✨ “…the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another.” ~ Bruce Springsteen ✨

In my work and personal life, I see relationships as a meeting of two entities which go on to create a third entity – the Relationship.

This third entity is an intelligent, conscious being with desires, needs, wants, life force and its own evolutionary trajectory. It requires the right environment to grow and thrive. It is our responsibility to nurture it.

When clients first come to me, they believe coaching will be exclusively about two people – them and the person they wish to be coupled with or them and their partner. Stuck in this duality, they bring to their coupling their own personal agenda, life experiences, anxieties, values, beliefs, and traumas.
This approach places in the center what each partner brings to the couple. It creates an adversarial situation. It sets them up to erect oppositional camps, where there is a right way or a wrong way. It creates a sense of separation from the other.

This results in patterns of control, anger, indifference, passive-aggression, resignation, withdrawal, depression, desperation, or manipulation. Reasons to blame the other.

When we view relationship as a third entity, this lose-lose dynamic can shift into a collaborative co-creation. We can create a more generative outcome.

What’s your experience with a duality perspective?
Come back next week for part 2 to learn how to make a mind shift.