Last weekend my partner and I drove out to the Oregon coast for a couple's weekend we'd been wanting for months.

We'd talked ahead of time about wanting some physical intimacy, the kind you have to plan for when your life is full.

Watching the sunset, held in Ari's arms, I mentioned that I no longer enjoyed the sensation of psychedelics in my body anymore, that it felt like too much.

Then I said the sentence that almost changed the whole evening: "It's the same reason I don't like sex."

Ari spun me around. "You don't like sex?!"

He knows my history with sexual aversion, knows I've spent years exploring pleasure even while wrestling with it.

So I explained, it's not that I don't like sex. It's that I don't like being flooded with that much intensity anymore.

Sex can be wonderful and still be too much, even when it's pleasurable.

That distinction, between not wanting something and not wanting to be overwhelmed by it, is part of what I teach when I work with aversion. We work with the body.

The sex therapy field tends to treat aversion as intractable, something you manage rather than shift.
But my experience, personal and clinical, says otherwise.

​My approach runs counter to most of what's out there: instead of pushing through the flood, I teach you how to find the edge of your own capacity and work right at it, so intensity becomes something you can meet instead of something that drowns you.

If any part of this weekend's story sounds familiar, I built the course to help:​

From Avoidance to Closeness: A Compassionate Journey.

It's the deepest version of what I know about working with aversion from the inside, with discounted coaching support from me available.

​Start the course →
​
And, if you want to test the waters first, there's a free webinar and a short PDF guide below.

​Free 2020 Webinar on Sexual Aversion​
​10 Steps to Work With Avoidance on Your Own — $7 PDF
​
Back to last weekend.
​
Ari and I did find our way back to each other that night, in a beautiful way that had nothing to do with pushing through anything. Just meeting where we actually were.

When I was 28, I purchased a bottle of supplements in the food coop that promised to increase my libido. 

Why did I need that? Because I was feeling sexually averse, and thought I was a problem to be fixed. 
Sound familiar? 

A client of mine once told me she'd tried everything.
Lingerie. A weekend away. A book that promised to reignite her libido in thirty days. None of it worked, and by the time she sat across from me she'd started to believe the problem was some deficiency in her, a missing gear that other women had and she didn't.

What she'd actually built, over years of trying to force her way past a locked door, was a nervous system that associated sex with failure on top of whatever had closed the door in the first place.

So let me answer the question plainly before we go further.

Healing sexual aversion is not a technique you apply to your body from the outside. It's a slow return of trust between you and a nervous system that learned, for good reason, to protect you by shutting the door. The work is not making yourself want sex. The work is teaching your body that wanting is safe again.

Are you willing to go at the speed of your body, even when you're afraid it may never change? 

Start With Taking the Pressure Off, Not Adding More

Almost every strategy marketed to people with low or averse desire is really a pressure strategy in disguise. Schedule it. Set the mood. Just get started and your body will catch up. These approaches assume the problem is motivation, when the problem is often a threat response that predates the relationship you're in now.

Pressure is the language your body already speaks fluently, and not in a good way. It's usually what taught the aversion in the first place, whether that pressure came from duty sex, religious shame, an assault that never got named as one, or years of your no being ignored or negotiated away. Adding more pressure, even loving pressure, even well-meaning pressure from a partner who just misses you, confirms the old story instead of writing a new one.

The first real move is counterintuitive: take everything off the table. No goal of sex, not tonight, not this month. Just permission to notice what's happening in your body without an agenda attached to the noticing.

Learn to Name What's Happening

When aversion shows up, the instinct is either to push through it silently or collapse into shame about having it at all. Neither one helps. A third option exists: naming it. Silently, or out loud if you're alone, you say something like, this is aversion, my body is protecting me.

That sentence really works. It interrupts the shame spiral before it gathers speed, and it turns the experience into something you can watch instead of something that swallows you. You're not fixing anything in that moment. You're just building the muscle of relating to your own body with curiosity instead of contempt.

Rebuild Trust in Tiny, Boring Increments

Nervous systems don't heal through insight alone. They heal through repeated experience of safety, in doses small enough that the body doesn't override them with fear.

That might look like noticing the feeling of your feet on the floor for ten seconds. A hand resting on your own sternum for three breaths. Sitting near a partner with no expectation of where it leads. These sound almost too small to matter, and that's exactly the point. A body that has learned closeness equals danger needs proof in small, repeatable doses, not one dramatic breakthrough.

Self-consent belongs here too. Before your body will trust someone else with it, it needs to trust that you'll listen to it yourself. That means practicing yes and no in places that have nothing to do with sex. Declining a hug. Saying yes to a cup of tea you actually want. Each small honored boundary is evidence your nervous system logs, even when you're not consciously tracking it.

Widen What Counts as Intimacy

Most of us are working from a narrow definition of sex, usually the one specific act everyone's fear has attached itself to. Widening that definition takes pressure off the loaded thing and lets closeness happen in forms your body can actually tolerate right now: side by side silence, a hand on your back for a minute, dancing badly in the kitchen, eye contact that lasts a beat longer than usual.

This isn't a consolation prize for people who can't do the real thing. It's often how desire finds its way back, sideways, through a door nobody was watching.

When to Get Support

Some of this you can do alone, tracking your own patterns, practicing naming, taking pressure off yourself in daily life. Some of it goes faster and safer with a somatic therapist, sex therapist, or coach trained specifically in aversion, especially if the root includes trauma your body hasn't fully metabolized. There's no failure in needing a witness for this. Shame grows in isolation and starts to lose its grip the moment you let someone else can see you clearly and still stay.
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Healing here isn't a straight line and it isn't fast. It's closer to teaching a body that flinched for good reason that it's allowed, eventually, on its own timeline, to stop flinching.

Lorna told me that she flinches when he reaches for her. It's not super dramatic, just a small pull back, her shoulder that turns a half inch away from his hand, gone almost as fast as it arrives. He notices. He always notices. He rolls over and says nothing, and in the dark she lies there hating her own skin for doing what it just did.

This is the moment most people never talk about.

Aversion is not a big rupture, it's not like an affair. Just a shoulder turning away from a hand that used to be welcome, and the silence that follows.

I've sat across from dozens of couples where this is the real story underneath the story they came in with. They say they're fighting about money, about parenting, about who does the dishes. Underneath, someone's body has stopped saying yes, and neither of them knows what to do with that.

I used to treat sexual aversion as an individual issue, but found I got nowhere. People wanted to want sex. But they just didn't. 

Aversion Is Not a Character Flaw

Sexual aversion gets treated like a personality problem. Frigid. Uptight. Just not that into it anymore. Those words carry judgment, and judgment is exactly the wrong tool for what's actually happening.

The things is that aversion is your nervous system doing its job.

It is protection, not rejection.

Somewhere along the way, sex got linked to danger, obligation, disgust, or loss of self, and the body learned to close the door before anyone could walk through it uninvited.

Maybe it was duty sex for years. Maybe it was an experience that never got named as assault because it didn't look like the movies. Maybe it was a religious upbringing that taught the body was shameful before it ever had the chance to be curious. Maybe nobody did anything wrong at all, and the body still learned that closeness is overwhelming.

Your nervous system doesn't consult you before it makes these decisions. It acts first, the way a hand pulls back from a stove before the brain has finished registering heat. That reflex kept you safe once. The trouble is it doesn't know the danger has passed, so it keeps firing at a partner who has never hurt you, in a bed that has never been unsafe.

Why Willpower Doesn't Work Here

Most people try to fix aversion the way they'd fix a bad habit. Push through it. Schedule sex and hope desire shows up to meet the appointment. Tell yourself you're being unreasonable and force your way past the resistance.

I want to be blunt about why this fails. Pressure is the exact signal that taught your body to shut down in the first place. Adding more pressure on top of an already frightened nervous system is like yelling louder at someone who's already flinching. It doesn't open anything. It confirms the original story, which is that your no doesn't matter and your body is an obstacle to someone else's satisfaction.

Healing moves in the opposite direction. It starts with taking the pressure off entirely, which feels counterintuitive to almost everyone who tries it, especially the partner who's terrified the relationship is dying. But a body that has permission to say no is the only kind of body that can eventually, honestly, say yes.

What Actually Helps

Real work with aversion happens in layers, and none of them are fast.

Naming it.
Instead of pretending the flinch didn't happen or spiraling into shame about it, you learn to say, silently or out loud, this is aversion, my body is protecting me. That sentence does something small and enormous. It stops the shame story mid-sentence and turns the experience into something you can observe rather than something that swallows you whole.

Tracking your nervous system.
Aversion usually shows up as either shutdown or panic, numbness or a hard no that arrives before thought. Learning to notice which state you're in, and how far outside your window of tolerance you've drifted, gives you information instead of just overwhelm.

Rebuilding self-consent.
Before you can trust yourself with someone else, you have to trust yourself. That means practicing yes and no in low-stakes places first, a cup of tea, a hug, a plan for Saturday, until your body believes that when it says 'no', you will actually listen.

Redefining intimacy.

Sex is not one narrow thing. Closeness can be a hand on a chest for three breaths, side by side silence, dancing in the kitchen, eye contact that lasts a beat longer than usual. Widening the definition takes the pressure off the one act that's become loaded with everyone's fear.

None of this is about becoming someone who wants sex on command. It's about a body that has been closed for a long time slowly deciding it might be safe to open, on its own timeline, with its own consent intact.

If You're the Partner Reading This
If you're the one lying awake after the flinch, I want you to hear something clearly. Your partner's aversion is very rarely about you specifically, even when it feels aimed directly at your chest. It's older than your relationship. It has its own history, and that history is not your fault to fix or your failure to have caused.

What you can do is stop treating their no as a referendum on your worth, and start treating it as data about their nervous system. That shift alone changes what's possible between you. The posts that follow this one go deeper into what to do from your seat in this, because the couple's healing and the individual's healing are not the same project, even though they live in the same bed.
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Aversion is not the end of your sex life or your marriage. It's a closed door with a story behind it. Most closed doors, given enough safety and enough time, are willing to be knocked on.

Dr. Pavini Moray, PhD, is a somatic coach and Relational Life Therapy practitioner who has worked with couples in crisis since 2012. Their practice focuses on sexual aversion, nervous system healing, and rebuilding intimacy after shutdown, betrayal, or years of duty sex, working with individuals and couples who want their bodies back on their own terms. They are the author of How to Hold Power and Tending the Bones, and they teach From Avoidance to Closeness, a guided course for people working through sexual aversion at their own pace.
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If sexual aversion is affecting your relationship and you're ready for support, you can explore "Overcoming Avoidance" the book about my approach that I've written or book a free clarity call to talk through what's actually happening in your body and what might help.

Okay, last time I wrote about thought stopping as a simple practice to increase self-esteem. You stop being so mean to yourself, and voila! Your self-esteem gets a lot better.
​If you missed it, you can read it here.​
Now I want to write about three reasons positive self-esteem matters for a happy relationship.Let me tell you a story. It's a personal one this time, no longer tender, but still hard to write about.
Back in the day, my self-esteem was pretty shit. In my first marriage, the person I was in relationship with was okay 90% of the time, but when triggered, he got mean, really mean.
I had started to explore feeling like a sexual being inside myself, and I bought a pair of Fluevog boots. They were sexy-sleek, wayyy outside of my comfort zone. But I wanted to be the person who could wear those boots, and so I had to wear those boots.
The first time I was set to wear them, my plan was to go to a matinee movie by myself. It was a very rare treat, as the parent of a baby and a toddler. Any personal time was sacred, and I was going to take myself on a date.
He came home in the midst of me getting ready, saw me in the boots. Instead of appreciating, he told me I looked like a slut, and he didn't mean it in a good way.
My heart felt crushed. I still wore the boots. I still went to the movie, but the joy was gone.
Then, my self-esteem wasn't good enough to stand up for myself, to hand him back the shame he directed at me. I didn't know how to set boundaries, how to not absorb someone else's yuck. It hurt, but it was years until I realized how inappropriate that comment and the energy behind it were.
Now, I hold myself in warm positive regard.
No one gets to project their negativity on me, what I wear, or my choices and stay in my life. I deserve better than that, and I am the one who makes sure I get it. The rise in my self-esteem means that I am in cherishing relationships, full stop.
Your self-esteem impacts your relationships in major ways.

1. It sets your baseline for what you'll accept.​
   People with solid self-esteem expect to be treated well, so they naturally hold higher standards for respect, honesty, and effort from a partner. Low self-esteem often makes poor treatment feel familiar or even deserved, which weakens relational health.
2. It reduces reactivity and defensiveness.​
   When you feel secure in your own worth, a partner's criticism, bad mood, or need for space doesn't automatically read as a threat to your identity. (Read more about the crucial relationship principle I call 'Allowability of Feeling' here). You can hear feedback, disagree, or give them room to have their own experience without collapsing into anxiety or lashing out. When you are steady like that, intimacy is possible. It means you can stay more grounded during normal relational conflict and not turn your partner into your enemy.
3. It frees you from needing your partner to complete you.​
   Self-esteem means your sense of value isn't outsourced to someone else's approval. That takes a huge amount of pressure off the relationship, since your partner isn't responsible for managing your emotional state or constantly reassuring you. Two people who each feel whole on their own tend to choose each other from desire rather than desperation or crippling need. It becomes a delight to share life rather than an obligation.

Happy, healthy relationships depend on two people who value themselves, who esteem their own worth, and who have boundaries for what comes in.
If any part of this story sounded familiar, I'd love to talk with you. Book a clarity call and let's figure out what's next for you and your relationship.
Book a free clarity call

Lak is in my office giving feedback to his partner, Noran. 

"I'm really mad at you. When we went to my parents house last week, you were just on your phone and didn't engage at all. I had to explain to my folks that you weren't upset with them." 

Noran fires back, "Well, you are always annoyed with me for something, so nothing new here." 

Instead of listening and receiving the feedback, Noran got defensive and deflected responsibility. Lan gave him a chance to be awesome,  and he blew it. 

So what would awesome look like in this case? 

Noran allowing Lak to be angry. 

It might sound like, "I hear you are mad at me." 

In my work with couples, I am frequently teaching them to allow the other to feel what they feel. "Allowability of Feeling" is the name of the skill. 

It's an important relational concept; just allowing someone to feel what they feel.

This may seem obvious, but notice what happens the next time someone (friend, partner, co-worker) brings you a feeling they are having, about you!

When someone tells you that they are frustrated with your behavior, how do you handle it? Do you make them wrong for feeling the way they feel, even if it's only in your head?

In working with hundreds of couples, I noticed how hard it is to let each other feel what we feel about the other.

We wish that the person did not feel the way they feel: frustrated, angry, disappointed, betrayed.

We immediately jump to justify our own behavior, or defend our intentions.

Ironically, the quickest way for feelings to move through is for them to receive acknowledgment.

Next time your partner or friend comes to you to let you know how pissed off they are at you for doing XYZ, instead of reacting, try this.

Look at them, take a breath, and say, "You are pissed off at me for doing XYZ," and then notice what happens.

You have just allowed them to feel the way they are feeling.

This is a pattern interrupt for most of us.

Instead of getting pushback when we share our feeling, we get met with validation and acknowledgment. It's a game-changer. It is so healing when someone gives us permission to feel what we feel, without trying to manage, control, shame, or change it!

You can curate an open-heartedness when you are listening. You are just trying to receive the other person and all their complexity. You are trying not to take whatever they're sharing personally. You are not thinking about how you will respond. You are taking in what they are saying, so that you can reflect and summarize what you hear them saying.

You don't have to expect your brain to get it all.

Somebody shares something that's important to them. You reply with, "Okay, cool. This is what I hear you saying. Am I getting it? What am I missing?"

In asking that question, you are allowing the person to feel exactly what they are feeling without challenge.

You are also getting the chance to understand more, and to allow your own empathy to come online.

Allowability of Feeling goes for you too.

Allowing yourself to feel what you feel is a counter-intuitive, yet deeply effective way to be with impact.
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You are telling yourself, "I feel this way right now," and you trust that that will not always be true.

That these feelings will shift and change. Your first reaction is not your final answer.

Because feelings aren't facts.

They are just an experience in the body, one you can learn to make space for, and be with in both loving and curious ways.

You don't need to justify how you feel, and neither does your partner. You also don't have to agree with them. 

Feelings point to what needs your attention.

Allowing yourself and others to simply feel feelings, without fixing, taking on, or pushing back, is a radical act of relationality.

​I was in session with a couple this morning, and the topic of self-esteem came up. One of them wondered what would happen if their self-esteem was better, more loving towards themself. Would it make a difference in their relationship?

My answer is an unequivocal yes.

Now, we all know we are "supposed to" love ourselves, and do self-care. But rarely does that extend to how we treat ourselves in our heads.

In the session today, I asked each of them to tell me the recurrent mean things they say to themselves.

I wrote down exactly what I heard: "You're lazy. You're a bad parent. You have no value at work."

They both told me that the strategy is to bully themselves into doing better.

But when I read back their lists, and asked what they would do if someone said those things to their kid, they quickly rose to the defense. "I'd put a stop to it immediately, and kick that person out of my house."

But in our internal house, we let the bully rampage on, thinking it is some kind of "motivation." Masochism, more like!

Like most of us, being mean to myself used to feel normal.

Early in my healing journey, I realized I didn't want to be complicit any longer with the external messages I'd internalized about my goodness as a human.

I didn't want to pile on with the haters. I didn't want to abuse myself from the inside out anymore.

So I decided to stop. But, of course, it is never that easy.

In my case, I did a practice, using a CBT technique called "thought stopping."

Here's exactly what I did to increase my self-esteem, step by step.

First, I noticed was being internally mean.

Second, I set a boundary from my wise adult: "No, I'm not talking to myself like that."

Third, I offered a positive affirmation or redirect. "I am trying to love myself," or simply, "I love you."

I used a physical anchor point, a green jade heart I wore around my neck and never removed. Whenever I noticed negative self-talk, I'd grab the heart, and run through the process.

When I started, I had no idea how long it would take.

If I tell you I did this multiple times a day for 18 months, that might sound long!

But you know what?

After a lifetime of being harsh with myself, it's done.

I almost never say anything mean to myself now.

And if I do, I immediately catch it, and inquire more deeply into what that mean part might be needing.

Over the course of the practice, the negative self-talk lessened, and lessened more.

Truly, this is the practice (out of all the thousands I've done) that changed my entire life so positively.

It took a while, yes, because I'd been practicing the mean voice for 40 years.

Here's what I learned:
Developing a loving relationship with yourself doesn't come from spa days and long baths.

It comes from doing the hard healing work of confronting your inner bully with love and firm boundaries.

You do NOT need to be complicit in abuse, and your wise adult is never mean.

Also, the 'motivation' piece is total crap. It's a lie.

I get way more done when I honor and appreciate myself, and tend to my needs, than when I beat myself up.

By the end of the session, both of my clients had practiced thought stopping by interrupting the negative message. They each had a new positive message they created.

How about you? 

How are you talking to yourself in your head?

Give thought stopping a try right now.

Think of a common mean thing you tell yourself, for the sake of being 'better.'
Interrupt it, set a boundary, and offer a positive message.

Now comment below and tell me what happened.

How do you tell your partner what you are really feeling, when you know it's probably going to hurt them, and maybe create conflict?

This comes up for me all the time in my own partnership, and it comes up for my clients too. Honesty in relationships is one of the trickiest skills to build, and most of us were never taught how.

Here's an example. Let's say you feel really frustrated whenever your partner teases you in front of other people. And they have social anxiety, so you have compassion for why they act differently in company, because of their own internal experience.

You're stuck between honesty and protecting them. So what do you do?

Three Ways People Try to Handle Relationship Honesty (And Why They Backfire)

1. Say what's true, and let the chips fall where they may.
This looks like telling your partner you feel hurt when they tease you, even though you know it's probably going to trigger their "getting it wrong" feeling. Then you have to deal with their reaction to your feelings, on top of your own.

2. Soften the blow with watered-down language.
This might sound like, "I love it when you give me compliments around other people, it's so nice." But you haven't said the true thing. Next time company is around, the same thing happens again, and you're more resentful than before.

3. Stuff your feelings so you don't impact your partner right now, and let it come out later, during conflict, at 10x volume.
You say nothing in the moment. Then, the next time you're fighting about something else entirely, it comes out anyway: "And you always hurt my feelings whenever we're around other people!"

Why Navigating Feelings in a Relationship Is So Hard

Learning to navigate feelings in relationship is one of the hardest parts of partnership, and it comes down to three skills most of us never learned:

• How to respect your own experience
• How to share skillfully, without derailing the conversation
• How to receive your partner's feelings about your actions, without collapsing or defending

I don't have a miracle cure for this. But I am deeply committed to relationships built on radical honesty, and it's what I teach, and what I practice, in my own partnership and in my couples work.

What Happens When You Don't Say the True Thing

If you aren't saying what's true for you, if you're watering it down or stuffing it, it isn't sustainable long-term. The translation is almost always the same: resentment, unhappiness, or eventually, breaking up.

This is avoidable. But it takes real work: skills learning, personal exploration, and healing the parts of you that learned honesty was dangerous in the first place.

A Small Practice to Start With

So here's my question to you: how can you be 2% more honest with your partner this week?

FAQ: Honesty in Relationships

Why is it so hard to be honest with my partner?
Most people were never taught how to share difficult feelings skillfully. Without that skill, honesty tends to swing between two extremes: blunt honesty that creates conflict, or softened honesty that breeds resentment.

What happens if I keep avoiding hard conversations with my partner?
Feelings that get stuffed instead of shared don't disappear. They tend to resurface later, often during an unrelated conflict, at a much higher intensity than the original feeling ever was.
​
Is radical honesty the same as saying whatever you feel?
No. Radical honesty means telling the truth while also learning to share it skillfully, so the conversation doesn't derail, and both people can stay in it together.

Ready to be 2% more honest this week, and every week after? Start here.

Tal and Eliza are dear clients (names are changed.)

When we worked together initially several years ago, we completed a focused six-month container that ended in triumph: one of them got sober, and they decided to have a baby!

I'd kept up with them over the years through monthly maintenance sessions, and the work had stuck. However, I'd begun to notice a lackluster heaviness creeping back in when we spoke.

Under-resourced, exhausted, the grind of early parenting had erased their feeling of being a team. They were back in some unhealthy patterns, and both of them were miserable.

It didn't exacly look like they were in crisis, but they kinda were. They were far away from each other, and I was worried what the distance meant for the family they were building.

So I told them the truth: weekly sessions were too slow for what they needed. What would help was uninterrupted time to go deep. They needed quick and effective intervention, so I offered a three-day couple's intensive.

They got childcare (easier for three days than weekly sessions) and booked a cabin in the woods.

On day one of the intensive, they both expressed fear and despair. They loved each other, but was it too late to turn their marriage around?

I had high hopes things could get better.

During those three days, we did a lot of heavy lifting.

We named the troublesome patterns with honesty. We did early trauma work from their childhoods. They learned to set boundaries with each other in ways that felt joyful after so much heaviness.

There was a hard, unflinching conversation about what addiction had done to their family system, even after sobriety. There were a lots of tears that day. We acknowledged how each of their inner adaptive children were running (and destroying) their marriage without either of them fully realizing it. There was a grief and forgiveness ritual toward the end, laying some of the oldest ghosts to rest.

By the close of the third day, things felt lighter.

I don't mean that the work was finished, because in a relationship, it never fully is. But Eliza and Tal had found their way back to the same team, with clarity about the path ahead.

They're are commited to breaking ancestral inheritances, and changing their lineages patterns of addiction, for their child's sake and for their own. That's the kind of thing weekly sessions build toward slowly.

An intensive can get you there in a weekend.

No two intensives look alike. What Tal and Eliza needed was trauma work, grief ritual and honesty about addiction's long tail. Another couple might need something else entirely.

I draw on Relational Life Therapy and somatic practice to build each container, but the shape of it comes from you, not a template.

I have two intensive slots open this summer, based on the West Coast.

If you're local, or willing to travel, we can do the full three days here. If distance or logistics make that hard, I also offer intensives online, structured to hold the same depth even without the cabin in the woods.

An intensive is built for couples who've plateaued in ongoing work and need concentrated time to move through it, couples in real crisis who need more than a weekly session can hold, and couples facing a transition, a birth, a move, a diagnosis, who want to enter it from solid ground instead of scrambling to find it along the way.

It's not cheap, and it's not easy. But an intensive can be a pivot point for your relationship, for the rest of your life.

I told Tal and Eliza that years from now, I want them to reflect on our time and say, "That's the moment everything shifted."

You can read more about how the three days are structured here: pavinimoray.com/couples-intensive​​

A couple sits across from me, and I can feel the exact weight they've brought into the room.
It's not anger exactly, though I've heard them fight so I know there has been plenty of that. What I'm noticing is something heavier. It feels like the exhaustion of people who have tried, repeatedly, and can no longer tell if they are fighting for their relationship or fighting to get out of it.
​
One of them says, "I don't even know what I want anymore."

She's talking about being in the relationship, and I hear that more than anything else.

It's an honest thing to say. It takes courage to say it out loud, especially to your partner, especially in front of a stranger.

Not knowing is not the same as not caring. It usually means you've been so busy surviving the dynamic between you that you've lost the thread back to yourself.
Relational Life Therapy is built for this.

Terry Real's RLT model doesn't assume that staying together is the goal. It assumes that clarity is. What I want is two people showing up fully, telling the truth without weapons. Then we can figure out what is actually possible between them. Sometimes what's possible is a transformed relationship. Sometimes it's a conscious uncoupling, done with care and dignity instead of carnage. Both require the same work.

What RLT gives couples on the edge is a container rigorous enough to hold the the actual question.

I've watched people arrive at my door certain they were done, and discover through the work that there was something they hadn't yet tried, some version of themselves they hadn't yet brought to the relationship. I've watched people arrive hoping to be convinced to stay, and discover instead that the kindest thing they could do for themselves and their partner was to leave well.

Neither of those outcomes can be rushed. And from where I sit, neither can be decided from the outside.

Somatics teaches us that body knows things the mind hasn't caught up to yet. A clenching in the chest when your partner reaches for you. The way you breathe differently in their absence. Numbness you've gotten so used to you stopped noticing it. RLT and somatics work with those signals, not just the story you've been telling about what's wrong.

In relationship therapy sessions, I give couples the same invitation again and again: put down the case you've been building against each other, just for now. I don't say this because the case isn't real, but because building it has already cost you years, and it hasn't resolved anything.

What would it mean to get curious instead? What would it mean to let your partner see what is actually happening inside you, not the defended version, not the one that has learned to wound before being wounded?

RLT cultivates what Terry Real calls the Wise Adult. Not a spiritually bypassed version of adulthood that never gets angry or afraid. The kind that can feel all of it and still choose how to respond.

Some couples do this work and recommit with a clarity and honesty they didn't know was possible when they walked in. Some couples do this work and part. They part having said the true things, having understood each other at a level the fighting never allowed. Their kids, if they have them, feel the difference.

If you are sitting with the question of whether to stay or go, you don't need someone to hand you the answer. You need a space honest enough, and rigorous enough, to let you find it yourself.

If you are ready for clarity, reach out and let's talk, honestly. I can help you find your way through, instead of staying stuck. 

Odd how envy can point the way to true desire.
Have you ever felt envious of someone for something they have or something they do, only to find out later that it is something you long for? Something you dream of being or doing, but you haven’t given yourself permission?
At 8, I love books more than anything.
In the tiny Ohio town, summer at my grandma’s house includes the freedom to wander.
With the porch door slapping at my heels, I run through backyards of roses and apple trees. Past rusting cars. Over the metal tang of railroad lines.
Hot asphalt sticks to my sandals as I skip through the church parking lot and fling myself into the town library’s cool, dim interior.
Here, I fall in love with queer feminist icon Nancy Drew, leaving the dull Hardy boys to collect dust on the shelf.
It is this library where words catch my heart and never let go.
I find a book called “Bittersweet.”
With the complexity of one word, the world of poetry cracks the cave door and bids me to enter.
Rummaging the shelves, I land on a disintegrating copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Old Swimming Hole.” I check it out.
Sitting in my treehouse, I read his gentle poems until the pages crumble, smudged with Chips Ahoy dust.
Along with snacks, I feed myself new words and images. I devour bucolic descriptions of farming life.
Most importantly, I discover a new feeling: longing.
Back at school, I memorize the call number 811, the poetry shelf in the school library.
Here I print my name in chunky pencil letters on the library call slips of Rod McKuen and Robert Frost.
No one comments on the strangeness of a third-grade child immersed in slim volumes with vague pastel covers.
That year, several poems litter our language arts textbook.
While my classmates crack up at Shel Silverstein, I prefer the quiet humanity of Lucille Clifton and the deep play of e.e. cummings.
Poems pour out of my kid fingers onto the pages of my denim-covered Gnome Notebook.
Roused by Riley’s poetic descriptions of light, many of my poems contain references to the “golden hour of eternity.” Also, dolphins, snowflakes, and memory.
To anyone who asks what I want to be when I grow up, I say, “a poet.”
One day my dad tells me that poets are a dime a dozen.
I stop saying that.

Her LinkedIn profile headline reads one word: “Author.”
Book after book pours out of her. She writes for a few well-known blogs.
The writing is okay, but it doesn’t move me the way great writing does.
Let me say that this woman is perfectly lovely. In every encounter I’ve had with her, she has been nothing but respectful and supportive.
But I hate her.
It is years before I can name the real feeling: envy.
I am envious of her.
Why does she get to write books for a living?
Why does she get published and get to dedicate her career to writing?
I’m embarrassed to say how long it takes me to admit that I want what she has.
I want to be a writer.
In fact, it is what I have always wanted.
Even as I type those words, the doubt comes in.
Writers are a dime a dozen. Writers don’t make money. Writers blah blah blah….
This, my friend, is a question of permission.
Have you ever wanted something so badly but not been able to let yourself have it?
Is there a longing deep inside you that you have buried forever?
​You are in good company.
So how do we do it?
How do we allow ourselves to be our longing?
This is what I have been praying over, grieving for, and ritualizing the past two months.
Do I get to be a writer?
Do you get to ______?
When I tell my friend Jenny who’s known me since I was 15, I want to take a stab at writing, she says, “It’s always been writing.”
When my career coach gently asks, “What’s the worst that could happen if you try?” I burst into tears, terrified that I could live my whole life and not try.
Permission comes in drips and drops.
I don't have many answers about how, but I do know permission is a process.
Perhaps one day, my bio will read “Writer.” But until then, find me typing in the library.

In the 30-plus years since my tire-screeching departure after grabbing my diploma from the sweaty hands of my high school principal, Northeastern Ohio has changed only in that it is now even more conservative.
At 18, I drove away from oversized hair and stagnantly closed minds, determined to try my luck anywhere but the Midwest.
I have no place here in Ohio and never did.
I’m spending the week helping my 80-year-old mother, from whom I am mostly estranged, care for herself after knee replacement surgery.
It is 560 miles between my current mountain home to the burdened land where my ancestors have squatted for generations.
I’ve covered those miles by driving North in my rickety camper built the year I graduated from high school that I euphemistically call “vintage.
Every day I'm there, I leave my mom's farm and drive to town to gather supplies.
Each trip results in long stares and raised eyebrows from the Trump-loving locals.
I rarely feel unsafe as a visibly queer and trans person, but here I do.
The vitriol on the white Christian faces has driven more than one queer into the embrace of sin, AKA San Francisco.
It’s a long week.
As I ready myself to leave, I realize I don’t have to be home for another two days.
The time spreads out in front of me, golden and sweet.
I need this time to process the week with my mom.
I text a friend, “I can’t tell if I am completely okay or totally disassociated.” My friend texts back, “Maybe it’s both.”
A solo-road trip sounds excellent, winding slowly back down south.
I whisper my intention at the gas pump, “May today bring me exactly the magick I need.”
In the Southwest corner of present-day Ohio exists the Great Serpent Mound.
It is the largest effigy mound in North America at 1,348 feet in length, 25 feet in width, and three feet high, complete with seven curvatures and a triple spiral tail.
This holy mother was constructed approximately 2300 years ago by Native cultures whose names are reconstructions: the Fort Ancient Culture and later the Adena Culture.
Doing my homework, I learned that the snake surrounds an egg and was built on an ancient meteor impact site called an astrobleme.
This meteor impact occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago.
In the center of the structure, sedimentary strata have been uplifted several hundred feet, resembling the central uplifts of lunar craters.
I’m curious enough about the snake effigy to linger in Ohio.
I drive for hours, leaving the highway for the two-lane country roads replete with pick-up trucks and Dollar General.
Arriving at the mound, the park is closed for the night.
I’m too nervous about sneaking in.
I decide to wild camp in my rig and arrive at the mound first thing in the morning.
I scout a good location, up a dirt road, in the middle of an empty field near the serpent’s head.
Traveling in Scotland, I was enchanted by their “right to roam” law which strikes a balance between the right to access land and water and owning private property.
Basically, you can visit and camp on the land, swim in lakes and rivers, hike, and explore historic sites, even if they are on private property.
This is a good law.
Because, after all, how can one really “own” property?
Can you pick it up and take it with you?
No.
The land is here for all of us to live on.
We are made of it.
Perhaps my anarchist sensibility runs too deep, but the concept of private property as applied to land is a weird construct.
I’m tucked in for the night, and the late dusk softens the world.
I am aware that there are “right” ways to be in relationship with new and old places.
How one approaches a new place matters.
When first arriving in a place, it’s polite to make a land offering to the local spirits and guardians, thanking them for having you.
I decide to do this in the morning.
This was a mistake.
I crack a beer and am lounging in my camper when a car horn blares and won’t stop.
Decidedly jarring, I pull on pants and stagger into the unrelenting high beams of a car pointed directly at me.
A voice begins to yell at me, even before I can see it.
I know this is most likely not going to go well, but I think it is probably best to deal with it head-on.
I approach, and in a big truck is an irate older woman, screaming her head off at me.
Her words are barely decipherable.
She is so enraged.
I see an older man sitting in the passenger seat, and he looks confused.
I can hear “MY PROPERTY!” and “GET THE FUCK OUT!” “MY PROPERTY!”
I gather from those words she would politely like to ask me to gather my things and go.
I feel a bit scared but also taken aback.
This woman is so triggered, and I am clearly not a threat.
I say authentically, “I am so sorry. I will go.”
It wasn’t my intention to disrupt her evening, merely to find a place to rest.
How true my apology feels surprises me.
Nothing in me wants to fight with her; I am just sorry.
The truck waits as she guns the engine while I prepare to leave and do.
She follows me a mile down the road, flashing her lights and honking.
I drive slowly, trying to decide what to do next.
I realize that my reading glasses are lost in the back of the camper and that I have no cell reception anyway.
I’m going to have to navigate by feel.
I’ve already scoped the location near the mound, and know there is nowhere good to camp, so I head down a dirt road, then another, and another.
At each turn, I feel into it.
Which is the right way to go?
As a child, my mother had several impactful talks with me about my “conscience.”
These usually occurred after I had done something terrible: put the cat in the fridge to see what would happen or poured water all over the floor to make it slippery.
From what I could gather as a child, my conscience was something inside me that helped me “feel” what was the good thing to do and what would piss my mother off.
It’s not precisely my conscience that I’m using to decide my route, but it is a felt sense.
I follow my nose through the pitch-black night amidst curving winding roads.
It’s late by the time I pull into the ATV state recreation area, thinking this might be a good place to rest.
It’s private, and I hope no one will bother me here.
I lay down to rest, but my body won’t relax.
I’ve done many sketchy questionable things when I travel.
Still, I realize that the information I’m receiving from my body jives with what my brain knows.
I’m in rural Ohio, but I don’t know where.
No one knows where I am. I’m trans.
I’ve told my partner I’m safe for the night.
I have no cell reception. I have no glasses.
I’m hidden from view in an area well known by locals.
Probably it would be okay, but I shouldn’t risk it.
I’ve got to find another place to be.
Again, I hop out of the camper and reconnect the battery terminals so the thing will start. Yes, it’s that janky.
I start driving again.
I had a good activist friend in college who doled out this good anti-authoritarian advice: When you don't know which way to go, go left.
Left it was as I pulled out of the ATV park onto the darkened road.
Another 30 minutes of fields, curves, and occasional darkened farmhouses.
It’s so late, and my eyes are weary.
I start to pray out loud, to my ancestors, to the spirits of this land, to whoever is benevolently listening.
“I need some help, y’awl.”
Miles go by.
Many turns.
More prayers, “Like, a campground. That’s what I need. Can you please guide me towards a campground?”
Suddenly, a bright green blaze crosses the sky over yet another field.
An emerald blur from the right side of the field, down low to the left.
It’s burned low to the ground.
​
If it were light out, I would have tried to find where the meteor landed.
My attention is drawn in the direction it fell, and there it is: a sign, faded and worn, with an arrow and one word, "Camping."
The brakes squeal as I make the left turn too quickly.
More miles and miles of road.
Five.
Ten.
Fifteen.
I pass a cemetery.
Decide not to sleep there.
Again, I speak out loud, “Y’awl, I have faith, but I am starting to doubt this story will end well tonight. A campground? Please?”
And then there it is.
On my right, I see the dim outline of an RV. A gravel driveway.
I pull in.
Almost all of the spots are available.
Finally, I rest.
When I wake in the morning, the sun is golden.
The late spring green of the sacred world glows, and the breeze is warm.
I eat my yogurt and berries slowly, savoring the morning.
As I pull out, I blow a kiss to the ancestors, the guides, and the land.
Later that morning, as I wind and wind towards the direction I think is home, my heart cracks open.
Too tired last night to consider the miracle of the green flash, the morning brings contemplation.
I was guided.
That is clear.
But why was going to the Serpent Mound not the right thing?
I’m fighting with the lady from last night in my head.
She appeared like a middle-aged conservative white lady.
Probably Christian.
Why are conservative midwestern Christians so hypocritical?
Why is their god so desecrated?
What about love and acceptance, kindness to strangers, offering succor and respite to weary travelers?
Christian charity?
Ooh, I hate hypocrisy.
And why am I fighting with someone who is not even here?
Why was she so full of hate for me?
Because it did feel personal when she screamed, “Why did you ever think it would be okay for you to be here???”
What did she see?
Did she see a middle-aged person, like herself, who was unafraid to travel alone?
To take risks?
To read as queer and trans and other, amid a culture that kills its own if they are in the littlest way different?
What was the trauma that had her read me as a threat?
As I ponder, I soften.
I don’t know anything about her and her life, what dreams she may have had, or who she may have lost.
I have received a gift from her: be soft with strangers.
Be gentle, be loving.
I’m glad I said none of the ugly things I could have.
I appreciate the healing that has made my heart soft enough to be in a good way.
I can feel the land here, thrumming with life.
When the tears come, I start to understand something new about the pain of colonization.
I’m driving and crying, which is a favorite combo.
When the grief gets stronger, the words “I’m so sorry” are what pour, repeatedly, from within.
The same thing I said and meant to the lady from last night.
Except now I’m saying it to the land and the original inhabitants.
I am so, so sorry for what my ancestors did to you.
For what we continue to do.
From the marrow of my bones, I feel the wrongness.
My deep felt remorse was precisely the same as I had spoken the previous evening: I am so, so sorry.
At that exact moment, as I round a hairpin turn in the country glow of morning, I realize: I didn’t make an offering to that land where I squatted.
While part of what I met in that lady was a traumatized, raging, and entitled white lady, another layer was the rage of the untended great mother serpent.
The unacknowledged rape of the land.
The native tourism I had been about to participate in because I hadn’t checked in with my conscience and thought it would be cool.
Understood through that lens, the wrath I had experienced was deserved. In fact, it’s a gift.
Queerness offers you a unique sensitivity to the world.
Often painful, yet there are moments when you can be so grateful for the exquisite sensation of sensing your conscience.
I appreciate feeling the difference between what is right and what will piss your Mother off.
​​

Stop trying to be so good.
The world could give a fuck about your goodness.
Your realness is what's called for.
Your acknowledgment of all the capacity you have: to love, to hurt, to kill, to heal, to create.
Being good is about proving.
Proving that you are worthy to receive the resources you need to exist.
You are trying to be good when you worry about your carbon footprint.
When you recycle. When you send thank you notes, and when you turn off the water to brush your teeth.
You are trying to be good when you listen to someone you are not interested in listening to.
When you say yes because you think you should.
Trying to be good sneaks in all over the place.
Politeness.
Social grace.
Virtue signaling.
Ask, "How do I feel when I am trying to prove myself?"
If you are honest, you will realize that you don't know what it feels like because you are always doing it.
I've been proving myself for as long as I can remember.
Even as I stepped out of mainstream culture, I stepped into proving that I was punk enough. Feminist enough. Earthy enough.Queer enough. Activist enough. Woke enough.
I've been puking my guts out while trying not to make a mess.
Proving runs deep in us, amirite?
Proving is woven with capitalism.
It goes like this: If you are good enough already, with nothing to prove, what will motivate you to work beyond your true capacity?
Capitalism creates internalized slavery.
"Success" is another word for it. Success is you proving your worth to the world.
Let's burn down that word.
I was in a somatic coaching session when I realized how trying and being have gotten enmeshed for me.
My somatic coach suggested that I get to be here, and take up space, simply by merit of being alive.
That I don't have to earn my right to take a breath.
She said, "Stop trying and BE."
This idea, while it made sense on the surface, like DUH, didn't sink in.
I couldn't understand why she was telling me this. I KNEW this already.
But I am good, and a good student too.
Leaving her office that session, I said (with great earnestness), "Okay, so my homework is to Try and Be."
She grabbed my arm fiercely and growled through clenched teeth, "No. Just Be."
Imagine that there is a competition you are trying to win.
Like a science fair. Or a ring-the-bell-at-the-fair strength challenge.
And because you are awesome, the person is coming towards you with your coveted prize.
They want to hand it to you.
They are following you around as you keep working on finishing your project.
You keep trying to ring that bell you've already rung.
They are trying to get you to take your trophy, your gold star.
But you won't even turn towards them. You ignore their existence as you keep trying.
In your head, your mantra rings: "You've got this! Keep going!"
You won't arrive long enough to receive your accolade.
This is what it means to not arrive to receive.
Proving is excellent protection.
If I am always in the proving, I don't have to trust I will be cared for.
I don't have to trust that others can and will meet my needs.
It keeps me occupied, confident I've not yet arrived.
Proving says, "Don't slow; you'll falter, then stop."
And what if that was true? What if you stopped?
What if you rested, even without earning it?
(Because honey, you HAVE earned it with all the striving you've done during your life.)
When I turned 50, my partner secretly invited many of my loved ones to record 1-minute videos.
I watched loved one upon loved one say something along the line of, "Rest, sweetie. Take it easy. Enjoy."
When I watched these sweet tributes, I was confused, then frustrated.
Why were so many people telling me to rest? I had a world to save.
Two months later, I experienced my first clinical depression as my body and brain set a boundary for me.
I couldn't work and had to rest.
I watched my life fall apart in slow motion with an interested disinterest.
What would happen if I let it all go? If I just stopped all the proving and striving?
My practices fell away, one by one. Gym, dance, prayer. On it went.
When I was underwater, moving through molasses, the 'being good' muscle atrophied.
Unable to be polite, I would suddenly leave dinners and hangouts, often only able to eke out the words, "I'm done now," as I plodded off.
That time in the twisted kingdom felt magical in a different way.
The magic of honesty without pretense or striving.
So much success-orientation got stripped away.
So much proving burned off.
When I finally emerged, I was different.
Naked. Softer. More connected with myself.
I was less willing to push through, and unable to work like the devil anymore. Not that I wanted to.
Sustaining recovery from depression has meant learning a new way to exist inside myself.
I have had to learn to honor my capacity, moment to moment.
Not being good is my saving grace.
The word "success" is slowly being replaced with "arrive."
I'm learning, finally, to arrive so that I can receive.
Stop trying to be good.
​
Start arriving to receive.I'm not saying try to be bad. That's another kind of striving. (Although it can be more fun.)
Stop doing for a sec and soften into what's available right now.
Love, the world has sweetness for you if you'll allow it.
Your ancestors have blessings for you.
Your friends have more love to give.
Your community wants to celebrate you.
Stop being good. Stop striving. Start arriving.
Yes, dear one, the world really will fall apart if you stop proving and start arriving to receive.
You're not imagining it.
But maybe falling apart because we are all receiving goodness is just what this world needs.

“I love all the divine feminine energy here. It’s so important. They are trying to tear us apart, but we won’t be divided,” she leans in, her wispy voice, disrupting the conversation I had been having with my best friend, Theo Mae.
We are sitting on the lawn at The Chicks concert.
In the background, Cherry Bomb by the Runaways blares, projected onto multiple 25-foot screens.
We were enjoying our snacks, waiting for the band to take the stage, when this white waify purple-haired woman sat down on the grass between us.
At first, she was on her phone, invading our personal space, but she seemed harmless.
But then she started talking, all goddess this, womyn that, feminine feminine feminine.
Eye-gazing.
Lavender hair tossing.
Trying.
To.
CONNECT.
Theo Mae and I rolled our eyes at each other and shook our damn heads.
Both non-binary, we are no strangers to hearing how incredible our “feminine energy” is.
Let me be clear.
I love women.
I am down with how people want to describe their experiences.
Usually, I pick my battles about gender.
I often ignore comments like these.
After all, I will never see the person again.
But this lady wouldn’t drop it.
Amping up, she went on and on about the glorious feminine moon, the goddess energy of the crowd, the field of the feminine emanating from us all.
Finally, I had had enough.
I turned toward her and said, “I’m not trying to bust your groove, but you are talking to two non-binary, trans people. The language about the “divine feminine” you are using doesn’t work for me. It is alienating and off-putting. You are gonna need to stop with that if you want to hang out with us.”
Clear. Kind. Boundary.
In my head, I’m putting my money on her doubling down. It seems, for a brief moment, that she will stop.
I’m still bracing for it.
“Oh yes! I honor you so much!” she replies, chatting about the music for a minute.
Great, but my guard is up.
“But really, fighting the patriarchy takes ALL of us.”
Uh-oh.
And then.
“Okay, but you don’t understand. Your feminine energy is so beautiful! You are so powerful!”
And there it is, folks. The ole double-down.
Here’s what the Google has to say: “The phrase “double down” means to put forth the additional effort or risk in a situation or argument, even if you know the outcome will be a mistake or will be negative.”At this point, Theo Mae sees my disgust. They lean in, bless them, and bravely give purple hair Gender 101.
For five minutes of their precious life on Earth time, it’s all smash the gender binary, celebrate the glittering gender multiverse, and try to help this woman learn.
I admire Theo Mae’s fortitude.
Their educational interlude gives me time to think about what I want from this situation.

1. I want it to stop.
2. I want to have a good night.
3. I want to be kind.

Until.
This bitch puts her hand on my arm! “I just want you to know I honor everything about you, your….”
I knock her hand off my arm.
“Don’t touch me,” I growl.
I mean.
When was the last time someone tried to manage me physically?
Now I’m mad.
Is she tripping? She might be.
I still have care for this human, misguided as she is.
I say, “Look, I know you want to connect, but I’m here for the concert, not to educate you. I asked you to stop, and you didn’t. We are done here.”
She tells me that because she honors me, she is going to leave.
“If you really honor me, here’s what you can do. After the concert, go home and get on Google. Research gender identity. Research non-binary. That’s how you can honor me,” is how I reply.
This is reasonable, considering all the shitty and mean things I could have said.
Here’s her parting shot: “I’m sorry for all the people who hurt you and made you the way you are.”
She runs, I mean RUNS, off, forgetting her wallet in the process.
I look at it lying there, unwilling to do anything with it.
But Theo Mae is nicer than me and sprints after her to return it.
They return, laughing, “Now she’s gonna think trans people are so evil.”
And she likely will.
Bullshit like this happens all the time to my black friends, transfeminine peeps, fat folks, disabled friends, and all the other folks existing at the edges of what is considered ‘normal.’
But something about this episode made me question the doubling down thing.
Like, why double down?
Why did she believe her intention to be understood was much more important than the impact I expressed to her?
More important than the boundary I set?
This is a meme, right? The doubling down?
What did that lady think was gonna happen if she kept insisting on my feminine energy after I set a boundary, saying how she honored me without listening to me and kept nonconsensually touching me? (She did it again!)
Does anyone ever soften because you’ve convinced them you are right?
or…
Have you ever been convinced by someone’s intentions that the impact you feel doesn’t matter?
I think about embodied strategies a lot.
Strategies are attempts to meet needs.
You can ask, “What is this strategy trying to take care of?” especially when it seems nonsensical.
Doubling down is a strategy; my best guess is that it is trying to take care of belonging.
That lady wanted to belong with Theo and me, and for that to happen, she felt we had to understand her perspective.
It makes sense to me.
However, how she went about belonging didn’t work for us, and ultimately for her.
If she were my client, I would suggest implementing a new narrative and strategy for belonging.
Stop and listen when someone gives you feedback that something in your behavior isn’t working.Every week in my dance community, we read our community agreements. Here are the relevant bits:
“If you receive feedback from another dancer that they were uncomfortable with something, here’s what to do:

1. Stop.
2. Listen.
3. Reflect back to them what you’ve heard.
4. Ask questions to make sure you understand the impact they are sharing with you.
5. If you get stuck, seek a supporter.
6. If someone offers you feedback, they give you the gift of believing in your capacity to learn. Take the opportunity.”

Seriously.
It doesn’t seem that difficult to me.
Sure, it’s hard to hear you unwittingly impacted someone, but it was an accident, right?
So why not just listen, and say something like, “Oh so sorry! I hear that language doesn’t work for you, so I’ll stop.”
That would have been the coolest thing, and then she could have hung out with us all night.
What is the necessary work that gets us all to the place of being able to hear the impact we inadvertently caused without taking it as a personal affront we must defend against?
If I hurt you, I want to know about it, so I can make it right.
That starts with listening and making sure I understand the impact.
Hurt happens in all relationships.
Repair from harm deepens all relationships.Being the angry trans person isn’t my jam.
It’s no fun.
I often have so much spaciousness for people’s learning.
Case in point: Three weeks ago, I came out as NB to my 75-year-old silversmithing teacher.
It was the first time she met someone NB or encountered the concept.
I explained it to her, then she got excited and hugged me, saying, “Happy Binary! Happy Binary! I love you!”
I knew exactly what she meant.
Now we are having conversations, and I’ve given her permission to ask all her questions.
This feels good to me.
I love this work.
She is so excited to learn and to understand and confront the limits to her understanding.
When she makes a mistake, she readily admits it, “Oh shoot, I messed up your pronoun again!” and we move on.
It’s just not a big deal.
Last thought on this: I wanna double down sometimes too.
Being misunderstood sucks.
The thing is, I didn’t misunderstand the purple lady.
I didn’t think she had bad intentions.
Her intentions of connection were clear.
What else was clear is the learning she still has to do around gender, boundaries, and listening.
As do I, as do you.
Doubling down feels like “But…!” in my body.

• “But you don’t get what I’m saying!”
• “But I didn’t mean it like that!”
• “But if you really got it, you wouldn’t feel like that.”

I think the corrective here is to consider that the impact someone is sharing is the impact they experience.
You don’t know what that feels like to be them.
This week, I am practicing listening to the impact I catalyze in others without defensiveness or trying to convince them of my rightness or good intentions.
I’d be delighted if you’d join me in this practice.
Down with the double down, up with Connection!

One of the worst things I ever did to another human on purpose was to scrub the toilet with their toothbrush, then put it back in the toothbrush holder.
The recipient of this disgusting treatment was my then-husband.
What's worse is that he had a whole thing about toilet germs, which I knew about.
We were in a fight, and I was furious.
At the moment, it felt like the perfect retaliation.
I'm sure it does not surprise you in the least that relationship eventually ended.
We had so few tools to communicate with love, so we took out our pain on each other.
I'm embarrassed when I reflect on that less-than-shining example of how I handled conflict.
That was where I was then, but I wish I had had better skills to communicate my feelings and needs.
What happens to you when you get into a conflict with a friend or partner?
Do you ever do or say things you later regret?
If you are like many people, your body has a response.
You may go on autopilot and then later, like me with the toothbrush, wonder what caused you to behave that way.
When I met my current partner, I was determined to learn how to use conflict to fuel connection instead of break it.
I wanted this relationship to last, so I better learn how to fight better.
So I went to school for conflict resolution.
I read everything I could find about conflict theory.
I took classes like NVC to learn how to communicate my needs.
I studied somatics to understand the body's fight-and-flight responses and how to work with them.
And sure enough, I got better at conflict.
You probably already know that conflict can be painful, but did you know that it is also a force that can be generative?
It helps you out by pointing out what needs to be addressed.
Sometimes you conflict over something straightforward.
You forgot to pick up an important package you agreed to pick up, and your partner is pissed.
But I've learned in my study of conflict that most of it happens below the surface.
What we think we are fighting about is rarely what we're fighting about.
For example, suppose I fight with my partner about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
What we are really fighting about could be unmet needs for fairness, reciprocity, equality, etc.
Or it could be about something else entirely!
Old unresolved past issues, resentments, longings, or even a desire for connection.
All this stuff is under the surface, and we're fighting about the dishes. I bet that's happened to you.
When I get into conflict now, it happens in slow motion.
We move and speak at turtle speed.
I don't want to say or do something I regret later and have to apologize for.
So I go slow.
Probably less than half the crap that comes through my brain comes out of my mouth, which is a good thing because oooh-weee.
The impulse to retaliate has significantly lessened as I've learned to tell my partner what I feel and need.
Their toothbrush is safe with me!
I feel proud of how my partner and I show up in conflict.
There is respect between us.
Do we still get triggered?
Uh-yup!
Sure do, because human!
However, embodied practices have saved my butt countless times.
Instead of reacting out of my fight impulse, I take a pause.
I take a break.
I breathe.
All of this, hard as it is in the moment, saves me countless hours in therapy processing my fuck-ups.
Attending to my body during conflict is a gift I've learned to give myself.
Yes, good conflict skills are 100% learnable.
You don't have to be at the mercy of your conflict patterns for the rest of your life.
You can train to fight with respect and care.
Professional fighters train to build skill and grace.
Conflict skills are learnable, and I teach them, and you can learn them.

If you keep having the same fight with your partner, no matter how many talks you’ve had, you’re not broken. You’re stuck in a painful dynamic.

I practice Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy, which is transforming how I help couples stay connected even through the necessary growth moments in their relationships.

The great thing about learning and practicing relational skills is they benefit ALL of your relationships, for the rest of your life.

Pretty great self-investment, amiright?

Why You Keep Having the Same Fight​
​Repeating conflict cycles are the bane of most couples.For example,

• The more you get angry, the more they pull away.
• The more they pull away, the angrier you get.

Or:

• The more they get blamey, the more you withdraw.
• The more you withdraw, the blamier they get. ​

Relationship Life Therapy calls these cycles "The More, The More."The more, the more is a dance of our wounds colliding, on repeat. I bet you know what I'm talking about!
Many of us think, "If my partner would just act differently, I wouldn't feel (insert bad feeling.)"

We outsource the solution to them. But guess what?

They are thinking the same thing!

If YOU would just change, they wouldn't feel the bad way they feel, and there wouldn't be this stupid repeating conflict!
Or maybe you are an internalizer, and blame yourself.
If only you could keep it together, you wouldn't take your partner to this negative place.

It's common to feel hopeless, despairing and trapped when trapped in cycles of conflict.

My couples' clients often say things like, "Ugh, I can't believe we are here again."
Conventional relationship therapy often focuses on the problems instead of solutions. 

But what you focus on increases.
For example, if you want a more trusting relationship, do the practices that will increase trust rather than endlessly reinforcing where trust was broken.

When I work with couples, I give them the same choice again and again.

1. "We can spend our time in sessions processing the hard things that happened between you, if that is how you want to spend your time and money."
2. "Or, we can focus on practicing what you long for in your partnership."

It’s a paradigm shift.
​
So how do you get out of "The More, The More?"

1. Name the pattern when not activated. While only one of you needs to see it to have leverage, it is helpful if both of you share an understanding of the dynamic
2. Watch for it happening in the wild.
3. See if you can name it while it is happening. (This works really well for my competitive clients; they want to be the first one to see and name it.)
4. The act of naming it while it's happening is often a total gamechanger. The smallest of interruptions can get you back on the same team.
5. Seek support for changing dynamics, not just processing negative emotions. Find a couple's counselor who is willing to help you keep your eyes on the prize: a thriving relationship, not endless venting. We are going after true change!

​
I am currently accepting a small number of new relationship clients.​

Let’s map your unique pattern together and discover how to interrupt and bring back joy and connection → Book a free call

​I am in my kitchen, preparing dinner.
The reddish-orange of the tomato skin sheens against the worn wood of the cutting board, crouching on the counter.
The knife blade, serrated and glowing, flows from the black plastic handle my hand grips. Late afternoon sun nudges the window frame above the sink. The gas oven hisses as it preheats.
Cutting into the fruit’s flesh, the warm smell of the tomato tangs my nose. Diluted juice and seeds spill across the board.
Slice by slice, I complete the job. The consistent thickness of wedges in a row is satisfying.
All I am doing is cutting a tomato.
The miracle is that I am completely here and now. I am present.
It is a moment of quiet grace requiring no effort to wrangle my attention toward the task.
How long it had been since I was entirely present chopping a vegetable?
Usually, my mind is elsewhere. I’m thinking about whatever I’m annoyed with or when the endless backyard project will complete. Wondering what time my partner will be home. Thinking about what I have to do later in the evening.
So few moments am I present with what is in front of me.
Like some of you, I too wrote cringey goth poetry in high school. In a recent re-read, a line of wisdom from my 17-year-old self jumped out. “May I never cease to realize my alive.”
As enchanting as the tomato moment is, there is also terror.
Am I missing it? My life? The little time I have to be here, experiencing? Have I ceased to know my alive?
Coming into presence means admitting absence.
Why is being here, now so freaking hard?!
According to the gospel of me, a life well-lived rests on three foundations: presence, creativity, and connection.
Presence is most elusive.
Do you struggle to realize your aliveness, to know it while you have it?
I have a theory.
Presence requires feeling. All the everything. The joy. The horror. The suffering. The grief. The delight.
To feel is sometimes to feel too much.
So we turn it down.
Check out. Overwork. Worry. Ignore needs. Hold pee. Resist moving.
The little numbings, the slight turning-it-down-to-take-the-edge-off are justified.
I’m not giving myself shit for them, and neither should you.
But when I am away from myself, I start to feel shitty. I feel empty, lonely, grabby.
I bet you can relate.
The only medicine to absence is presence.
Directing your attention back to this moment, to this breath. To feelings and sensations happening right now.
The poet Byron said, “The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”
I’d rather feel it all.
When my attention is here, and now, it’s better, even when it hurts.
I don’t want to miss it, my life.
I don’t want to regret not living and loving fully. So being present is what I practice.
Chopping vegetables. In beauty and in sadness. In joy and in pain.
All of it, now.

This is the first thing many couples say to me when we speak. 

When a relationship reaches the breaking point, couples often arrive at therapy carrying something larger than communication issues. They're facing the collapse of their nervous system's sense of safety with each other.

Communication tools and frameworks can only go so far when the body itself has shut down access to connection. Couples therapy crisis reconnection is not just a conversation problem or a skill deficit. It is a biology problem, a patterning problem, a wound carried in the body long before any argument began.

The ten barriers below are among the most common communication barriers that prevent couples from finding their way back to each other. Each one is paired with a somatic practice, body-based and grounded in how the nervous system actually works.

1. Is Physiological Flooding Shutting Down Your Ability to Talk?
When one or both partners become overwhelmed during conflict, the thinking brain effectively goes offline. Heart rate spikes, perception narrows, and anything said lands as threat rather than information. No amount of communication skill survives flooding, which is one of the most underrecognized therapy challenges for couples in crisis: the conversation keeps happening after the nervous system has already left the room.

Somatic practice: Agree in advance on a signal, a word or gesture, that means "I need twenty minutes." Make the pause non-negotiable and structured. During that window, each partner walks, breathes slowly, or does bilateral movement (anything that crosses the body's midline) to help the nervous system return to its window of tolerance before re-engaging.

2. Is Contempt Poisoning Even Your Neutral Exchanges?
Contempt, including eye rolls, dismissiveness, and a tone that communicates "you are beneath me," is one of the strongest predictors of relationship dissolution. It makes relationship repair in counseling extraordinarily difficult, because the message underneath contempt is not about any specific conflict. It is about worth.

Somatic practice: Before a difficult conversation, each partner takes two minutes to silently recall a moment of genuine appreciation for the other. Not forced gratitude, but a real memory. The body shifts its baseline state, and the face and voice follow into something softer before words begin.

3. When Your Partner Goes Silent, Are They Checked Out or Overwhelmed?
Stonewalling is one of the most misread communication barriers in couples work. Emotional disconnection often looks like a partner who has simply gone still: monosyllabic, expressionless, absent. Stonewalling is usually not indifference. It is a shutdown response, the nervous system's way of protecting itself from unbearable overwhelm. To the other partner, though, it reads as abandonment, which deepens the crisis rather than containing it.

Somatic practice: The stonewalling partner can learn to narrate what is happening physiologically rather than going silent: "I can feel myself shutting down. I want to stay with you. Can we slow down?" Even that small act of narration keeps a thread of connection alive and signals presence rather than disappearance.

4. Are You and Your Partner Caught in a Protest Cycle?
In emotionally disconnected couples, one partner often escalates, growing louder and more urgent, while the other withdraws further. Each response triggers the other in a loop. The pursuing partner reads withdrawal as evidence that nothing matters to their partner. The withdrawing partner reads pursuit as confirmation that they can never do anything right. Couples therapy crisis reconnection work often centers on interrupting this specific cycle before any deeper repair can happen.

Somatic practice: Interrupt the cycle with synchronized breathing. Sit facing each other and breathe together, inhaling for four counts and exhaling for four counts, for two minutes. Physical attunement can interrupt the autonomic mismatch driving the cycle, even briefly, and create enough co-regulation to make a next step possible.

5. Is Old Trauma Running the Conflict You're Having Right Now?
Many couples in crisis are not just fighting with each other. They are fighting through unresolved wounds from childhood, previous relationships, or earlier ruptures in the current partnership. A partner's raised voice may land not as irritation but as danger. Emotional disconnection in these moments is not about the argument at hand. It is about something much older, and one of the most significant therapy challenges for couples is learning to distinguish the two.

Somatic practice: Ground before engaging. Feet flat on the floor, weight felt in the seat, three slow exhales. Grounding does not resolve old wounds, but it can create enough space to remind the nervous system of the present moment and separate past threat from current reality.

6. Is Defensiveness Keeping Both of You Stuck on Trial?
When criticism lands and the defensive partner immediately deflects, minimizes, or attacks in return, no one can afford to be vulnerable. Relationship repair in counseling requires at least one partner to drop their shield long enough to be genuinely affected. Communication barriers compound when both partners feel perpetually on trial, because the posture of self-protection forecloses the very contact that repair requires.

Somatic practice: Practice receiving before responding. When something lands hard, place one hand on the chest and take a slow breath before speaking. The physical gesture activates the body's self-soothing capacity and creates a half-second interruption between stimulus and reaction, which is often exactly the space where a different choice becomes possible.

7. Has Goodwill Eroded to the Point Where Even Kind Gestures Feel Suspicious?
In healthy relationships, goodwill acts as a buffer, softening a partner's minor irritating behavior through an underlying felt sense of connection. In crisis couples, that buffer has eroded, and the loss of positive sentiment override means that neutral or even kind actions get read through a negative filter. Trust rebuilding under these conditions is slow, because the nervous system has learned to treat the partner's presence as a source of threat rather than safety.

Somatic practice: Build a daily micro-ritual of positive contact: a real hug (six seconds minimum activates oxytocin), a moment of genuine eye contact, a brief touch. Over time, the nervous system begins to re-associate the partner's presence with safety rather than threat, which is the biological precondition for trust rebuilding to take root.

8. Is Emotional Numbing Keeping One Partner Unreachable?
Some partners shut down not through stonewalling but through dissociation. They are present in body but have learned, often over years of unresolved conflict or emotional invalidation, not to feel. The emotional disconnection reads to the other partner as indifference, and trust rebuilding feels impossible when one partner seems to have no access to emotion at all.

Somatic practice: Begin with sensation rather than feeling. Ask: "What do you notice in your body right now?" Not "What do you feel?" but where, specifically: chest, throat, belly, jaw. Naming physical sensation builds a bridge back into emotional experience without demanding a performance the partner cannot yet access.

9. Are Your Repair Attempts Landing, or Are They Invisible?
Even healthy couples rupture. What distinguishes them is the ability to repair, and repair attempts require a vulnerability that couples in crisis often cannot access. A clumsy joke, a touch on the arm, a simple "I'm sorry things got so hard" can turn a conflict in a healthier relationship. In a crisis couple, those same gestures often go unrecognized, which is one of the subtler communication barriers in couples therapy: the attempt is made, but the other partner's nervous system, still on high alert, cannot receive it.

Somatic practice: Make repair attempts explicit and legible. Name them: "I want to try to come back toward you. Can I reach for your hand?" Verbal cuing removes the ambiguity that makes small gestures invisible and gives the other partner something clear to orient toward.

10. Are You Living Side by Side Without Actually Making Contact?
Some couples arrive in crisis not because they fight constantly but because they have stopped touching each other's inner worlds entirely. Emotional disconnection here is structural: each partner manages their own sphere, and the relationship has become a logistics arrangement. Communication barriers in this kind of crisis are less about conflict and more about the slow withdrawal of genuine curiosity and presence, which is its own form of relationship repair in counseling challenge because there is no obvious rupture to point to.

Somatic practice: Practice a weekly "State of the Union" check-in: ten minutes each, uninterrupted. One partner speaks, one witnesses. No advice, no rebuttal, no problem-solving. The witnessing partner keeps their body soft and attention full. Over time, felt presence rebuilds what scheduling and logistics cannot, because what most couples in crisis are actually starving for is the experience of being truly known.

A Note on Somatic Work and Couples Therapy Crisis Reconnection
The practices above are not techniques to deploy in the heat of conflict. They are capacities to build in steadier moments so they become available under stress. The body holds the record of relational injury, and it also holds the capacity for relational repair, but that capacity has to be cultivated before crisis, not conjured in the middle of one.

If you and your partner are navigating emotional disconnection and communication has broken down at the level of the nervous system, working with a somatic couples therapist trained in both relational and somatic approaches can help you move at the speed your bodies actually need.

When silence takes up residence between two people who used to know each other's bodies, it can be a major relational pain point. I'm not talking about the comfortable lack of sexual urgency of long familiarity. I mean the silence that fills the space where desire used to live and where touch used to be natural.

One of you reaches for physical connection, and the other tightens, or retreats, or simply goes somewhere else inside themselves. And both people feel despairing and hopeless, worrying about living inside a sexually dead marriage, or a sexless partnership. 

Talk therapy helps couples understand the absence of erotic connection. Somatic sex therapy helps them move through it.

What Somatic Sex Therapy Actually Is

The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning living body. Somatic sex therapy is a body-centered approach to sexual and relational healing built on the premise that the body holds what the mind cannot always articulate. Trauma has an address in the musculature. Desire is a physiological event before it is ever a thought. Shame has a shape in the chest, a particular quality of breath, a way of making eye contact disappear.

Traditional talk therapy works from the top down, the idea is that if you  understand why sex isn't happening, you can change. Somatic approaches work from the bottom up, starting with sensation, breath, and physical presence and letting meaning emerge from what the body is already saying.

For couples, this distinction matters enormously. Most of the patterns that keep two people stuck are not primarily cognitive problems. The pursuer who crowds, the withdrawer who vanishes, the one who freezes when touched in a particular way: these are body responses. Nervous system patterns respond to nervous system-level interventions. Insight alone tends not to reach your sexual patterns and habits. 

Somatic sex therapy does not involve touch between therapist and client. A somatic sex therapist guides couples through exercises, breath practices, and body-awareness work that they do with each other, at home or in session. The work is always boundaried, always consent-based, and always paced to what each person can actually tolerate.

Why Couples End Up Here

The couples I work with in intensive settings rarely show up saying "I need somatic sex therapy." They show up saying things like:

• We haven't had sex in two years and I don't know how to talk about it.
• My partner wants more than I can give and I feel like I'm failing.
• Since the affair I can't let him touch me without wanting to leave my body.
• We love each other but something is gone and I don't know where it went.

What all of these share is the body's central involvement in the problem. Libido does not live in the thinking brain. Arousal, desire, the capacity to receive touch, the felt sense of safety with another person are physiological experiences first.

When a relationship fractures, the nervous system registers it. And when a nervous system has learned that intimacy means danger, or disappointment, or disappearance, it will protect accordingly, even when both partners consciously want things to be different.

Somatic sex therapy addresses that protection by earning its release rather than dismantling it.

What the Research Tells Us

The integration of body-based approaches into couples work is increasingly supported by clinical literature. A 2025 review in Somatic Psychotherapy Today found that somatic resonance, the process of attending to both partners' bodily states simultaneously, opens access to vulnerability and shared humanity that talk alone cannot reach. Research on emotionally focused couples therapy has shown that therapist attention to somatic cues significantly deepens the quality of emotional experiencing for both pursuers and withdrawers in the room.

What Couples Somatic Sex Therapy Looks Like in Practice

A somatic approach to couples intimacy tends to include several overlapping threads.

Breathwork and co-regulation. Partners practice synchronized breathing as a way of learning that two nervous systems can find rhythm together. Many couples have never intentionally done this. The effect is often immediate and surprising.

Body tracking and sensation language. Each partner learns to notice and name their physical experience in real time, moving from generalities like "I feel disconnected" toward specifics like "I notice my chest tightens and my eyes want to look away when you reach for me." Precision changes the conversation from blame to information.

Sensate focus exercises. Developed originally by Masters and Johnson, sensate focus invites couples to explore touch free of pressure or performance expectations. A somatic practitioner adapts this to include attunement to nervous system response, attending to where touch feels welcome, where it creates contraction, where the body holds its breath.

Somatic mirroring. Partners reflect each other's posture, gesture, and movement as a way of building the felt experience of being seen. Embodied attunement is a prerequisite for erotic connection, and mirroring practices rebuild that foundation.
Working with the window of tolerance. Every person has a range of activation within which they can stay present and engaged. Flood above that range and reactivity or shutdown follows; drop below it and numbness and absence take over.

Somatic work helps couples learn each other's windows and develop the capacity to stay inside them together, especially in moments of closeness.

Talking and Consent. Something particularly important in my work is helping couples learn to talk about sex, and embody consent skills. We practice these things in session, so when you are on your own, you are building on supported practice. 

The Common Presenting Issues

Couples seek somatic sex therapy for a range of specific concerns. Desire discrepancy is perhaps the most common: one partner wants more intimacy than the other, and the gap has become a source of shame, resentment, or grief on both sides. A somatic approach explores what desire actually feels like in each person's body, where it shows up, what inhibits it, and what conditions allow it to surface.

Sexual trauma is another significant thread. Trauma responses do not read an invitation to intimacy and determine it is now safe to stand down. The body that learned to brace, freeze, or flee will continue doing so until something changes at the somatic level. Skilled somatic sex therapists know how to titrate the pace so that healing happens without re-traumatization, and a trauma-informed framework is essential throughout.

Couples navigating infertility, postpartum changes, illness, or major life transition often find that their physical relationship carries the weight of everything they cannot control. The body becomes a place where grief, fear, and resentment accumulate. Somatic work creates a way to process that accumulation together rather than carrying it in silence.

Long-term couples who have drifted into parallel lives, devoted partners who have become strangers at night, often respond particularly well to body-based approaches. The issue in these relationships is usually not conflict or mistrust but a kind of embodied forgetting, and somatic practice offers a way back into each other.

What Somatic Sex Therapy Is Not

Somatic sex therapy is not a substitute for medical evaluation when physical symptoms are present. Vaginismus, painful intercourse, and erectile dysfunction all warrant evaluation by a physician or pelvic floor specialist alongside any therapeutic work.

It is also not a quick fix. The body learns slowly and teaches slowly. Couples who come to a three-day intensive often leave with more access to each other than they had in years, and the work continues after they leave the room.
Both partners are active in this process. The therapist creates the conditions and guides the work; the couple does it. Somatic sex therapy is not something that happens to you.

Finding the Right Somatic Practitioner

A somatic sex therapist should hold some type of credential as a mental health professional, whether psychologist, licensed counselor, licensed marriage and family therapist, or equivalent, alongside specific training in somatic approaches and sex therapy. Look for training through recognized bodies: AASECT certification indicates specific sex therapy training; Somatic Experiencing training through the SE Trauma Institute indicates grounding in the body-based trauma model. Relational Life Therapy training, which I hold alongside my somatic psychology doctorate, adds a relational framework I find essential in couples work. I am also a Certified Sexological Bodyworker, and have training in Strozzi Somatics and generative somatics. I am also trained in Somatic Experiencing, and have over 15 years working on topics of sexuality with individuals and couples. 
​
Ask a prospective therapist directly about their training, their approach to boundaries and consent in body-based work, and their experience with whatever is most central to your situation, whether that is trauma, desire discrepancy, long-term disconnection, or something else entirely.

A Note on Couples Intensives

For couples in acute crisis, or for those who have limited access to ongoing weekly therapy due to geography or scheduling, a couples intensive offers a concentrated container for this work. Rather than fifty minutes a week, an intensive creates an extended arc of three days in which couples can move through material that would take months to surface in weekly sessions.

The body-based component of intensive work is particularly powerful in this format. There is time to go slowly, to track sensation carefully, to let something complete itself rather than cutting it off at the hour mark. Many couples leave an intensive with a felt sense of each other they had stopped believing was available.

If you are a couple carrying a silence you cannot name, somatic sex therapy may be a place to begin. The body knows things the conversation has not yet reached. And sometimes, what a relationship needs most is permission to start there.

What does it mean if you feel contempt in your relationship?
(Read until the end to get your free resource.)

I recently heard the phrase "Normal Marital Hatred" in my RLT training.
When I heard this I thought, "Yep, I know that feeling."

I've written elsewhere about my two marriages, but in the story I'm going to tell you, I am 29. I've been married for four years. We have a small home we've built together. It is a shoes-off house.

There are two steps leading up to the front door of the house. My then-husband has a habit of leaving his shoes in the middle of the steps. So that I either have to move them, or step over them.

I arrive home first from work. And on this particular day, I've had it. My students were a pain in the butt, my lessons didn't work, and my boss was micro-managing. I just wanted to come home, have a nice dinner, and chill.
I'm entering the house, and as usual, his boots are in the way, but in my urgency to enter, I don't see them. I trip, and fall through the threshold.

A swoosh of rage rushes through me. Why can't he put his fucking shoes on the fucking shoe rack that is RIGHT NEXT TO THE DOOR???

Instead of responding as an adult, I react from my adaptive child. I pick up his boots and throw them into the snow-covered yard, in two different directions.

After, I'm standing in my kitchen fuming. What an inconsiderate asshole. He doesn't think of anyone else but himself. Selfish. Entitled.

What I didn't know at the time is that I was stewing in my Core Negative Image of my partner.

I remember thinking, 'Ah, this must be marriage then. You just hate your partner, and keep going.'

At the time, it seemed clear that this was just the trajectory of relationships. And truly, the married people I knew all seemed to hate their partners, even if just a little bit.

My then-husband came home puzzled and annoyed that I'd thrown his boots in the yard. He didn't stop leaving them on the steps. I didn't have the tools to explain what I needed (consideration) and what I was asking for (please put them on the shoe rack.)

And so the contempt trajectory continued, until it reached its obvious conclusion: divorce.

Fast forward 25 years.

My current partner and I were going through a challenging season.
When I started to feel contempt, my lips would turn down. I didn't want to look at him. I felt gross inside.

Something in me went "Uh oh. Oh no."

I recognized the feelings. I got quiet, and sought what was beneath that feeling.
What I found surprised me: deep yearning for mutual cherishing.

I yearned to cherish, and be cherished.

There was an ache, like something had gone missing from the place it had always been.

The goodwill and warm positive regard I had felt for years was just... gone. I felt grief, and deep concern.

This time, instead of accepting contempt as a normal phase of a relationship, I challenged myself: maybe this was a warning sign. Not something to wait out.

A huge problem with contempt and resentment is that you are the one holding them.

The poison is in you, slowly eroding the love and care you used to have. And to be honest, they are fairly come by. You don't start hating your person in a vacuum.
There is a backlog of unrepaired wounds. The triggers have gotten grooved.
They are too predictable, and you know too well the path the fight will take. But you are the one living with the unmetabolized pain. It's hurting you and your good life.

(I'm imagining standing on a pulpit preaching about the value of love and relationship) But there is a way back from contempt!

It starts with deciding you love yourself too much to live with it.

Surprised?

So now what?

Decisions, decisions.

• Is the relationship salvageable?
• Will you keep on keeping on, misery intact?
• Will you leave? And take your own bullshit with you, even as you escape theirs?​

When I felt contempt in my current marriage, I knew exactly where that road led.
So I got my ass into therapy with a Relational Life Therapist who could help me clean up what was on my side of the street. (I'm the one who hurls boots, remember?)

I have recovered my warm positive regard for my partner.

I do not feel contempt anymore.

I work regularly to replace my core negative image of my partner with a better version.

My marriage now feels like the marriage I want to be in.

Feeling contempt was the warning sign that made me take action instead of sitting passively and letting things unfold.

Here's the counterintuitive good news: if you hate them, it means you still care. There is still room to do the work.

My Relational Life Therapy teacher, Terry Real, says it's possible to live a contempt-free life. I believe him, because I'm living it.

If any of this landed for you, I made something specifically for you.
It's called The Contempt Audit: A self-assessment for when you're done pretending you don't hate your partner a little. Free PDF guide and audio recording, if you're sitting with feelings you haven't quite named.
​
Grab your free guide

I love Valentine’s Day, and my partner thinks it’s completely pointless.
That difference easily turns into hurt feelings, unspoken expectations, and conflict.
Holidays like Valentine’s Day often expose an uncomfortable dynamic: one partner feels they are carrying more of the emotional labor of the relationship.

My story, when my partner didn’t show up on Feb 14 bedazzled with hearts and candy and romantic gestures, was that I care more about our relationship than they do.

As a couples therapist, I see this dynamic show up frequently.
​
The core problem is the pursuer-distancer imbalance: one partner experiences relational inequity, or the perception of it.

Let's talk about the Relational Life Therapy (RLT) model of “The More, The More.”

The more you pursue, the more they avoid.

• Their avoidance increases your anxiety, which leads you to pursue more.​

Feel Familiar?

Pursuing and avoiding do not create relational safety, nor joy. Over time, the connection suffers.

Relational Joy is the point of relationships: the soothing ease, contentment, and delight you experience when you and your person have stepped out of the dance of pursuit and avoidance.

Many of my clients can understand this cognitively, but applying the corrective is more difficult.

What do you even do?

Here are two things to chew on, for the sake of your relational joy.
1. Attention
Attention is the currency of a relationship.

• Do you respond to my bids for affection?
• Do you hear my pain, or are you listening through your defensiveness?
• Can I soften how I share feedback to not push you away, but bring you closer instead?

Attention Action: Send or say one appreciative message today.​
2. Prioritization
I worked with a couple once, and when I asked one of the men, “What are your priorities?” he said, “My husband is my priority.”
His husband had been complaining about not feeling attended to, so I didn’t buy it.
“Prove it,” I asked, “Show me your calendar.”
His calendar was full of work meetings, friend activities, and family events.

Not one mention of his partner!

Here's the thing.

The primacy of the bond must be intentionally nourished, and it starts with your calendar.

Intentional time together, and attentional time together, where you are engaging with one another.

A date night that involves a movie may be nice and relaxing, but is it connective? Do you feel closer?

Prioritization Action: Schedule one protected hour together this week and focus on connection.

Not feeling connected
?Feeling like you care more than your partner?I am opening a limited number of Relationship Reset calls this month.

In this session, we identify your pursue-avoid pattern, map what keeps it stuck, and create the first concrete shifts you can start using immediately.

If your relationship matters to you, do not wait for the pattern to fix itself (it won't.)
​Book your call and begin shifting the pattern now.