Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new."
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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Relationships are hard.
For many of us, they have been places of profound hurt. Often times the closer we are to another person the more we see their wounds and the more they see ours. Without access to healing, many of places of our deepest wounding enact more wounds on the people we love the most. We want to love and yet we hurt and harm. Relationships are so messy. They also can be places of profound growth. Of joy and connection like nothing else. Of healing and possibility. Relationships can be places where we practice generative conflict. Relationships can be places where we practice showing up for little kid us and also practice embodying the values of big kid us. Contradictions and complexity run rampant in our relationships. How can we build bodies that can hold them and keep reaching towards practices that better serve both us and our partners? Many of us are wounded by not-so-perfectly-healthy early childhood attachments. We often replay these early attachment wounds in our adult relationships, relating from a defended stance that blocks us from experiencing true intimacy. If our partner is wounded too, this is a recipe for getting stuck in the same conflict over and over. Trauma and oppression impacts our relationships. Many of us did brilliant things to survive, and we don't know how to let go of those survival strategies even when we are offered the chance of a healthy, consent-filled connection. I am here to give you some better tools. Tools so you can love others better. And so you can also love yourself better. What if you and your partner/s could learn to...
How does it work?The first partners session we do all together with who ever is in the relationship that is needing some work.
I start partners work with an assessment done by each person in the relationship. Asking questions like: what’s working, what’s not, what do you long for and how would we know if you had that longing, can give us a blueprint to our work together and what skills you need to develop in your relationship for it to be successful. This assessment also creates an accountability document for me as your practitioner to make sure that I’m helping you develop the skills and the hold the container in the ways that all of you need the most. From there, we dive in. Sometimes all of the sessions include everyone, sometimes it makes sense to have some sessions be 1-on-1 work with me. A lot of folks come to me because they feel stuck or desperate or can’t figure out how to execute their great ideas in moments of stress, habitual patterns and nervous system activation. So we might have some conversations about the stuck places. How do you know in your body when you are approaching a moment of nervous system activation with your partner/s? In what ways do your various attachment styes impact your relationship or your habits with your partner/s? I make sure that I balance talking with practices that will help you change up what isn’t working. Sometimes it will become clear that one or more of the people in the relationship could benefit from longer-term individual work, and I support them in accessing that. Somatic work is deeply relational and so in some ways, in partners work, you already arrive with your practice partner/s, and I get to tell you what I see and how you might change your practices to get closer to what you long for. My sessions are generally emergent and largely guided by you. If it works for all of you, I love giving homework because it gives you scaffolding to develop the muscle memory that new patterns require and also the ability to take what you are learning directly into your life. |
