A 30-minute private session to help you move forward in relationship decisions by untangling your thoughts, feelings, interpretations, needs, and strategies.
Price: $50 USD for one 30-minute session
If you feel stuck in your relationship, it’s likely because:
- You think your partner’s actions are the cause of your feelings.
- You think your partner is somehow preventing you from living the life you want to live.
- You don’t see the difference between your needs and the strategies you’ve arbitrarily decided are the way to get those needs met.
- You’re not making decisions that take your needs into account.
Other people don’t cause your feelings
When you’re tangled up, you’re likely to blame your partner for any uncomfortable feelings you have. You’ll say things like “I’m upset because they’re not meeting my needs”, which is crazy-talk. You’re upset because your needs aren’t met, not because they’re not meeting them.
There are lots of ways of meeting your needs. Maybe your partner can meet them, or maybe they can be met some other way.
But, as long as you confuse needs with strategies, you’re in trouble because:
- You won’t notice better ways of meeting your needs.
- You’ll blame your partner, which will make things worse because they’ll get triggered.
- You’ll quit relationships that could have worked out better.
Example of a need: being understood
Examples of strategies for meeting that need:
- Expressing yourself to your partner
- Expressing yourself to a friend
- Reading a book about someone going through a similar situation
- Writing a book about your situation
- Breaking up with your partner and finding someone else who understands you better
- Going out into the mountains and yelling at the top of your lungs
Maybe some of these will work better than others. But, you’ll never know unless you’re in touch enough with your needs that you’re capable of experimenting and finding out.
To untangle everything, you need self-empathy
Self-empathy means you’re aware of your thoughts and feelings and that you’re able to sit with them as they are, without trying to change them.
This is hard to do when you’re so close to the situation.
How the session works
In this 30-minute session (on Zoom), I’ll help you train self-empathy.
Here’s what we’ll do:
- You tell me what’s going on in your relationship: how you’re feeling, what’s working and what’s not working, what your partner did/didn’t do, why you think they did/didn’t do it, etc. You can be as irrational as you want.
- I will reflect back what I’m hearing, in a way that’s less tangled than what I heard from you. I will hear the feelings and needs beneath the stories you tell, and I’ll speak them out loud.
- You then have an opportunity to correct me. Or, you can add more information or change your mind and express it differently.
This is a loop that will repeat until the session is over.
Warnings
- I may not “agree” with you. My job is to reflect back what I’m hearing.
- I’m less attached to the situation than you are, so I may say something that triggers a feeling of invalidation in you.
- It’s not my job to make you feel good, but rather to help you untangle your own stories.
- This isn’t therapy and I’m not a qualified mental health professional.
- I’m not going to give you advice. You, however, can use this to come up with your own advice.
About me
Hi, I’m Michael. I’ve been in lots of failed relationships, so I’ve learned about what hasn’t worked. I’ve also read about Nonviolent Communication and meditated a ton, so I spend all day thinking about this stuff. I post on Instagram (@no.michael.here). Hope to hear from you.
Ready to get started?
Price: $50 USD for one 30-minute session
Fill out the application and I’ll get back to you if I think this would be a good fit.