Being Fully, Freely Yourself in a Healthy Relationship. What Authentic Connection Feels Like.
July 5, 2017
My inner distress, when I fight it, keeps me from truly connecting with others – when I bring an attitude of kindness and compassion towards it, letting go of the chatter in my mind and feeling everything in my body, I can connect with others.
How can we be truly ourselves in a healthy relationship with another? It takes awareness and the courage to be the truest version of yourself. When you are hoping to create a transformative relationship with another, it will mean challenging your old ways of being and relating to yourself first, and then how you relate to someone else.
Together, we will be with your relational history and touch into the pain – both emotional and embodied – that you may have felt, and still may feel, when in relationship to another.
At some time in your history, you may have learned that you needed to suppress yourself and your needs in order to stay in connection with your parents or caregivers. We learn that we can’t be our full selves, because our caregivers weren’t able to be with all of us – so we learn to suppress our authenticity and aliveness, without being aware of it, even now, as an adult.
As children, we will do anything maintain our attachment with our parents – and in so doing, we learned to disconnect from the truth in ourselves. Now, as an adult, you have the opportunity to heal these relational patterns – and your ways of being in your relationships.
Notice what you long for – what you hope will complete you in your life. With awareness, notice what you feel is missing in your life and what you want in a relationship. Then, just for now, give this to yourself.
You may feel that you can’t give yourself everything that another person could give you, and I would say, yes, being in a healthy relationship with another is different than giving ourselves what we need – but just as important for us.
When you begin to slow down, notice and turn towards feelings and sensations in yourself, and in your body, you begin to notice all of your impulses that you may or may not pay attention to. Paying attention to what you need is the beginning of learning how to take care of yourself.
When you begin there, you lay the foundation for a nourishing relationship with another. When you take responsibility for your own emotional needs and wounding, you can release your partner from doing this for you – as this is not their job.
When you can release your expectation that your partner be whatever was missing in your earlier developmental history, you may be able to be authentically vulnerable and truthful and allow yourself to be deeply intimate with another.
Begin to notice your somatic (body-focused) experience – the feelings in your body that you push away and do anything not to feel, and what you do to distract yourself from feelings your emotions. Stay with the feelings, move closer to them, and allow yourself to be curious about what you don’t want to feel.
Together, we will notice your feelings, and come to know them intimately. Your feelings can be understood, worked through and integrated in a place of kindness and understanding.
If you are searching for someone to make the emptiness in your life go away, relieve you from feelings and limiting beliefs you do not want to confront, and allow you not to feel the feelings that arise from your unlived life. As long as we are looking to our partners to fulfill those functions that were not offered to us as young children, it will be difficult to come into a fulfilling, loving relationship that is not focused on our expectations of what we need to make up for the past.
Your partner is there to help and support you with love, but not to take care of you and live your life for you – you are healthy and well, and can do this for yourself.
Being in a healthy relationship is about navigating unknown territory on an ongoing basis – and something you must live and co-create in each moment.
The way we relate to others in relationships – our emotional struggles and even physical pain, can be traced back to the way we were nurtured in childhood – what we were subjected to or witnessed during this formative time, can be traced back to how resilient our nervous system is now.
By allowing in support, and learning to take care of yourself, you are creating a foundation within yourself, where you discover what allows you to come alive – and begin to let go of your projections onto a ‘perfect’ other.
If you want to develop new awareness and aliveness in yourself – understand your relational history, heal from a break-up or divorce and create a healthy blueprint for new relationships – AND – if you are in a relationship now and want to understand your attachment patterns, shift the focus of your relationship, heal the pain of old habits, and increase the resiliency of your nervous system – get in touch.
I work with individuals and couples – using a relational, emotionally-focused and embodied process of healing from painful feelings of abandonment, overwhelm, anger, loneliness, trauma and unworthiness. As someone who has done and continues to do their own personal work, and is highly trained in relational psychotherapy, embodied practices, transgenerational trauma, and nervous system regulation.
With a somatic, relational, body-focused approach, you can heal long standing relational patterns held in your body, mind and heart.
I look forward to being with you.
with love, Kim xoxo.
www.s3p.d51.myftpupload.com / [email protected]
Tap into your flowing life energy, connect with your deepest self and feel compassion, kindness and understanding. In-person & Skype sessions are available for individuals & couples – open space for truth and aliveness to rise.
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www.s3p.d51.myftpupload.com / [email protected]
