Seize Love: The Psychology of Relationships in Practice

GITTE SANDER

Seize Love

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELATIONSHIPS IN PRACTICE

Copyright © 2016 Gitte Sander

All rights reserved

First published 2012 by Duo, Denmark

Reprinted second edition 2016 by Gyldendal, Denmark

ISBN 978-87-995298-4-1 epub

Published by Duo 2017

www.gittesander.dk

Cover design Courage Design

Photographer Kirstine Mengel

First edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the good people who have supported and inspired me in the process of writing this book. 

I hold a deep sense of gratitude towards psychologist and senior clinical instructor, Jette Simon, my collaborator through many years, an inspiring colleague and mentor who has taught me a great deal of what I pass on throughout this book. 

During my education in and my work for The Imago Institute and Imago Relationships International I have gained a thorough knowledge of the Imago method, which is built upon the work of PhD Harville Hendrix and PhD Helen LaKelly Hunt whose visions and intentions continue to reverberate in most parts of the world. I owe them and Imago Relationships International many thanks. IRI counts members from all parts of the world and besides feeling respectful towards IRI's global work with Imago, I feel grateful towards every individual who participate in the existing forums for professional development, reflection and inspiration.

I also want to thank the individuals, the couples and the families who trustfully allow me to become a part of their journeys through any of our therapy sessions.  Many people doesn't know exactly how amazing and rewarding this job is.

Thanks to everybody who has backed up the publication of the book, everyone who has encouraged me to write and who has given me advices, especially Elsebeth Mørup, Christina Boel Pedersen, Signe Ryge and Jørgen Søndergård. Without your great support and inspiration this book would not have been written and I owe you the deepest debt of gratitude. In addition I want to thank Tea Stræde Spile, Christian Topp and Birte Gam-Jensen for their great work with the translation of the material and for making it possible to spread the word in English.

And at last a most important and heartfelt thanks to my beloved children, Jonas, Anna and Sofie for their love, support and inspiration. Their magnificent resources have made it possible for me not only to learn as a parent in the parenting process of recollection but also to improve my professional competence and my work.

PREFACE

Some individuals have a soul connection and a love to each other, which seems to be endless. From time to time they recognize intense glimpses of love in their partner's eyes. They have connected and it shows in the way they look at each other. Something sacred lies within this gaze, which can be passed on as an unshakeable calmness into their children's hearts.

There is a sacred and healing space in the existence of love between two people. Something we all need, not only as a means to please us in the present moment, but also as a spearhead which can provide a sense of direction regarding our future lives. But it isn't always easy - handling love.

When I was forty-something I had developed a rather self-centered focus. Part of the psychotherapeutic training I had gone through concentrated inwards without adequately considering the bigger picture or one's own contributions to the world. For me getting to know Imago therapy became a kind of relational rebirth through the realization that creating and maintaining a relationship always takes at least two people. 

This was the eye-opener that caused me to begin to take another kind of responsibility and to see the reality around me for what it actually was. I became more open in close relations, I began to develop my own contributions and I experienced a new sense of being connected, which was ground-breaking for my view of life. A door opened to an inner source, which has driven my commitment to the writing process of this book and continuously motivates me in my daily work. The greatest nourishment in my work is watching with my own eyes, listening with my ears and sensing in my heart the temporary glimpses of potent, pure love in the presence and the contact between people during couple counseling sessions.

In this book I seek to capture the space and the language of the heart and some of the many different paths love can take. Pure, deep felt love is not always easy to achieve and sometimes it even causes chaos and pain in our lives to love. It is my hope and intention that by passing on the experience I have gained partly from my professional work as a therapist and partly from my own love life this book can be of help to others. I will describe some of the patterns and the structures which have helped me to a greater understanding and vigor and which I have found to be rewarding and reassuring paths to follow, safe and clever steps to take, to handle the chaos and pain, that love in fact also sometimes shows up with.

As a couple counsellor I have the great privilege to shower in thoughts about what love is, how it arises and how it is healed. In the attempt to find answers to the questions popping up I consult science, some spirituality plus my own experiences as well as others. When I am in a session with a couple and I open the spaces in me that are resonant to the love between others it is like a tuning fork where the couples' relationship makes the prongs vibrate and I tune in on how to make the couples' instrument play beautifully again. I perceive my own role not only as a purely psychological professional, but also as a human detective of love who needs to find the love-sprouts that are hiding in the ground between the partners and figure out how they are malnourished and what is needed for the couple to start growing again.

People are created in wonderfully different ways, physically as well as mentally, and love flourishes everywhere. But though our differences in many ways are a blessing they also constitute the factor, which creates challenges in every relationship - the challenge of loving the parts of our partner that are different from ourselves in uncomfortable ways. This is not always an easy challenge to overcome and we might even need help from a third part to do so.

We hold a personal responsibility when it comes to deciding in which ways and with how much effort we want to contribute to the world. We may choose to stimulate our surroundings to love and peace and contribute to a path towards a non-violent world free from war and power struggles. A world developing towards beauty, love, security, warmth and compassion. These contributions are merely a grain of sand in the work of peace and the healing we all need to fulfill ourselves. Most people embrace this responsibility and try their best to contribute in positive ways. Unfortunately we do not always succeed in our projects of positive development. We get stuck with a feeling of powerlessness, we end up in situations where we no longer know what we can or what we are supposed to do. We are attracted to darkness even though we tell ourselves we need to follow the light.

There are no absolute solutions nor are there any final answers when it comes to finding a way out of difficult situations and dark places, but fortunately help can be provided from many different sources. This book is meant to constitute such a source of help derived from the knowledge and experience I have gained in my personal and my professional life so far.

One thing is certain: you have to find love inside of yourself, work with it and let it grow. Love is very much a choice we make. When we fall in love it may be an unconscious choice, but it is possible to make conscious choices about love, choices about allowing love in your life, about nourishing love and prioritizing love. It only takes one person to make changes. When one partner in a relationship changes, the relationship itself changes. And when singles change their ways of interacting in relations, their relations will change as well. When you begin to act differently in response to your defence mechanisms and your survival strategies, you will create and attract something new in your life.

Everything develops and is shaped by what the individual says, does and contributes with. We create waves in the relational ocean with each step we take and help may sometimes be needed in our personal development to enable us to contribute in positive ways.

Whether you are in a relationship or not your patterns of reactions, your personality and your actions will affect your relations be it family, children, colleagues, friends or even the cashier in your local supermarket.

It is not only possible to change patterns and habits, but also the structures and functions of our brains. What we say, what we do and how we think influences on the possibilities we create for ourselves in the future.

Whether you are single or in a relationship you have the possibility of:

→ Gaining new knowledge about the latest research on relational competence theory, about how we are designed psychologically and neuro-biologically and about how we react and develop in relations. By gaining more knowledge you become more aware. You create a lifeline for yourself to hold on to when you get lost. Something that can help you think in new ways and provide you with the tools to act more constructively. When the gap between intention and result is too big a greater awareness is crucial in order to learn to act differently.

→ Participating in workshops and therapy sessions that can give you a greater insight into your personal background, your childhood, your early relationships and your individual experiences and patterns. Digging in the past is useless if all we ever do is complain about it, but if we want to learn something new about ourselves it is often a necessity that we confront the ghosts of our past in open-minded and constructive ways.

→ Working on yourself, physically as well as mentally. Through for instance meditation, exercise, sports, yoga, nutrition and sleep you can dive into the process of getting in contact with and developing the most healthy you.

At the same time this is not really something you need to learn, since you already know it. We are all born with the ability inside us to make love flourish. It is something we have and always have had that we need to find and fertilize.

That is the individual work I wish to support with this book. I hope clients, course participants and professionals will be inspired and gain a greater knowledge about the different possibilities we have when it comes to encourage a positive development in close relations.

We have to bring the great thoughts down to earth and into our own everyday life. Release the healing power of love. It is a task that will last our entire life, and when we work at it, we often work with the conflicts of generations.

Embrace the Task

We are designed in such a strange way that we sometimes at the same time do or say completely opposite things. Not least when it comes to love. We may at the same time think: "I love being with you. You are my favourite thing and I can't be near you. Your presence destroys me!" This is the ambivalence of love.

When someone falls in love he or she emotionally becomes like a child again. The emotional experiences are intensified and can easily swing from one extreme to the other like standing in the freezing cold weather of Iceland and diving into one of the hot pools, or standing at a hot beach in Southern Europe and diving into the cool water. Sometimes it is almost more than the body can take - on one hand it is joyful - on the other hand we can get so confused with our emotions that keeping our heads straight is difficult.

In some cases a feeling of love manifests that is so deep it makes you feel that the love to the other is bigger than your love towards yourself. This kind of love constitutes a risk. We are told we should love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, but if the love balance is disturbed by overweight on the other's side a danger emerges that you loose the sense of yourself and your sense of direction.

In other cases people say "I love you" to their partner, but do not at all seem to be willing to listen to what their partners have to say. How can you love somebody and not want to listen to him/her? How can you love someone and not be interested in knowing who he/she really is? It seems questionable if this is love.

An example is Maria who during a couples therapy session refused to summarize what her husband had said and how it made sense to her. I don't agree at all in what he is saying , she said and continued I don't intend to act as my husband's therapist! The only thing she was willing to do was to let her husband know in which ways she disagreed with him.

This couple had a serious problem. One thing was that they were so stubbornly focusing on their own interpretations of the situation that they could not take on the other's point of view and another that they were refusing to help each other to a mutual understanding. If your partner of all people does not show herself willing to listen to and to help you, you may feel very lost and alone. Unfortunately this problem is not an uncommon one and many people struggle with trying to make their partners at least listen.

This example also shows that loving your partner does not necessarily mean that you love the things your partner actually says or does. Love in these cases rather seems to be a feeling inside of us that is more connected to a picture of the partner inside of us than to the partner we have chosen in the real life.

You have a task when you enter a relationship and choose to be with someone. A task of continuously helping and healing the relation. Use your love to work on your relationship and your partner even though it may seem very difficult at times. One of the reasons why it can be so hard to help our partner is that he represents the equivalent of our internalized parents. Your partner may thus hold both representations of your mother and your father (and possibly other important caregivers) in your experience of him and therefore it naturally becomes more difficult for us to listen to our partner and react rationally than it would be with any other person on the planet.

Maybe you have not yet understood how you can become the best healer and helper for the person you love and maybe you are thinking that you owe it to your partner to do so, otherwise there is no love. Or maybe you are judging your partner, lecturing him and finding it hard to listen to and see him properly, your reaction patterns might be repeating the ways in which you responded to your earliest caretakers and the way you survived in your first, primary family and these subconscious repetitions are clouding your ability to truly understand your partner.

The relevant questions to ask, which have most likely been dominant in the beginning of your relationship, are: What can I do for you? How can I help you? What can I do differently? What do you need?

Trying to become adult beings in our love relations and to become attentive partners we can use some of the feelings and behaviors from when we fell in love. If you hold on to a stubborn and immature preoccupation with yourself you will not be able to move on. Deep love will only be completed when we succeed in showing the love through our words and our actions in a mature way that nurture our partners and bring safe joy.

A loving relationship might be the most therapeutic construction naturally given. Love offers a place where we have the opportunity to be ourselves with our deepest and most complicated parts and where the need of our survival strategies can be rested. Love is a conscious choice about being empathetic and about not judging another person. (i)

Besides making ourselves happy love is also a task we take on to do good for someone else. Like in the Indian greeting Namaste which means 'I honor the place in you where we are one'. Love recognizes the ability humans have to be as one in their spirits, it is a link between us, where we have recognized the best parts of another person and have smelled the possibilities of traveling and growing together. This specific ability challenges us to move on from childhood illusions in which being loved was a natural expectation to our caretakers which we could demand, and to realizing that as adult beings we need to learn to be equally giving and receiving when it comes to love. And this realization is for the greater good of us all.

A View from the Top

It is not unimportant whether we do something or not. Trouble in the relationship is very often much about not being sufficiently able to welcome each other's differences. It is important not only for the sake of one's own relationship, but also for the sake of the whole we are included in.  When we get better at handling each other's differences, listening to each others' perspectives and recognizing each others' contributions our children and descendants will receive a more healthy starting point in life. Families will be less marked by conflict, less threatened by divorce and the children will more reflected, more able to think creatively and more whole as human beings. In organizations and at workspaces those who manage to use all the potential of the employee group as well as its differences have much better possibilities to reach growth than those who tend to get stuck in conflict. Instead of focusing on what we want to achieve individually and get stuck in power struggles we will be taking into account all differing knowledge and on that basis make the most profitable solution to the problem.

When we are arguing about whose opinion is better or more accurate the consequence will be a narrow-minded development based on power which is more fragile and less creative than if we keep an open mind when it comes to handling differences.

Unfortunately it is not at all uncommon to witness war and discrimination around the world and it is of great importance for the sake of the future that we deliver a dialogical positive impact. For instance a country like Denmark could very well be developing solutions to conflicts as it is a country with a long tradition of openness and broad-mindedness where most people are sympathetic towards differences regarding gender, religion and culture. The reason why Denmark is in the lead of e.g. same sex marriages is, in my point of view, the way we relate and our great sense of community.

Psychologist PhD Daniel Goleman addresses the mistrust and suspicion that can develop towards people who are different from us. Goleman points out that the most efficient way to reach an acceptance of what he categorizes as 'groups of 'them' and 'us'', is if 'we' either marry or befriend one of 'them'. (ii)

At one point I was running a process with a group in an organization that had a serious underlying conflict. In the process I used Communulogue(iii), which is an Imago Dialogue method used in groups. The method has i.e. been used in Israel between groups with different religious backgrounds. It ensures that all parties are heard and the most distinctive thing about the method is that it creates peace simply by allowing everyone to express themselves and by using mirroring, validation and empathy in the processing of the different opinions. It is of great significance to spend time, create space and be structured when it comes to expressing differences. Furthermore it is very important in a situation of conflict to make sure that we value and appreciate that which we already have achieved and that which is useful and  available in the present moment.

A core value that getting to know Imago therapy has provided me with is the basic and deep realization of how connected we are to each other. Not only in our intimate relations, but also in society and globally. How every single individual contribution continuously creates waves into relationships. 

Our relations are neither more nor less than what each of us are capable of doing. We all have our share of responsibility in what happens around us. The same can be said regarding the unions, the societies and the global community. The power of being capable of recognizing, appreciating, helping and supporting each other to thrive and do your best is a transforming, positive power which, when it is put to use, spreads like circles on the water.

One could imagine that families and organizations may develop into groups capable of embracing different points of views and different ways of living. And that is something we need in the future. With the massive globalization going on we are intermixing many different cultural backgrounds through relations and marriage. A danger emerges that power structures based on narrow hierarchies and strictly divided barriers of class take over which would be a complete undermining of the core values of the kind of love we are talking about. We have to learn to express ourselves and talk about disagreements in ways, which result in everybody receiving the best profit possible from the resources in question.

We need to develop methods and exchange experiences that would allow us to integrate the differences of people in a peaceful way, enhancing love and tolerance, contain differences, nurturing that which is healthy for us, and including instead of excluding. Every time a group singles out a person to be scapegoated, blames somebody or makes itself better than others it harms the whole community and the development. It is all too easy to make the mistake of wronging somebody and not appreciating the value of different experiences and statements. 

If you feel safe and confident with yourself you can move mountains. And since the great majority of us at a deeper level have doubts about being good enough and being worth loving it is necessary that we help each other move towards a sense of inner security which may encourage us to be our better selves and show who we are.

There is no use in stubbornly determining and sustaining our own opinions. Dialogue is the road ahead. We need to trust the good intentions of others, have faith in and believe each other. From a macrocosmic perspective we are challenged by the integration of different cultures, differing opinions on religion and varying sexual orientations. Challenges like the one we experienced with the Muhammad cartoon crisis or challenges concerning our children being exposed to bizarre sexual worlds through the internet. On a microcosmic level we are challenged in our own families and relations. You don't have to be in a cross-cultural marriage to experience that your partner's attitude is completely different from your own.

I like to think about the fact that just because we are born we are all wanted on this planet. Everybody has a right to think what they think and feel how they do. Everybody has a right to be who they are. Imago offers a way of re-connecting with significant people whom you for some reason have lost the feeling of being connected to whether it be a partner, a family member, a friend or a colleague. The acknowledging method uses a mindset and certain tools which can help us to become better at listening to each other and teach us how to transform conflict-ridden differences into inter-relational growth. When we re-connect with other people in a positive way, we become more whole as human beings and thus contribute to a more reflected and complete development that is not based on the survival of the fittest, but is instead gathering and using all present resources.

There is a need of us healing the space between us, that we heal our relations. Rather than focusing on and working with the individual human being we must look at the whole and concentrate about making the whole along with the spaces between us work.

When we focus on and put energy into developing dialogical, therapeutic and educational methods, which accommodate the needs of the world now and in the future we take part in the improvement of peacefully integrating different perspectives and different historical backgrounds with the purpose of creating a peaceful coexistence and meaningful connections between human beings. The questions if it is okay to be different and if it is possible to live together exists on all levels and so does the need of feeling connected, feeling secure and feeling that you belong. 

A good place to start is right in front of our noses - with our closest relations. The task is still to understand and to love our neighbor and our partner and to love even the parts of them we find it most difficult to appreciate.

 INTRODUCTION TO IMAGO

A large part of this book is based on Imago thinking and Imago method. At the same time I have emphasized my own greatest fields of interest; neurology, interpersonal neurobiology and mindfulness meditation. 

Back in the day when I first became acquainted with the Imago method on a couples weekend workshop it was primarily for professional reasons. As a psychotherapist I already had experience in working with couples, but I did not feel that the work was going very well. The results were not what I wished for. Based on this feeling I decided to participate in a couples seminar to get a more thorough knowledge of the Imago method.

At this time of my life I had been in a relationship for about a year and was still newly in love. Being newly in love actually made me unfit to properly deal with the subjects I talk about in this book. In retrospect it was even a challenge having to respond to the reality. When you are in love a lot of things are based on illusions both regarding yourself and the other. You are riding on a psychological and physical wave that does not leave much space for self-examination.

I was, however, affected by seeing to what great extent the method was working. I had been professionally engaged in psychotherapy and had been attending therapy for many years and it was exciting to experience new sides of myself in relation to my partner at the workshop. I experienced it as new perspectives on my background to entering into relations.

Some of the discoveries I made were scary to put it mildly. For instance I made the discovery that I was pretty terrible at listening. I was so preoccupied with my own inner ideas and fears that I quite often misinterpreted what was being said. A frightening realization when a main skill in your job consists of listening to other people. 

I saw to what extent the things which I was frustrated about in my own relationship, were inextricably linked with my own life themes. How I had chosen a partner who, in some ways, resembled my parents and how these features both attracted me, but also made me walk on thin ice because they triggered my past. I understood that I needed to change myself and my attitude if I wanted things around me to improve. That something had to come from me. It was clear that with some of my survival strategies I was contributing to conflicts not only in my relationship, but also in other relations. And this is a difficult thing to acknowledge since changing yourself is a heavy challenge. It is much easier instead to point out what you think other people should change about themselves.

The work of PhD Harville Hendrix and his wife PhD Helen LaKelly Hunt is based on the presumption that we are born to be and to feel connected and that we are born into a natural state of relaxation and joy, which is a state we strive to return to so that we may feel whole again. This is why we search for a partner and why we fall in love with somebody who has the potential to give us what we need.

Who we become attracted to is not random. We are attracted to people who are consistent with our 'Imago'. The 'Imago' is created during our childhood and by our experiences with the people with whom we relate.

In the beginning, when we are newly in love, we only see the positive features of our partner. We do not want to see anything else. But sooner or later we begin to spot the negative sides of the person we have chosen as well. When this happens the relationship moves on to the next phase, which we call 'the power struggle'. The power struggle can be expressed with open fire, silent coldness or other means, but in any case the power struggle carries several inherent conflicts. I.a. because we see each other's differences and realize that our partner holds something which we find it hard to deal with and which causes emotionally difficult situations.

The Imago method is eclectic which means it has brought knowledge and experience from many directions in psychological science. It does not relate specifically to whether issues in the relationship are mostly due to innate features in each partner, what environment they have grown up in or if the reason should be found in the partners' attachment style or carried traumas from childhood. From my perspective Imago thus represents mostly a method of existentialism since it seeks to relate to 'the here and now' of the relation and includes many different causal explanations and tools which are chosen based on what seems to be the most successful regarding the described 'phenomenon'. You could say that this represents both the strength and the weakness of the method since it does not point inflexibly in one direction, but seeks to work with the possibility of integrating differing points of view. It is an effective method in the clinic and in practice and which by being successful is proving itself true. 

In Imago therapy the love relationship is seen as the main path to personal development. A person's attachment style, defence mechanisms and survival strategies are reflected in the intimate relations and it demands awareness and consciousness to navigate in a way that supports the love and nourishes existing relations. And it is exactly that; the awareness, the consciousness, the intentionality and the decision to focus our attention on new spots, which can make a difference and transform conflict into contact and development.

One of the staple forces in achieving this is to decide to become a more dialogical person and to train the basic steps of the Imago Dialogue. When you want to make changes in your relationship, training is crucial. The brain, in that way, works like the rest of the body even though there are no muscles in it. That, which we wish to change, has to be trained over and over again until it is automated. Love relationships and family are the most important things in many people's lives. This is where life is lived. And if we want something new to happen we have to do something new. Change is not going to come to us when we are sleeping - it takes a lot of effort.

It has sometimes happened that people have misunderstood Imago to be these basic steps and have thought that the intention of Imago is that couples should be rehearsing structured Imago dialogues at home in order to make things work. But Imago is a whole lot more than that and it presently introduces a long row of different paths you can take to reach development.

My own story is about personal experiences from my private life and about the things I have witnessed and witness in my therapeutic practice. The elements that I wish to present in detail are those that I regard as leading in the successful creation of magical moments of love. Three elements from Imago Dialogue; Mirroring, Validation and Empathy, have proven to be particularly significant and transforming in relation to fostering a dialogue which makes sense and is transforming. I will explain these elements in detail later on.

Basic Elements of Imago Dialogue

>   Focused topic

>   Mirroring

>   Validation

>   Empathy

>   Memories

>   Longings

>   Goal and action

I use many case examples along the way, which are meant to support the understanding. These examples are, of course, anonymized and any similarity to previous or present clients is unintended. I use the pronouns 'he' and 'she' at random and there is no meaning behind which one of the two is being used.

1

PREPARE FOR LOVE

Begin at Once

When a couple arrives at my practice we usually commence in the following manner: I share with them some information on what my routines are for a couple’s first session.  

They give a brief explanation of their background and reasons for being here and I ask them to focus for a while on their breath and lead them through a brief imagery, to make an inner contact to their safe place (lv).

I say: "Make yourselves comfortable, close your eyes or lower them and take a nice, deep breath. Take a deep, cleansing breath circle and make sure it goes all the way down to your stomach. You may make the exhalations somewhat longer than the inhalations for a few breath circles in order to create balance. Try to focus on your breathing, your inhalation and your exhalation, for a while and see if you can find a nice quiet place inside of yourself where you feel safe. Think about the word safe … Perhaps you can locate a certain spot in your body in which you recognize a bodily experience or a feeling of safety. If you scan your body from the inside you may find a place of safety and calmness, maybe it is in your breathing or in your stomach. You can also try to create an imaginary picture of an actual place in which you feel completely safe, it could possibly be at your home or maybe somewhere in nature. Take a minute or two to find or to picture the place and then to sense the comfortable and stable feeling of safety and calmness. When you feel ready, establish eye contact with your partner."

We allow time for this exercise because we want to evoke the feelings of presence, calmness and safety, which are prerequisite for approaching essential, emotional subjects and for getting past the possible feelings of anxiety and unease and the remains of the experiences the couple may have had just before they arrived.

It is a good idea to focus your breathing and to take a check-in with your bodily senses before initiating an important conversation in order to point the attention towards the body’s inner state and the body’s inner sensory perception to make the foundation to be fully able to meet your partner with openness and accessibility in the conversation. Therefore we by this check-in with yourself seek to sense the bodily state and to clean it up a bit to get rid of possible remains of disturbance, excitement or tensed reactions that might have developed before the couple arrived.

During this simple exercise some react by crying. Some are affected by the situation itself and the fact that they are finally taking the time to sit down and be present with each other. Some are affected if they can not find a safe space inside themselves and again some are affected by the sad circumstances that account for the two of them being here.

Some people are not used to point their attention to what they are sensing and feeling inside, in which cases the exercise itself can be quite a challenge, but most people also describe feelings of warmth and joy by being here together in contact with each other and by the partner’s willingness to join them. Quite a few actually start crying the moment they are seated just because of the fact that they sit here. 

Many of my clients sense that the space between them has shut its doors or that their heart has closed its openness towards the other. They ask me: What can we do to improve the space between us?, How can I reopen my heart?, What can I do to bring back the understanding we used to have?, How can we repair, what is broken?.

At this point tears often come to my eyes as well. I get deeply affected by the situation, in spite of me seeing it on a daily basis, affected by the trust and the honesty they are putting into it and by these human beings, who are fighting to find each other again when they feel lost. 

Not all couples cry at their first session, but show other signals which expose the significance of the situation. It can be the trembling of an upper lip, a frozen smile or tensions in the hands, the back or in another place in the body. How big the distance between the couples’ chairs is, or placing their chairs so that they are facing me instead of each other. All of these signals are pointers to the basis from which we can begin.

Beginnings take time and the good ones are often well-prepared. Sometimes people have circled around these subjects in their minds several years before they actually begin the work. When we are newly in love everything about love seems so easy. Love is 'being served' and appears to be developing all by itself. At least this is the feeling that many of us have all though we are in fact constantly doing a lot of things ourselves through our behaviors and are unconsciously acting in ways which support and strengthen the feelings of love between us. But when the phase of being newly in love ends, the relationship begins to demand that we put a conscious effort into the relationship, and following up on this demand is crucial to reaching the deeper levels of love.

We may be lead to believe that love is a gift sent to us from above or we may feel like some supernatural force has come into play, like Cupid's arrow or maybe destiny. But in reality it all begins with you being fully present and able to point your attention both inwards and outwards at the same time. 

Richard Moss(v) has created the excellent model 'Mandala of being' which illustrates how we can be engaged in different directions besides the present moment.

Fig.1 Richard Moss: Mandala of being.

The present moment is placed in the center. This is where your story begins - in your relation to the present. The present holds your current perception of the past, the future, the 'I' and the 'you'. It is not unusual to come by a couple where the partners are preoccupied in different directions. Maybe one is finding it hard to move on due to bad experiences in the past while the other is focused on improving the relationship in the future and cannot understand why his partner does not seem to be able to move on. Other partners are so focused on the question of how they can improve themselves and make their partner happy that they forget what they need and want for themselves. Again others are too preoccupied with themselves and their own ideas to remember to care for their partner. There are many variations of partners moving in different directions. Unfortunately we are not always synchronously ready for traveling down the same road at the same time.That, which is vitally important to meeting your partner in a positive way, is that you become able to orientate yourself in all four directions while maintaining your base in the present moment. That you become flexible and able to take it all into consideration.

Focusing and Meditation

It is crucial to the communication in relationships that the partners make time warps, room for spending time together. When we are talking about communication, partners need to spend time together where they are able to be fully present and relaxed whether it is in the everyday life or during a conflict. It is not always vital whether it lasts five minutes or two hours, but it is important that it takes place. Couples, who succeed, make time for being together every day. Maybe just 5-10 minutes, enough for a cup of coffee, in at good and safe connection, staying relaxed and focused, offering their time to the partner and into the relationship. The length of time is not crucial, nor does the subject really often matter to the conversation. The truly important things are to maintain or restore the connection between the two of you by simply spending time together for a while. Sharing the present moment with whatever it contains.

There are many good and beneficial ways of training yourself to being present in the moment, for instance various meditative techniques, centering and grounding your body plus exercising your breathing. This training may be essential, not least if you are stressed or have a shifting body consciousness. You can also practice other less complicated approaches to reach the same goal. Something which usually causes people to be more present is to actively use their body or their voice, so if you are feeling detached from yourself or from your surroundings it might be a good idea to go for a walk or a run in nature, dance to your favourite music, sing a song or maybe you find that something completely different works better for you. Most people have a good idea about the actions or situations that cause them to feel a sense of awareness in the present moment and it is worth it to engage in these activities especially in the time leading up to important conversations - for instance about love.

The word 'mindfulness' means paying attention in a particular way. And exercising mindfulness involves focusing your full attention on being awake, observant and neutral without judging the experiences of yourself or the other. By training your awareness and your presence you can achieve calmness and clarity of mind and let go of clinging on to your habits and patterns. This will release energy and constitute a fertile soil for being present in the moment in a different way and for making better decisions. 

A useful tip about how to become present in the now is to close your eyes and either lower them or fixate them on a certain spot if you prefer them to be open. Then you draw your attention to your inner senses and perceptions (more about these later). Nobody can do this for you. You have to sense it your own way, experience how you are feeling and what your senses are telling you. Ask yourself How am I really feeling? and search for the answer from inside. Check-in with yourself and what you are sensing inside of your body. Explore where these sensations are leading you. 

If you close your eyes or look down on a spot on the floor you will easier be able to notice bodily sensations, tensions, pains and temperatures in different parts of your body. Maybe your feet are cold, your old ankle injury is hurting, your hands are warm or you are feeling tensions in the lower back. You will