As if being a human wasn’t hard enough; now we have to figure out how to be together.
Competition. Sex. Communication. Trauma.
As a couple, you have been able to navigate small challenges such as your first fights, differences in opinion, and other minor hiccups. But when it comes to the future or larger issues, it feels like you both can’t come to an agreement or reach a compromise. Not much is harder than figuring out how to love your partner in all of their messy humanness — and there’s also not much that’s more important. Real Love is tough.
Which version of you shows up in your relationships?
"I'm excelling in my professional life but my personal life seems nonexistent."
Have you ever felt as if you were an unwitting passenger in your own interactions with your partner? Maybe your the explosive type. Maybe you withdraw. May you’re neither aggressive or withdrawn, maybe for the most part you’re moderate, even-tempered, and sensible — it’s just your partner isn’t.
Welcome to humanity. After a fight, sooner or later — in minutes, hours or days — you come to your senses. And then it’s time to do damage control. We have all been there.
And you both move on sweeping the whole thing under the rug until the next one.
Which version of you shows up in your relationships?
It's Time to Remember Love
Before you pick up the verbal knife, before you brick yourself in even further, let me remind you that you love this person. Therein lies the truth of recovery in your relationship – do you remember, really, in that heated moment when fear or righteous anger spouts that you truly love this person. The sobering answer, in you’re dead honest with yourself, is that you do not. In that heated moment, the sweetness between you, the sense of the two of you facing the world together, the sense of us, is nearly impossible to locate.
The good news is love is still there
What’s Your Trauma?
Your nervous system, brain and body need a loving reset
Your autonomic nervous system — far below your consciousness — is in flight-or-flight, spurring you on or shutting you down. The higher functions of your brain have completely gone offline, not to mention, you’re triggered by something that happened when you were 10. In the middle of a fight, without that soothing connection of our partner, we lose the ability to pause between what we feel and what we do.
Couples therapy at Sauna Theapy
how it works
When I am working with clients I have one question: What are your stressors? Stressors like money problems, mismatched sex drives, kids, in-laws -are all important, but with childhood trauma spilling our cups over these issues may very well feel like life or death.
01
The triggered part sees life through the past
In couples therapy, we try to figure out which parts of you are online in your relationship. There is no such thing as overreacting – you’re partner just may be reacting to things that aren’t physically in front of them.
02
With Your Partner You’re Safe Enough to ‘Go High’
There is no redeeming value in harshness. If you walk away from couples therapy with this one concept, you will have your money well spent. Harshness does nothing that loving firmness doesn’t do better.
03
Moving beyond the autonomic and automatic
If you’ve worked with Sauna for long enough you’ve probably heard of the word relational trauma – that’s right – trauma from old mom and dad. It doesn’t mean that mom and dad were right or wrong; it just means we learned automatic patterns from their behaviors. We want to break these patterns and look at your reality without repeating generational trauma; raising consciousness, insight, discipline and grace. Shifting from an automatic, thoughtless response to you and me consciousness.