An Invitation to Rewire How You Do Relationships

Have you been longing for more?

The Essential Skills Relationship Bootcamp facilitated by me along with my esteemed colleagues, Victoria Easa and Juliane Taylor Shore, is fast approaching the weekend of October 24-25, and registration closes on October 15th.

We are shaping up to be a juicy bunch!

If you are longing for more "Relational Mindfulness" this workshop is full of exercises, practices and offerings that will help you look within at your own ways of showing up in relationships. It offers maps of how to shift into greater intimacy and relational well being.  

This online workshop is meant to meet you where you are, provide safety and welcome a variety of comfort levels. For some of us, going deep into our own process or making brave moves with our partners is the right next step. For others, sitting back, observing, and slowly taking in the paths to relational well-being that are being offered is a better fit. The great news is this workshop is designed for you to make it match you. With three facilitators you get to hear different voices sharing the wisdom found in the couples model created by Terry Real. With small break-out groups and facilitator support you'll be able to dive deep if you want to. With most of the concepts being presented in the big group there is a place for questions, conversation and just sitting back and absorbing. With this much safety, space and so many options for how to engage, we can accommodate a variety of learning styles.  

I started studying Relational Life Therapy roughly 4 years ago; it was one of the first models I found for relational healing that offered profound hope for shifting the most ingrained of relationship conflicts. The Relational Living practice makes explicit long standing emotional patterns of trigger and response and cultivates new opportunities to rewire how we do relationships. 

I met Vickey and Jules while training to lead this bootcamp with Terry Real in Mexico (with our spouses) on the cusp of the COVID shut- down. The six of us were drawn together, quite organically and so it made sense for the three of us to reconnect to co-facilitate Bootcamp.

We share similarities in our journeys, our own personal work, our relational work with our partners...and our commitments to our individual practices as therapists. And we each bring unique approaches and styles to our teaching, sure to energize the material and provide a variety of paths into the practice. 

Jules brings a profound understanding of interpersonal neurobiology and offers explanations for how healing happens. She'll help us understand why we do what we do, how we can see it and how we can break it down.

Vickey brings a very human ability to dive into our stories and uses herself and her lived experience to make this work incredibly relatable. 

And I bring a focus on the real and powerful possibility for relational healing when we can learn to bring consciousness, awareness, relationship mindfulness — Connectfulness® — to the moment. I focus not only on trauma and stickiness but on the true power of healing and growth.

If you have been wondering if your partner would come — if you are thinking ‘I am hoping for something more in how I feel day to day in my relationships’ — this is an invitation.  

We hope to see you among us, moving toward greater relational health together.

Click here to register.

Join Us to Activate Profound Relational Healing That Can Span Generations

If you’ve been following along with my posts to you over these last three weeks you may sense my excitement about the enormous potential for transformation that bringing in your authentic voice can have on all of your relationships: to yourself, to your partner, to your family and to your world. But once you do bring it in, it’s likely you’ll benefit from tools to navigate this new terrain and deepen your understanding of it.

What does relationship mean? 

We grow as humans through relationships. We learn about what’s safe and what’s not safe through our relationships as infants with our caregivers, as children with the people in our lives and ultimately as adults in relationship with ourselves, our partners and our own children. 

Relational healing has a lot to do with how we learn to see ourselves. The intersection of who we are and how we connect to what’s bigger than us impacts how we show up day to day, and how we understand what’s safe. All of that feeds into what triggers us. We often find ways we contort, or adapt to protect ourselves. Often there are stories we tell ourselves (usually passed down through generations) and we become triggered by how these stories affect not only ourselves but our understandings of each other in adult relationships with an intimate partner.

When we start to notice what we bring to the interpretation of the other, via our own story, and feel into where and how it triggers us in a familiar way, we begin to un-blend or disentangle from “story.” This is the moment when we can actually heal ourselves. We can notice the places where in relationship, in real time, in real life, both individually or together we can activate profound relational healing that can span generations. 

I’m thrilled to be co facilitating On Oct 24th & 25th: 10:30am-6pm (EST) a 2-day online weekend Relational Bootcamp for couples, individuals, and therapists seeking certification training in the Relational Life model.

This is an authorized presentation of Terry Real's Essential Skills Relationship Bootcamp co-facilitated by me, Rebecca Wong, Victoria Easa and Juliane Taylor Shore. We are all certified Relational Life Therapists who collectively have 40 of years of experience helping individuals and couples move out of dark times. 

To learn more and register to join us, click here. 

Speak again soon,

p.s. have you listened to my most recent podcast episode, featuring Jules, on the science behind how your relationship can help you heal?

Why Can It Be so Difficult to Ask for What We Want in Relationships?

I know that asking for what we want isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. 

Often, in our original families, we don’t really learn to share our truths; to be honest about what we feel and what we need. It’s no wonder we have trouble doing it now in our own family systems or close partnerships.

It’s not that we were taught to be untruthful. It’s just that we adapted to the silent messages that were passed along to us through our parents or care givers: 

that we were too much,

not enough, 

too loud, 

that we were too quiet,

annoying,

silly,

not good enough at something, 

not interested in the right things. 

Sometimes we were put in charge, asked to manage things we didn’t know how to, asked to process things that were too complicated, asked to step up too soon…etc. 

We may have become small in an attempt towards invisibility because it was safer or we may have become reactive in order to cope with whatever was happening because we felt threatened. That’s how we protected ourselves… 

Throughout these times, we may never have thought of these cumulative instances as overt traumas or abusive situations and yet, little by little, our needs were not being met as children. 

It’s not that our carers didn’t love us or want what was best, but sometimes just because they couldn’t see our needs and meet them, or adapt their own behavior we never learned how to acknowledge what we needed, what we really wanted and how to ask for help when needed.

In order not to rock the boat, not to bring shame on ourselves or our parents, not to disrupt, or lose whatever amount of respect or love we felt we’d secured for ourselves, we inadvertently continued, past the point of their usefulness, these assumed behaviors—and maybe we’re coming to see they don’t serve us anymore.

Sometimes we’re not even aware that we’re enacting them. 

But these adaptive coping legacies now impact our relationships with our partners and children and there’s a feeling of being stuck in a cycle of behavior that doesn’t help.

So it may be time…to make a choice. To take a very conscious step. To stake your claim on this very inconvenient truth:

that your authentic voice is now needed. 

And the voice that tells you you’re too much, so you keep quiet, or that you’re not enough, so you yell…you can talk to that voice. 

It’s not easy and yet, I must say…once you’ve done it. Wow. The shift is momentous. 

Staking your claim; talking to your old voices; seeing your Self, seeing your partner, listening… is becoming RELATIONAL instead of reactive and is a breath of fresh air for a family system.

Doing it with 3 Certified Relational Life Therapists is a safe, clear and (dare we say) fun way to commence!

If you’re ready to find out how, click here. 

Speak again soon,

p.s. stay tuned for my next podcast episode, available later this week, to learn more. 

Changing the Course of our Relationships

In my last post I mentioned strategies for changing the course of our relationships to ourselves, to our partners and to the world. 

There’s a lot of talk about compassion in relationships, and the world needs more of it, for sure.

But first I want to talk about an idea harder to digest than compassion: Contempt.

Let me begin to explain how essential an understanding of contempt is to our relationships and how it functions in them.

In our culture, we’re constantly inundated with the message that we're not enough, that we're inadequate, or could be better if only… 

This gives rise to un-healthy self-esteem, borne of a collective drive to feel good about ourselves. But it leads us into shame-spirals that pull us into a one-down feeling of inferiority or into a judgmental feeling of one-up grandiosity, superiority. Both positions are unhealthy and both hurt our relationships. 

Terry Real states over and over again that "the core energy in both, shame and grandiosity, is contempt."

Let’s unpack that for a sec… 

When contempt swings inward, we call that shame. When contempt swings outward onto those around us, we call it grandiosity. The energy itself is fundamentally the same. We may even use the same words to berate others as we use to berate ourselves. 

In his book, the New Rules of Marriage, Terry Real says,

“You know you’re in a real relationship the day you look at this person and realize they’re exquisitely designed to stick the burning spear into your eyeball. This person is going to throw me right back into the soup that I thought I was going to avoid. And that’s the good news, because that’s where the healing lies.”

Often we work our whole lives to avoid feeling pain and then we meet someone who has a unique power to trigger us! And we think that bolstering ourselves or blaming our partner is how we avoid feeling the pain. We think we’ll be better off if we escape pain and go into blame and shame…the truth is, we won’t be. 

We won’t be better off if we indulge, justify, mount a case, punish or withdraw; if we walk around huffing, puffing, yelling, finger-pointing, or turning our homes into war zones. 

We're just perpetuating and replicating the cycle of contempt. 

The practice of bringing awareness to how contempt is showing up in your relationship, and within your Self, can change everything. Life can become more manageable, and more, well, life-sized. Dynamics can change, loosen, transform. 

We all know what a life lived in fear motivates people to do on the world stage. What does fear make you do in your relationship? 

Wouldn’t it be easier to step into an honest reckoning with your deepest fears and learn how to ask for what you want? 

If you’re ready to find out how, consider joining myself and two fabulous certified relational life therapists a 2-day online weekend Relational Bootcamp for couples, individuals and also therapists training in the Relational Life model.

Speak Soon,

How do you get what you want in your relationship?

Yes, the world feels out of control.
Few of us are getting much of what we want these days. 

But let’s start with you. 

How do you get what you want in your relationship?
I ask because our relationships are NOT out of reach or out of our control. 

In fact relationships are one of the few areas we can profoundly impact day to day.

Sometimes we think we need to shut down the part of ourselves that still wants connection because there’s so much else requiring our attention. 

Or because the silence, or the arguments or the escalating discussions that hit the same familiar wall don’t seem to offer us a way forward. 

Our relationships are being tested. It’s true. Challenges to our lives, day in and day out, to our equilibriums, persist.  And unfortunately in the hardest of times it is often our relationships that seem easiest to put off dealing with. But when they’re working it’s our relationships that give us baseline comfort and empower us to meet these challenges with clarity. 

So stay tuned. 

In future posts I’ll be telling you more about a weekend of just you, or just you and your partner, and a team of three relational life therapists to guide you through every step and offer skills to make the process understandable and doable. Immediately. 

It will be a time to really unpack the habits that haven’t been working and replace them with strategies that will change the course of your relationship to yourself, to your partner and to the world.

Speak Soon,