Relationship Therapist – Is Love Enough
Dear Zakir, We often speak about "love", but is love enough for a relationship to be sustained? At times it feels like my partner and I are just two strangers sharing a bedroom. We have been married for 7 years and I wonder if there will be an 8th! Need help from a relationship therapist! What can you suggest to improve my situation?
Dear Ava,
Is love really enough to bind a relationship for years on end? Love most definitely plays a pivotal part in the equation, however, as a couple, you typically need more. That is, a little more awareness and self-growth which will help push your relationship to new heights to feeling secure, connected, and understood as a person.
Meet Ashley & Sara (South Africa, Relationship Counseling Clients)
Ashley and Sara were very much in love during their courting years as high school sweethearts. They felt they were soulmates and everything had always just clicked. Fast forward ten years and Sara is a professional woman who has a career and is looking after a young child. Ashley works from home and is building his own business. They have been married for a few years and their intimate lives are a mess. Sara is heavily invested in her career and when she is not working, being a mom is a full-time job. She has no time for anything else.
Ashley’s biggest issue is that they aren’t having sex anymore. Ok, we will come back to this in a bit.
Emotional and physical desire may have been the catalyst that got one hooked at the beginning, and those good feelings were labeled as love. When the honeymoon period fades and everyday life happens, most couples find themselves in what I called “surviving monotony”.
Back to Relationship Counseling with Sara & Ashley
Sara contacted me for relationship counseling. In their first session, it was clear they were living two separate lives. Spending as little as 30 mins of quality time together as a couple had become their norm. Yes, they lived together, but their essence of personal connection and commitment to each other was lost and thus kept busy with other things.
A critical question in relationship therapy is,
“Always ask yourself if you’re putting as much into your relationship as you are into your career, exercise goals, friendships…”
As a relationship therapist, my approach to any form of relationship counseling or therapy comes from first helping you take personal responsibility and accountability for yourself. I help you focus on your personal growth as an individual because it’s a foundational aspect of the overall relationship. It’s often the perceived lack within us that triggers the decay in the relationship.
In relationship therapy, couples have an expectation around proving who is right and who is wrong when the relationship is failing. Factual truths are always biased based on personal beliefs. In most situations both perspectives of both partners are correct.
In a typical relationship, each person comes in with different perspectives or world views on how things should be. These perspectives or views are ingrained from the time one is a baby and continues to develop and shape as one gets older.
Our basic subconscious relationship manual is installed through our observations as children from our primary caregivers. Now, if we have a couple with two different manuals on how relationships should be, what kind of outcomes would we expect? We tend to project these outcomes onto our partners. In most cases, these projections are an inner wounding of not feeling valued prior to the current relationship. Can our partners truly measure up to our own subconscious patterns of relating?
THE QUESTION WE EACH NEED to ask and BE truly upfront and vulnerable about in our conversations is:
What do we truly desire in life? The majority of my clients want a sense of personal freedom. They often feel stuck and can’t find solutions because they are doing the same thing over and over again. They are looking for something different, yet are unable to identify what exactly it is.
(Back to Relationship Therapy with Sara & Ashley in South Africa)
Sara, your typical working mom’s home chores included wiping poop and cleaning up after the kids, cooking, and running around the house. When it came to her personal time, she retreated to bed to read or to sleep from the sheer exhaustion of being on autopilot. In our relationship therapy sessions, she rediscovered that she wanted to feel valued and cared for, however, Ashley never picked up on the cues. She couldn’t express this to Ashley, as most of their conversations ended up as an argument. So, why try! The magic was taken out of her life. Focusing on her own self-worth and making minor changes to how she perceived her life started making her feel more vibrant and excited for the day. Taking personal responsibility for her trajectory of herself led to the overall well-being of their marriage. Ashley had his role to play as well. His story of creating his business as the main focus is to be the provider and that was an important value for him. It was about finding the balance to learn learning skills to better communicate, and understand what Sara actually wanted in the relationship without her feeling attacked during their conversations.
It’s in this finding in ourselves and our role in life that generates excitement for living that brings fresh energy to any relationship. In doing so, we no longer see our partners as a possession but rather as an individual with whom we co-create the relationship we want. We learn to heal and let go of the old outdated tools that we learned as a child which is no longer serving us and develop emotional maturity that leads to greater depths of connection, love, and desire.
As a starting point in any relationship counseling, I invite you to:-
3 Tips For Igniting Your Relationship
1) Have a conscious heartfelt conversation about where you both are in your lives
Far too often, we are afraid to take that first step in being open and vulnerable. It’s our vulnerability that creates the opening for change.
2) Break the routine
Try to remember the good times you had in the relationship and invite those activities again, for example, a simple date night, salsa lessons, invite fun, silliness, and laughter back in.
3) Sex
Did you know the number one excuse for not having sex is, “I am sick, tired, or not in the mood”. Did you know orgasms are a natural cure for headaches? Make time for sex. Sex naturally brings a feeling of closeness and releases the love chemical oxytocin.
We have time for everything else. Why not time for sex?
Listen to my podcast on emotional intimacy 101
I always say, “Through Pleasure, We Heal”.
Embody your success in life and in the bedroom. Be present on the journey and let go of chasing the destination. You can and will reach it in the most playful of ways. It is just a matter of changing perspective.
If you like to schedule a One on One deep dive into your own tailored solution on moving past your symptoms to epic relationships and great Orgasms you can book your discovery call here.
Zakir Mahomedy
Somatic Relationship Therapist
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