Loving more boldly.  

Imagine you are very hungry. You ask yourself what you want to eat and decide to drive down to your favorite restaurant. You arrive, sit at a table. The server asks what you would like and you pick the most delicious thing you can find. The meal is served. You eat and feel a warm satisfaction. You pay the bill and leave the restaurant, ready to enjoy the rest of your evening. 

Now imagine the same scenario but take out one of the steps because you never learned how to do it. What if no one had ever helped you learn how to drive? What if no one had ever gone with you to eat at various places so you could learn what types of foods you enjoy? What if the idea of interacting with strangers, even kind restaurant staff, filled you with an anxiety so big that it was easier to just heat up a can of soup at home instead of taking that risk? What if you got all the way to the table of the restaurant but then never flagged down the server and ordered the food? Would they be able to serve you a tasty meal? 

I imagine that most of you reading this have completed the above challenge many times over. Most of you are probably so talented at this that you don’t even register these steps as a skillset. Relationships with other people also require a diverse set of skills. Some of them you certainly already have, but some of them are probably still mysterious. Personally, I continue to learn new relational skills all the time, and I plan to keep doing this for the rest of my life. Relationships are complex enough that I can make that commitment lifelong. All the same, once we establish a baseline of skills to help us relate to others, the improvements in our relationships can be astonishing! 

The thing is, we need help in order to develop relational skills. By definition, they need to be developed with other people. So many people struggle on their own out of a fear of asking for that help. I would love for that to change because we can get so much more done when we work together, and it’s a lot more enjoyable too. 

Couples coaching is some of the most exciting work that I do because it combines all of my disciplines and talents into one practice: peace work, conflict transformation, sex education, developmental psychology, emotional intelligence, and relationship coaching. During my yearlong training in sex and relationship coaching with the Somatica Institute, I was able to hone my style and learn cutting-edge coaching models and techniques that can be tailor-made to adapt to a huge number of different relationship challenges. 

In my work with couples, I help people build essential relational skills to empower them to move gracefully through the inevitable conflicts of sharing life with others. Many of the basic skills needed for a happy relationship are similar to the ones above in our restaurant fantasy: the ability to check in with yourself and make decisions, knowing what you need and want, believing your desires are ok, knowing how to take action to get your needs met, patience with the people you rely on, asking for what you want, recognizing when you’ve succeeded at meeting a goal and can move on. 

Everyone is at varying degrees of confidence with these simple skills and capacities. Some of us grew up with such neglect and detachment from our bodies that it’s hard to even recognize when we’re hungry in the first place. And others of us are so resourced that we buy an extra meal and hand it to someone in need on the walk back to the car. My goal for all of my clients is to have the same level of confidence and faith in creating their ideal relationships as they do with successfully ordering dinner.