Being in a relationship is not like getting a college degree that once you achieved it, it’s done. Being a couple is a never-ending process to a degree that you master skills such as communication or conflict management. Today, we dive into the real definition of coupling. On the side, we give our insights on the value of addressing the issues that you’re having that is not benefitting anyone in the relationship. On top of that, find out why seeking for help from coaches or mentors resolves your fear of losing the relationship.
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Below is a transcript of the video and audio above. The paragraphs and sections are alternated between bold / not bold for ease of reading along with the video or audio.
Mastering The Art Of Coupling
We’re talking about the “ing” in coupling. We’ve had people ask us, “Why are you coupling?” We want to share that being a couple is like you get into a couple or you get into a relationship. It’s not like a college degree. You don’t graduate from Arizona State University with a degree and then forever it’s the same. It’s like I have a coaching certification program. You don’t get a coaching certification and then, you have this certification. It is a verb. It is something that you do on a daily basis. It’s like when we talk about familying. It’s a verb.
It’s doing things with the family.
We’re familying. All of us are humaning. We are human beings. We are learning how to be a spiritual being in a human body dealing with regular everyday stuff. We’re humaning. We are coupling. We are in a couple. We are a committed couple that wants to grow our relationship on a daily basis. We want to be able to have fun, receive, give, love and to release the resentments, the hurts and the things of the past. We want to be able to enjoy and have a dream life together.
We want to stay connected and continue to be connected to each other. Even after several years of being married, we are still learning things about each other. That’s the beauty of being in a coupling relationship.
It’s like adulting. When you are learning how to be an adult and not come from your six-year-old that’s running the show, not being controlled by your emotions or the things of your past. You’re being an adult. You’re in the present moment. You’re being able to ask for what you want, coming from the eye, looking for preferences. You’re not in the drama triangle, but you’re being an adult. You’re adulting. You’re going to work. You’re paying the bills. You’re choosing what you want to do, just like that. It’s coupling. In your couple and coupling, it’s a verb. It’s like energy. Every single day your couple needs to be fed.
Each individual in the relationship needs to look at, “What are we feeding it with? Are we giving this relationship the love and receiving the love so that there’s almost like an infinity symbol of this beautiful exchange of energy and love?” By closing my heart because I’m resentful about something or I’m frustrated about something or I have a perspective that I’m not being supported in some way. That’s a place where I’m closing down my heart and I’m closing down my energy and only so much energy can then go out and also be received. It’s up to us individually to say, “Where am I closing down my heart?” and to be able to recognize places where I have a misbelief or having the limitation when it even comes to him or our relationship and be willing to do that work. One thing I wanted to bring up is we wanted to do this show and there’s a deep reason why we wanted to do the show. I’d love for you to share your perspective and why you felt compelled to not only do this kind of work together for other people but to do the show.
There are a couple of reasons why I was ready to do this show together. Number one, we’ve always created together out of the space of love. Everything that we’ve done together as a couple, whether it’s creating our family, our boys, creating wonderful places to live in, our houses, creating our vacations together, wonderful adventures when we decide where we want to go together. All of that has been created in this space of love together and now our puppy. For us, that’s the main idea when we create something. We create it from that space of love together. That’s when it flows well for us.
Let me say this too from manifestation perspective. Love is the highest vibration. It’s the highest energy in the universe. It’s the closest to God-self, Christ-self, divine-self, however you want to turn that. It is your alignment with that flow of energy and with that pure positivity. That is the highest vibration to create anything from. When you have a partner in a co-creative relationship, when you’re coming with the purest intention to create from a space of love with that intention and with that application of that intention, opening your hearts and what would we love and what would we prefer. That makes it flow so much more and the end result or the end manifestation is more fun, enjoyment, love, connection, support, all the things that we all want in our relationship.
For me, what happened is initially when we started our relationship, it was a wonderful relationship. We started hitting some obstacles or some things that we were bringing our attention into pushing our buttons to places where I was doing some things that I wasn’t aware of that I learned or it was a part of my programming. It wasn’t serving me inside my relationship with her. It was creating some confusion. It was creating some hurt. There was pain around it, frustration and resentment. Until I started looking at, “What am I doing that is causing her hurt?” That hurt was hurting me. It was painful to see that she was in a space of hurt and anger.
I was wondering, “What’s happening? Why is she in that space?” We all have these moments in a relationship where we’re wondering what’s going on with the partner, “Why is she reacting or he reacting in that way?” Sometimes we have to dig deep and look at ourselves and look at each other. Maybe there is something that we’re doing that is causing all of that. The only way that I could do that was to work with someone. After I did work with that person, that person helped us a lot in our couple. Fast forward, maybe I started being more open to doing some couple stuff.
The more we were working on our couple, the more I would see the benefits for other couples as well. I can talk about my background too. My programming comes from the space of having two parents that got into a divorce. I was telling Christy, that’s the end place. My parents ended up getting a divorce. That is a place in me where there is a split. I was confused about the divorce because I was sixteen years old when that happened. I was into my teens and I wasn’t paying attention to the result of that and what it would do to me. There was a result. There was a point where it affected my relationship in that space. The fact that my parents were divorced or got into a divorce, I started realizing that there was this pain point inside of me.
There were some feelings that I got. It’s a raw nerve inside of me that was touched because I could feel when other couples were into a similar situation where they weren’t necessarily happy with each other. That came to get me. The more I did my individual work, the better my relationship became with Christy. The end result is they’ve gotten into a divorce, but there’s also the spectrum of, “How did I see my parents’ relationship?” There was a lot of love in their relationship. I could see two people that were very much in love when they worked together before that space of divorce at the end of their relationship. There was this time where they were madly in love with each other. They spent many years together creating these wonderful vacations for the family. I was the only child for thirteen years until my sister came in. We had a very good relationship together. They had a very good relationship together.
You were saying you saw them kiss, you saw them hug, you saw affection.
I saw how close they were together. That also was good programming for me because I’m able to share my love with Christy in that same way. I was telling her there are parts of me where I’ve got that raw nerve with having to live with the divorce. That’s what I had to work on. Those are the issues that came up that were not benefiting me in the relationship that I have.
You were defending against the awful fear of losing the relationship. He wanted what his parents had as a young kid. He wanted the love, the affection, the display of love and having that feeling of having both parents. As a child, if you have kids, it’s good to know this. It’s like a triangle. Your area of who you find yourself to be in your fulfillment is mother, father, child or male, female, child. When the parents split, it’s like, “Who do I go with?” Even if your parents were married like mine were and they still are for 64 years or something like that, the conflict in their relationship. If my mom and my dad had very different views of something for me as the child, I’m like, “Who am I loyal to? Who do I want to be like? Who do I want to align with here?” There could be that split too.
I know for years I had a split with money where my mom would put people that had money on a pedestal, whereas my dad would criticize and judge people that had money. It’s like, “Where’s my loyalty?” When I started making my own money, I can see the split in me because I would make a lot and then I would start to sabotage and lose it to be loyal to my dad. I don’t want to have too much money because what if I’m judging myself or what if someone else judges me or what if my dad judges me? It was that total split. Within him, he saw his parents having this amazing relationship, saw what it was like, felt what it was like and knows what he wants in a relationship.
I was in that energy because as children, we grow up in the energy of our parents, in that energy field. That’s true. I felt that energy of love. I felt that energy of them being connected together and them sharing a beautiful relationship.
When it started to go sideways, he and his relationship were so protective, so closed down and so fearful that it was like, “I’m going to do everything to please her. I want to walk on eggshells so that she’s happy and that she’s not angry so that I keep my relationship.” He was functioning in our relationship out of so much fear and within him, the fear demonstrated that he would shut down and go within and I couldn’t find him.
Talk about putting walls. For me, I had some walls that were impenetrable. She couldn’t see me. She couldn’t see the emotions, what kind of emotions I had. Was I happy? Was I sad? Was I mad, loving or fearful?
He was always there, but there was no reaction.
Living in the fear, in the space of when am I going to lose that wonderful relationship that I’ve built? This is near and dear to my heart, the coupling as we were saying. Making other people understand how to be connected with each other and confirming that doing individual work is essential. Once the individual work is there, there is a space also to do the couple work.
I don’t care if you’re a famous actor or actress, if you’re one of these people that are in motivation or a person that is an athlete, people that live a high-level life and that have complete alignment in their lives, they do have coaches and they have mentors. It’s no different if you want to have that expanded, connected level of a relationship. Most people didn’t learn this stuff. His example was massively in love to divorce and there were things along the way that could have been corrected and fixed. We see this with couples that we have counseled and coached. We see this with friends of ours. We see this with people that we know from the kids’ school where it’s like all of a sudden, it’s this and it goes into a divorce. It doesn’t have to be that way because what happens is typically it’s the woman. I’m not saying it always is, but it’s the woman that is wanting some type of improvement in the relationship or wanting to work on the relationship and frustrated because the partner doesn’t want to. It’s usually one in the relationship. It could be the man or the woman that finds there’s something going askew and that we need some help or asking for something to change and the other person isn’t willing to take the change.
What do you do with a person that’s growing and they want to have that dream relationship? They want to feel that connection that they felt maybe in the beginning, but their partner is like, “We’re not applying anything. We’re not doing anything. This is where we’re at.” That’s what it was like for your dad. Your mom was asking for change. Your mom was saying and communicating the ways that she was displeased. Who knows? We weren’t there. Maybe not in the most skillful way that he could hear, but even if she did say it in the most skillful way and doing it in what we have now learned in our relationship, would your dad have heard her?
The same thing happened to us. For me, that’s why I was protecting my relationship. I was telling you, this is my intimate relationship. I don’t want anybody to be involved in the intimacy of my relationship. Why should I talk to someone about what’s going on in our relationship? This is between you and I. This is a sacred space. This is our nucleus. For me, I don’t feel good about sharing this with anybody else until I was able to open up and see that there were advantages of doing that, of talking about my own feelings where maybe I had some ideas or some views that weren’t necessarily helping me out in my relationship and understanding also where she’s coming from. How come she was feeling so much fear, anger and frustration? It might not be totally because of what I was doing but what I was bringing to the relationship was making her react and pushing her own buttons that she lived. I got to understand that.
Pushing my own buttons that I need to figure out and needed to communicate. There was a breaking point, and we’ve seen this going all the time. Whereas like the one person has communicated what they need had said, “I’m thinking about ending the relationship because I can’t handle it this way anymore. I could settle but I don’t want to settle. I’m not into having you as a roommate anymore and dealing with the daily stuff. I want romance. I want connection. I want to have awesome toe-curling sex.” All that kind of stuff that you want to live, you want to have life in passion in your relationship. If one person is not willing to grow and evolve, it doesn’t mean you’re trying to change who I am as a person. Frederic, since he has released a lot of his imprinted stuff, a lot of the fears that were holding him back, since all that is gone and he’s no longer afraid of me. He’s telling me, “I don’t appreciate when you talk to me like that or that didn’t feel good for me. That was an ouch.” He’s more of himself than he ever has.
We’re more into the relationship together.
Your personality, I get to know you now. Your humor comes out more. You’re letting me see who you are because you’re not this rigid person that’s afraid to make a move because you’re afraid to ruin the relationship. The more you evolve and the more you grow, your personality, which is truly who you are, comes out. I love you even more. I’m more in love with you now than the first day I met you. It’s because you’re more of you. You’re exposing more. You’re allowing more of yourself. You’re being freer in the love that you give and what you receive. You’re authentically who you are becoming more of you each day. The more you show me, the more I get to love him. It wasn’t him that I wanted to change. He’s essentially who he is. It was not caring about what I felt. Feeling like I had to do it all or that I was alone or that I had to pull stuff out of him to get an opinion or something. All that bondage clay crap that was holding his heart in place wasn’t allowing him to come out, that’s all gone. Now I get to be with Frederic and I get to have fun. We have stuff and issues that come up, but we laugh now instead of arguing.
They’re not as intense. We have stuff that comes up that we have to discuss. Now we look at the options and we can clear them out quickly.
We laugh about them. We laugh more in our relationship now than we ever have, just about goofy stuff.
Don’t wait until moments and it’s true for me as well. I did wait for the moment. It was a time in our lives where it was either I was going to get some help or the relationship was going to suffer from it.
It was a make or break situation.
It’s sad that mostly that’s what happens in a lot of relationships. One of the reasons why we’re doing this is so that people don’t necessarily wait until that happens, that last moment where the relationship is about to end. It’s either we do something about it or you don’t and those moments are where it’s already going downhill from there. One of the reasons why we want to do that is to say we’re there for coaching. It’s not a therapy session. We want to look ahead. We want to look forward to the space of coaching that we do with you. If you want to have some of that coaching with us, if you feel that we are the people to coach with you, go to ConnectedCoupling.com and fill out the form.
If you’re feeling frustrated about something that happened in the past and you’re having a hard time letting go of that stuff, we’re going to do our next episode on releasing resentments and hurts. Be sure to tune into that. If you’re feeling justified like, “I’m right. What he did was inexcusable or I don’t even know how to forgive,” these are things that we can help you with. You can go to ConnectedCoupling.com. We say the three-step process and there’s a lot that goes into these three-step process. From a big overview, it’s got to release the stuff of the past. If you’ve got some time committed into the relationship, whether it’s 5 years, 10 years, 15, 20, 25, however long you’ve been. It adds some hurts and resentments along the way and everything is energy. If you’ve closed down your heart to that person, that energy is still in there. In order to have the relationship thriving, you have to be able to open your heart and flow the energy to what you want.
For the action steps, number one is that you have to look at your coupling as a verb, as something you’re doing on a daily basis. You have to ask yourself, “What am I doing to either feed this relationship with love or deteriorate this relationship?” One or both is happening. If nothing’s happening, it’s staying stagnant. With energy, it doesn’t stay stagnant. It creates a vortex of something. It has to move. When you’re actively looking for things that you love in your partner and just like that Ramones song, That’s What I Like About You, thinking about that in your head. You don’t even have to communicate it, but thinking about those things and looking at the positive aspects that’s feeding your relationship. Doing things for your partner, compliments, doing acts of service, all those beautiful things that you can do to feed the relationship, to pay a nice compliment, to write a nice love note or a nice text, to say some words of appreciation. You’re feeding the relationship in the right way and it’s something you have to do on a daily basis. It’s coupling. It’s not a couple. It’s not something you have, you put on a shelf. It’s something you’re living in every single day. Any final words?
Be positive.
It’s being positive but you’ve got to release the stuff that’s there because naturally, we are positive. I’ll share this on another episode. I had something that came up where I felt I wasn’t supported by him. A call came up and it was an opportunity for me to clear it out so that I didn’t hold onto that. That’s what’s important is not making it about him, but recognizing in yourself, “Where am I holding this negative energy?” The one that I don’t want to keep holding onto it, even though I could probably justify it or I could say, “I’m right, he was wrong,” or whatever it was, how is that feeding your relationship? Look at where you are in relation to your relationship and where you are taking responsibility for the energy that you’re giving in that relationship. Next episode, we are going to do a process of releasing hurts and resentments. Until next episode. Thanks, everyone.
See you soon.