Occasional conflict is normal in healthy relationships. If you are an imperfect human, fostering a long-term relationship with another imperfect human, you will bump into disagreements and points of tension along the way. But, how do you resolve conflict without fighting?

When we are constantly in an energy of over analyzing and overthinking, the wires in our brain get crossed, and we begin detecting threats in our environment that aren’t actually there. Your brain starts responding to a past narrative, a past pain, as if it’s actually happening in the present moment…

When we go through the process of honoring the pain, grieving, feeling the anger, processing the pain throughout the body, that experience becomes integrated. Through this integration, we increase our awareness, our wisdom, and our ability to discern. We take the nuggets of wisdom from that painful experience and now carry it with us in an integrated way, versus a painful, triggering way.

When you operate from the unconscious programing that you need to rescue your clients or you need to hold their pain for them, you will rush your clients through their uncomfortable emotional experiences.

In order to see your partner for who they are instead of who fear makes them out to be, you must ⁠learn to feel safe in your nervous system when it comes to love and relationships.

When we see ourselves and our partners through the lens of love, we feel spacious, open, curious, and playful. When we see through the lens of fear - we feel tense, urgent, panicked, and hopeless.

When you learn to somatically attune to your client’s experience of trauma and safety, you know exactly how to support them in a way that makes them feel safe. This is how trauma-informed transformation happens.

If trauma is stored in the body, then knowing how to attune to your client's body is essential.

If trauma is released through the body, then knowing how to somatically guide your client's body to safety is essential.

Bottom line: If trauma-informed work does not include the body, it is not truly trauma-informed.

It’s very tempting to place meaning on this, and begin to interpret the fact that you’re struggling to connect intimately as “oh, something must be wrong…we must not be compatible…if we really loved each other enough or if we were really attracted to each other enough, then sex and intimacy would just be easy.”

This actually isn’t true.

There are a few different reasons why you may be experiencing intrusive thoughts during intimacy.

The space that used to be filled with anxiety, rumination, and overthinking, now gets to be filled with LIFE.

This is what can happen when you heal. This is what’s possible when anxiety isn’t running the show anymore. This is who you get to be when you aren’t stuck in your head all the time.

When you have resilience in your relationship, you no longer experience constantly intrusive thoughts about what your emotions “mean,” or when the other shoe is going to drop.

You no longer feel like you HAVE to be constantly thinking about, talking about, and working on your relationship or else something bad is going to happen.

You no longer project unpleasant emotions and experiences onto your relationship or your partner.

Instead of trying to “get” your partner to meet your needs - which often turns into nit-picking, manipulation, withholding love/information as a “test” of their commitment to you, not speaking to your needs because “they should just know” - make it so incredibly SAFE and enjoyable for them to meet your needs, and trust that they will.

Some values are foundational. They are the foundation from which everything else in the relationship can rest on. They can hold the relationship even when there’s differences. Even fundamental differences - personality, social desires, spiritual beliefs. Even though these are seemingly huge differences, there are certain shared values that provide a strong enough foundation that those differences don’t rattle the relationship, and that those differences actually add dimension and balance to the relationship.

Society has handed us a fantasy that once you are in a romantic relationship with the “right” person, you will never feel uncomfortable feelings again. You’ll never feel lonely, insecure, or bored. The “right” relationship will rescue you from the things that you experienced before being in a relationship.