Relationship Coaching

Why Relationship Coaching

Couples coaching works! It is a way of facilitating or navigating changes. It serves couples by deepening connection, creating harmony, resolving differences, healing wounds of past conflict, and/or bringing closure to a phase in the relationship.

Couples coaching begins with the assumptions that each member of the partnership is creative, resourceful and whole and that no one gets to be wrong, only fully responsible, for what happens. Coaching is a way of assessing what works, what does not work, and what is needed in a relationship. The process involves establishing a vision for change and growth, followed by sessions that support the development of plans for that growth and their implementation.

The Challenges to Relationships

Maintaining a strong relationship is a challenge that all couples face. There are always new forces and circumstances that need to be acknowledged and integrated into the life of a relationship.

Personal preferences differ because of the reality of diversity. Gender differences, family of origin, faith, ethnic culture, style, and personal temperament are some of the sources of both joy and tension in relationships. All of these differences are part of who we are. Each couple holds the desire and the keys to transform the diversity in their relationship into complimentary relational harmony.

The drift that can occur in a couple’s connection is often due to a process of progressive attrition of possibilities. The couple’s repertoire of fun and enlivening activities can decrease over time. This attrition of possibilities flattens, dulls, and eventually destroys the heart of the relationship. Attrition of possibilities occurs in a variety of ways. Sometimes it occurs when assumptions and expectations are not explored in ongoing conversations and then are taken on as rules and universal statements. Rules like "I can't" or "I will not" and universal statements like "always" or "never" diminish and undermine spontaneity in the relationship. Communication about what is needed is part of the solution for creating new possibilities. Assumptions and expectations deserve regular conversation for the sake of mutual understanding and clarity.

Couples coaching moves the partnership towards new possibilities and breaks through barriers that have been previously established. Couples create these barriers inadvertently over time and as a consequence of hurried accommodation to specific circumstances. Then these accommodations gradually become a cumbersome precedent for the routines of life. Couples can work together to undo the limitations that they have mistakenly co-created.