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Healthy Relationship Program: Create Rituals and Transform your Relationship
When veteran parents give advice to new parents, they often start by explaining the value of routines: bedtimes, storytimes, mealtimes, etc. Well, guess what? We may outgrow footed pajamas and Sippy cups, but we don’t outgrow our need for rituals—repeated, regular events you come to rely on, routines that help you gauge your days.
The Power of Love Rituals
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Healthy Relationships: Assessing the Emotional Safety
Couples seek relationship counseling for numerous reasons. As a professional who works with many different couples with a variety of issues, I’ve identified one similar thread that runs through all of them. Their relationships lack in varying degrees of “emotional safety.” Typically, the couples who present as the most hostile, distant, angry, disengaged or otherwise dysfunctional are the least emotionally safe together. Even people who come for counseling who have less glaring issues can benefit from a tune-up in this area.
So what is “emotional safety” in a relationship? I define this as the level of comfort both people feel with each other. There are six aspects in which to assess the emotional safety in a relationship. They are respect, feeling heard, understanding, validation, empathy and love. How can one assess their own relationship based on this paradigm? When working with couples, I often ask each partner to rate, from zero to ten, (zero being “never” and ten being “all the time”) how much they feel each of the six mentioned aspects of emotional safety from their partner. I chart it out with each person’s name written on the top of a piece of paper with a column under each. Then on the left side I list the six aspects with rows next to them.