, compassion, appreciation, Love is in alignment with our Authentic Self…
The closer we get ourselves to these feelings, by whatever clean means, the closer we are to Being our Authentic Self… Please take a moment to digest and take this in. This is the moment of truth…
When we Are our Authentic Selves (Soul-ful…), have a high vibrational frequency, we create other high vibrational frequency experiences feeding a “healthy” reciprocal loop… Can you imagine hanging in this range consistently? What this means for the experiences in your life?
What this means for the type of relationship you can create, experience – immediately? It’s time to clean your energy and start enjoying the blossoms of your higher vibrational Self. Feel better, love better!
Complete the MetroRelationship ™ Assignment below to help you effortlessly implement this, make changes and immediately start experiencing the relationship you want.
Happy Cleaning!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™ Assignment
Pick 3 feel good activities, rituals, and treats to integrate into your week – book, schedule, and calendar them. Get any related materials or prepare spaces involved ahead of time. Make this a weekly ritual in and of itself!
Copyright (c) 2016 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 a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Couple relationships experiencing difficulties can be categorized into two broad styles of relating: temperamental or tenuous, and can fluctuate between these extremes. These relationships are not satisfying, and not likely to succeed – enjoy couples’ inherent synergy, as the partners are spent in their constant efforts to address the impact of their relational style.
The partners might feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the level of reactivity in the temperamental relating and/or sad and alone by the distance in the tenuous relating.
The temperamental relationship might appear chaotic, volatile, reactive, the partners are all over each other. The tenuous relationship might appear rigid, cold, boring, polite, a lot of rules are in place, the partners lead parallel lives. Some relationships might fluctuate between these or have traits of both.
Regardless of the relational style polarity the partners tend to create, one of the common denominators between the styles is their ineffective system structure. The couple system consists of two individual subsystems, the partners. How these are aligned within the couple system determines in part the effectiveness of information and energy flow between the partners required for building intimacy and connection.
When this flow is disrupted by an inappropriate systemic structure, the partners can not be their authentic selves in their interactions nor be fully alive in their relationship.
Imagine the partners as circles. In the temperamental relationship, the partners are enmeshed with one another. Their individual circles might significantly overlap one another or one might engulf the other. In the tenuous relationship the partners are disengaged where their individual circles might be very separate, might have an obstruction in between them, or are above one another.
Combination of these are possible creating more complex interactional patterns.
Imagine the couple system itself represented by a circle that contains the individual circles structure. The success of this system depends also on how the individual circles are positioned in relation to it. In some troubled couples, one or both of the individual circles might be outside the couple circle, or the couple circle is barely discernible.
In these cases, the energy is leaked out of the couple system giving the partners a double whammy to deal with – funky relational structure and views.
It makes sense then that couples would struggle… And, a little mis-alignment is probably present in most couples, not just the ones screaming for help… How can couples possibly experience and enjoy synergy!? We haven’t been taught how to do relationship health and maintenance. If anything, most of us have grown up with mediocre relational role models at best.
Not to worry, good intention and an open heart is a good beginning. Then, restructure your system to its proper healthy functional order! How?
1) Mind your interactions to see if you are doing any engulfing, owning, dismissing, rejecting or other disruptive relating with your partner. Correct any tendencies to do this.
2) Accept your partner fully – you don’t have to love everything about them or agree with everything they say and do, but try to understand, get and accept them for who they are.
3) Treat your partner as an equal and invite their authentic Self to come out and play.
4) Address gender and other roles, expectations, cultural influences and differences.
5) Cooperate with each other. Set up clear responsibilities and opportunities to shine.
6) Have functional and efficient routines for taking care of the business of life. Schedule staying current discussions.
7) Have a united front, work as a team, address any obstacles standing in between you or pulling you apart.
8) Build in couple fun and intimate time. Dialogue about what it takes for you to feel special in your relationship and how to sprinkle that into your relating.
9) Re-introduce old rituals and create new ones. Intentionally interact with one another. Regularly share what you appreciate about each other.
10) Set out to create the relationship you want with your partner. Mark your calendars with your next “Relationship Check-up Chat”.
The current state and structure of your relationship is a manifestation of your and your partner’s growth opportunity. You are co-creating exactly what you each need right now in your journey to continue to grow and heal your Selves. What a beautiful and humbling treat! Don’t let the moment pass you by, savor its richness. Appreciate the way of things.
Happy Restructuring!!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™Assignment
Discuss with your partner ways in which you can each bring more equality, respect and intention into the relationship. Share with each other one new behavior you each intend to implement to foster effective information and energy flow between you for greater connectedness and intimacy, healing and growth.
Copyright (c) 2016 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 a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT has been in the mental health profession in varying capacities for the past 20+ years. She is the Founder and Director of metrorelationship.com a psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in working with busy professional and entrepreneurial couples who are struggling getting on the same page and feeling connected. The work helps couples create a radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life by becoming a strong partnership and increasing their connection, intimacy, and fun. Emma is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Relationship Strategy™.
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