Finding Your Voice for Deeper Connection in Relationship

If you're afraid to ask your partner to do/not do certain things because you think you'll come across as mean, insensitive, inconsiderate, imposing (not nice)…

It can be because you weren't treated ‘nicely’ as a child, so now you're extra-sensitive to not being like the people who didn’t treat you well: so you need to be nice (or be seen as a good person).

This isn't inherently bad, unless it prevents you from expressing yourself directly and make it hard to form a true intimate connection with another person.

What needs to be done is to bring kindness and loving attention to your wounded inner child, while staying very present to your body’s experience of sensations, both of which will make you less hyper-focused on being nice.

This brings healing to your past hurts and improves your communication, and your relationship.

Let's talk about how to do it…

First, you need to create a safe space for your emotions to surface, and be acknowledged and felt. By learning to pay attention to the physical sensations that arise in your body from a place of being calm, centered and curious, you create this.

Over time, this practice can help you gradually release unresolved traumas and trapped emotional energy stored in your body by creating the right conditions for it to move through you and be complete.

This provides a sense of relief and liberation, allowing you to move beyond the grip of the past, and empowering you to respond to current situations with greater awareness and authenticity, rather than reacting from unresolved past experiences.

That isn’t everything. You also can do potent healing work when specific past memories come up from earlier in life. You can take the opportunity to tend to the younger version of yourself that experienced the emotional neglect or pain, with the emotionally attuned loving kindness and safety it didn’t receive. You reparent yourself and provide a safe and loving environment for your inner child to express its needs and emotions.

You reparent yourself by giving the understanding and validation that was lacking during your formative years. You find out what that part needed and didn't get, so you can provide it.

This can change your relationship to the past and create more of a sense of inner peace and security from deep within, as well as self-compassion.

In the context of relationships, over time this translates as your focus moving from worrying about the other’s perception of you (over focus on them), to caring for yourself in a loving way (balanced focus includes self).

The combined effect of these practices leads to profound personal growth and transformation.

As you become more attuned to your body’s messages while also nurturing your inner child, you develop a deeper understanding of your emotional needs and boundaries.

This heightened self-awareness combined with feeling more secure in yourself allows you to communicate your feelings and desires more clearly and from vulnerability.

This authentic way of relating then fosters more mutually supportive dynamics in all your interactions in your primary relationship / or you begin to attract partners who appreciate and value the more integrated version of you that you show up with.

Helping you understand and move through this type of transformative process is what my 3-month 1-on-1 program is all about.

We practice feeling into the body over and over again, which instills this empowering practice as a habit that you can use for the rest of your life. We also do the imaginal reparenting work for the past pain that arises in the context of having to be nice now / feeling not nice when you ask for things!

To ensure that you are in your resilience and capacity while you move through the healing and growth processes I described in this post, I set the pace and depth that we go in our sessions to match where you’re at, at any given time.

This actually helps you become even more resilient and capable in the process.

That is important because when we don’t honor our natural pace because we’re ambitious for results, or we’re just intellectualizing our feelings and needs, and not feeling them, we can accidentally deepen the trauma and reinforce the negative patterns, and not get results. There’s some wisdom in slowing down to speed up.

Aside from learning how to feel your body and heal past pain, we also work on communication so that you are well equipped to take your gains and bring them effectively into your relationship or to practice them while dating to bring a new partner in from a newly integrated place.

This program and all the work we do together over 12 weeks is aimed to help caring and attentive people improve their relationships.

If interested in this program, feel free to email me and we’ll determine if it’s a good fit.