The Blog
How do you dance with your partner? Mandy Traut, MA, LMHC
Today I am launching a cooperative sharing of blogs with Mandy Traut, MA, LMHC. Mandy opens here by musing on the question, “How do you dance with your partner?”
It’s All About Connection
Mandy Traut, M.A, LMHC
Over the years, I’ve heard many statements from couples about relationships:
“I imagined he would be my prince charming and we’d never have any problems.”
“She pushes me too much.”
“I just want to feel special – but I’m taken for granted.”
“Nothing I do is ever good enough.”
Underlying many of these statements is a need to be loved, respected, and cherished. Moreover, couples and partners of all types want to feel connected. We are intuitive beings. When there is a problem with the connection, it is felt at the core. It probably feels like life is coming to an end during these moments. The social animals that we are – it is very understandable that human beings would feel tremendous fear and anxiety when connection is threatened. So often, things get in the way to create this very reality. Finding a way back to your mate (s) becomes a primary goal.
Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally-Focused Therapy likens emotional connection between couples to a tango (retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDlciU8Z7bQ on June 17th 2013: Johnson’s keynote speech at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium)
When you are secure with your partner, you have a sense of how the movements are supposed to go, and you work in concert with each other. John Gottman, a renowned researcher on couple’s relationships, as well as the founder of the Gottman Method, believes connection is something you create on a daily basis. He states, “Real life romance is fueled by a far more humdrum approach to staying connected. It is kept alive each time you let your spouse know he or she is valued during the grind of everyday life.” (retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/GottmanInstitute on June 17, 2013).
Dr. Johnson and Dr. Gottman may come from different approaches and styles, but their message is the same: emotional connection is vital in all intimate relationships. Likewise, most people want to feel cherished in their relationships.
How do you “dance” with your partner (s)? How do you communicate appreciation for your partner’s involvement in your life? Do you communicate how you cherish, respect, and value your partner(s)? Do you feel and communicate fondness towards your partner (s)? Does your partner(s) communicate these messages to you? Many stressors, past issues, and emotional blocks get in the way of connection. Nevertheless, I challenge you to believe that you can take those baby steps each day. Let the “dance” be something to aspire towards. Still, acknowledge that connection – above money and fame – is something we are all seeking in this life.
About Mandy Traut
Mandy Traut is a sex-positive Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and a graduate of Antioch University. Her private practice, New Connections Counseling, located in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, was established to assist more self-aware clients in fostering their growth, empowerment, resiliency, and freedom of self-expression, related to alternative sexuality, gender issues, and self/relationship development. Taking on a more strength-based, client-centered approach to treatment, she serves individuals, couples and polyamorous partners. Additionally, she serves clients with physical disabilities and those that as identify as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual transgendered). Though a shortened list, she asks clients if they want to improve their relationships, better their communication, explore or expand aspects of their sexuality, overcome isolation, take accountability for emotional regulation, and/or better live their authentic truths.
Mandy present workshops on numerous sex-related and relationship-oriented topics including – polyamory, open relationships, gender-variance, sexuality and disability, as well as other sex-positive and kink-aware concerns.
Mandy can be found at: New Connections Counseling
Should Couples Stay Together After An Affair?
This question was posted recently on a Marriage & Family Therapy LinkedIn Group Page.
Briefly here are my thoughts;
Affairs lie on top of a broken communication code that kept the couples from communicating their true intimate selves. Experience as an EFT Couples therapist has proven many times over that relationships can become much more honest, vulnerable, authentic and intimate if we as couple therapists can help a couple can move through & beyond the shame and blame often associated with the revelation and aftermath of an affair. Certainly not an easy task. Books have been written!!!! “Getting past the affair,” Synder, Baucom & Gordon is a very good one.
Here is what one non participating partner wrote, after 32 sessions of EFCT, and following the establishment of emotional security that was sorely lacking in the lead up to the affair, “I don’t think we have ever known each other like we do now. We never knew each other in our first 17 years like we do now. We have come leaps and bounds.”
While absolutely not condoning affair behavior, perhaps they can be the “wake-up call” that must happen for partners to authentically awake to each other.
Joseph
Hold Me Tight Seattle
A Weekend for Couples Who Want to Strengthen and Deepen Their Relationship, Connection and Intimacy
October 18–20, 2013
The Westin Hotel, Downtown Seattle
Space is Limited. Details at: Hold Me Tight Seattle
When helping hurts
Many of the couples I work with bring in troubles produced by parenting style. Here is a very well written article that speaks to the potential effects of “over-parenting.”
from=opinion
http://wap.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/too-much-helicopter-parenting.html?from=opinion
“I felt like a real person!”
After five and a half decades of swallowing feelings of hurt, rejection, sadness, a break through moment into becoming the woman she has always known was missing was deeply felt as the wife of a couple I have been working with was able to tell her husband, “I don’t want you to fix this, I don’t need you to do anything, I just want you to listen to how I truly felt last night during our fight. I saw him look at me. In that moment I could see it in his eyes. He was really listening! In that moment I felt like a real person! He just listened. Our cycle broke. I felt so good. I felt like I could run down the trail and just jump over all those roots that I had been tripping on. I could feel the sun and wind on my face. It felt so freeing. The rest of the weekend we were so happy!”
Not only was it a breakthrough moment for the wife, it was a breakthrough moment for the husband, who like many men (and yes some women) feel like they must offer a fix, a solution, a remedy, to help their partner not feel so whatever they are feeling.
Emotion Focused Couples Therapy helps partners communicate in authentically vulnerable ways that reverses the “offensive-defensive,” “tit for tat”, he said – she said,” cycling arguments that ensnare many couples.
Shame on you! Really??
Yesterday after the Senate failed to pass background check legislation a woman in the gallery yelled, “Shame on you!” Today, President Obama, in response to this the vote to not enlarge background checks, declared “All in all, today was a pretty shameful day for Washington.”
Will using SHAME help to create the type of safety humans need to live happy lives? I think not! Shame when hurled with the force witnessed yesterday in the Senate creates nothing but a defensive stance. When shamed we are not drawn into a conversation. Shame creates distance. Shame when felt makes one want to hide, to disappear, eventually to turn and strike back. Shame when used repeatedly to control another creates such an intense inner trauma it engenders anxiety, depression and other psychological distress. Shame has the power to create more Boston Bombers, more Adam Lanza’s.
Shaming those in opposition to us will not create the dialogue this county needs to move sensibly forward on our gun violence issue!
Only when we find the inner courage and create necessary safety to vulnerably and authentically offer to others our feelings shame, fear, of feeling abandoned, betrayed, confused and with this courage and safety to be heard and validated only then will we begin to create the connecting conversations so missing in our selves, our marriages, our families, in religious polarization and in society at large.
With hope and courage,
Joseph