The Courage to Be Known: Why Couples Work Offers Our Deepest Healing Opportunity

I’d like to talk for a moment about why I love working with couples.

As I see it, the journey of sustaining a healthy long-term monogamous partnership is possibly the greatest opportunity available for personal healing and growth.

It is very easy for us – particularly nowadays – to proceed through life carefully procuring our experiences and surroundings in such a way as to preserve our sense of self. But preservation of the sense of self, comfortable and satisfying as it may feel, is something of a cage – it is the sum total of everything we have come to understand from our formative experience about the world and our relationship to it.

So inviting the presence and influence of another in such a way that we might be challenged and transformed is a tremendous act of courage and movement towards liberation. There is nowhere to hide – all of the stickiest parts of us will, at various times, come to the fore. Parts that we may have difficulty accepting or have been blissfully unaware of will not only be made unavoidable, but will be witnessed by another. We will be required to accept that despite all of this, we are worthy of love.

Surrendering to this level of being known and changed can be so deeply uncomfortable – particularly if we haven’t truly explored our own inner landscape. Yet these challenges are precisely what make relationships so powerful for healing. Our core wounds surface, offering us the chance to finally address them. To quote the poet Rilke, “for one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” And in my estimation, the rewards are the richest available to us.

If you’re curious about how you can best receive the medicine of relationship, book your free discovery call using this link.