Safe Connections Blog
| A Different Response Take a moment to think about one specific thing you wanted and didn't get from your partner today. Was it a hug? Extended eye-contact with no digital devices magnetizing your partner's attention? The words, "Thank you for doing that"? How did you react when you didn't get what you wanted? Did you dismiss your own desire? Grow irritable without realizing it? Criticize your partner out loud or internally? Be honest with yourself about your reaction. Now imagine some way you might respond in this situation that would be different and more conscious. Could you close your eyes, take a breath, and recognize the hurt you feel? Could you ask respectfully for what you need, e.g. "I really want a hug from you"? Could you try to share how you're feeling with tenderness and honesty? The next time you're in this situation, try choosing the less comfortable response over your usual reaction. Be curious about what happens. |
| Your Relational Champion,
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| Hugs are healing. In one fell swoop, they equalize power struggles, level the playing field and awaken our softness and vulnerability within the container of trusted arms. Hugging is an action between two people where the arrows of giving and receiving go both ways, instantaneously changing our brain chemistry, soothing us, and shifting our mindset from one of scarcity and isolation to one of gratitude and connection. For one week, see if you can hug your partner every time you meet. You can either let them know you'd like to try weaving this active form of touch into your habitual way of greeting each other following a separation, or you can simply initiate the hug by signaling your intent-to-hug through non-verbals. You can also express your desire to hug them directly: "I really want to hug you!" If regular hugging makes you or your partner uncomfortable, you can explore the mental stories, memories, associations, or fears that surround this hugging experiment. You can brainstorm ways to tailor this Relational Growth Challenge to fit your personal growth edges, maybe agreeing with your partner on a time frame or on the amount of pressure that feels good in different circumstances. Your Relational Champion,
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| Our human brains are wired to focus on danger, threat, and things that are wrong. Much of our mental operating system is still running on ancient software: responding to a flicker of disapproval on our partner's face as if it were a python in the brush. We get locked in power struggles, snap at one another with criticisms or make repeated defensive comments. We harbor resentment long after disagreements are over. Often, we reinforce a sense of danger, threat and disconnection that doesn't truly exist... until we create it. Returning to love is a skill. It takes practice. A lot of practice. A whole lot of practice. It's a conscious choice to broaden your perspective. It's a choice we can make more naturally when we make the effort to choose it repeatedly over time. It's a momentary decision that gradually develops, if it's chosen often enough, into a habit: to notice reactivity a split second before it emerges and then, to pause. In that pause, it's possible to assess the external danger more realistically and recognize the internal brush fires we can choose to put out. We don't have to fan them into raging infernos with our judgements, assumptions and projections. Look for those small moments of conflict with your partner this week. When they come, be glad. Seriously. Without these opportunities, how would you practice? Pause, notice the story, and drop it. See if you can observe the flickering movements in the brush before reacting with fear or anger. See what happens if you practice returning to love. |
| Despite the challenges of relationships, the high divorce rate, the celebrities we see marrying in one edition of a magazine and separating in the next, we are pulled toward committed partnership, most commonly with a single, primary beloved. We seek to deeply know another and to be deeply known within a framework flexible enough to allow for change and reliable enough to create continuity. This container has the potential to establish a supportive limit, inhibiting our tendencies to avoid, escape, deny or sugarcoat unpleasant realities about ourselves, the impact of our words and actions, and the growing-pains still required for us realize our full relational potential. We are challenged to take in and understand another person's reality, feelings, experiences and needs without diminishing our own reality, feelings, experiences and needs. Often, the marital limits we push up against are invitations to look at something differently. Where is there an experience of impoverishment or scarcity in your relationship? How could you see this limit differently - as a challenge or an invitation to know your desires more intimately or to cultivate a deeper connection with your own truth? |
| What do you want? This seems like a simple enough question. Do you want to go on a European vacation or stay local? Do you want a few inches of space between you and her when you're talking or do you want her closer, holding your hand? Do you want to stay home tonight or go see a movie? In fact, really knowing what we want can be a conundrum. Almost every facet of our development as social creatures involves incorporating the benefits and costs of having, knowing and expressing our wants. We grow up with relational templates that lead us to expect or predict other's responses to our wants. These implicit expectations influence how and even if we express our wants clearly and directly. The interface between our own and our partner’s wants can be a fissure that divides or connective tissue that bonds. When we learn to express our wants directly, rather than circuitously, we are stepping into self-approval and giving our partner clear guidance about what pleases us most. Far from being selfish, understanding and approving of our own wants to the point where we can speak them with authority has the power to free our partner from the burden of trying to read our minds, make sense of our mixed signals, or guess at what will satisfy us. What do you want? Can you allow yourself to want it? What gets in the way of wanting and expressing your wants clearly and directly? |
Expectations within a marriage can be tricky, particularly as life's busyness encroaches on the time set aside for sharing and reflection. Unacknowledged expectations solidify into rigid identities and beliefs. Stopping to consider the expectations that have developed in a marriage related to roles, tasks and needs helps keep the connection honest and emotionally fertile, as well as inviting each person out of their comfort zones and into their own personal growth work.
Examining the unspoken expectations and unacknowledged needs in your partnership is worth the investment of time and other resources. You can start by letting your partner know you want to strengthen your alliance.
For this conversation to evolve productively, it helps to focus on what’s worked, what no longer works, and on what could work even better. Using reflective listening techniques or following the Imago Dialogue protocol, choose an area where you both have implicit expectations and take turns speaking about what you may have taken for granted about your partners' contributions. Areas to explore could include household tasks, emotional intimacy, finances, professional concerns, parenting, care-taking of parents or in-laws, social life, and sexual longings. You may want to choose one specific night a week and limit your talks to one topic each week as you deepen your understanding of what you'd like to adjust or re-calibrate.
By taking responsibility for your own expectations in multiple areas of your partnership, you can nurture a sense of interdependence while creating the emotional climate where changes can occur with greater fluidity and ease. Examining expectations together empowers you both to give more authentically and freely and to risk communicating vulnerably about your current desires.
Conditions abound. Some are explicit, others are implied. We read the fine print on labels, hire a lawyer to double-check contracts, agree to certain privileges in exchange for goods and services. You be the rock, I'll lend you my wings. You take out the trash, I'll wash the dishes. You provide, I'll nurture. There's nothing wrong with this. Conditions are a part of being in relationship with others. They establish boundaries and define terms we can accept as part of our own self-care.
At the same time, our need for unconditional love runs deep. We look for it in our families, our friendships, our spiritual relationships, our marriages. Glittering in the cracks and crevices of interdependence, unconditional love is the jewel that illuminates our relationships from within. We want to know that somewhere beyond the exchanges and transactions, the people that matter most to us can love us no matter what we do or don't do, in a way that celebrates our intrinsic, inalienable worthiness and humanity.
To love unconditionally means giving up our over-reliance on control. It means letting go of our sense of entitlement to guarantees. It means recognizing our addiction to self-serving outcomes. It means surrendering to the reality of an unknowable future.
Notice a moment today when your partner fails to meet an expectation or fulfill their end of a spoken or unspoken bargain. Love them, anyway.