Comprehensive Care For Your Relationship
Intimate And Collaborative Conversations
At the root of many relationship problems is a needed conversation that’s not happening. With hurt feelings partners often argue and/or withdraw from each other. Learning how to express hurt feelings, hopes and desires, without blaming your partner or feeling ashamed, can be the needed conversation that shifts the dynamic to one that’s more intimate and confiding. In an intimate and collaborative conversation partners talk with each other as if observing the problem from a platform, suspended high above the fray, looking down at the situation and people with compassionate curiosity, awareness, and reflection. Practicing this kind of Intimate Conversation is a fundamental skill for improving your relationship.
Learning how to collaborate with your partner means having an orientation toward understanding, acknowledging, and appreciating how the two of you are a team. When you forget this and mess-up (which you will) you will learn how to apologize and repair your mistake without guilt, shame, or self-reproach. Repair conversations are intimate in and of themselves. Intimate conversations are the foundation of Dan Wile’s Collaborative Couple Therapy.