Notes From a Relationship Coach
​(Big ideas in a small email)

“What is true intimacy but an ability to hold onto myself while I’m with you?”

–Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity​

I grew up thinking I needed to suffer, sacrifice, and shrink to earn a seat in my family – like that was literally the price of connection. I figured grin and bear it was just what I had to do to “make it work.”

And, unfortunately, I carried that idea into all my adult relationships.

With decades of personal and professional experience, I’m here to report that all the things people do to “make it work” are most often precisely what make a relationship NOT work.

Control, accommodate, over-function, anticipate, avoid, etc.

A relationship can survive for decades on self-abandonment. But that doesn’t mean the relationship is working… it means the self-abandonment is working.

Big difference there.

People employ “make it work” strategies for one of two reasons:

1. We partner with someone who can’t meet us halfway, so we pick up their slack, tip-toe around their wounds, and bend over backwards to meet them where they are.
2. We don’t even ask or allow them to meet us halfway because we’ve already assumed it’s our job to carry the extra weight.

In either case, we are managing a relationship, rather than fully showing up in it. And those managerial tasks are not only exhausting for everyone involved, they’re unsustainable. Oh yeah, and they don’t increase actual intimacy. At all.

Journal Prompt:

•What tasks or roles do you perform to “stay together” with someone?
•Where did you learn to do that?
•What are you afraid would happen if you stopped?

If you answer those questions by replying to this email, I bet you it would benefit both of us.

And I do love me a win/win situation.

*This email contains Amazon affiliate links to the books mentioned.

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