Imagine the scene inside a therapy office:
Therapist: So who wants to start off? Let me know why you’re here, okay?
Sheila: We’re here because George has been pulling away from me for a long time.
Therapist: How long?
Sheila: At least five years. It’s been a nightmare for me. It’s terribly lonely. I sit here every day wondering what’s going on in his head.
George sits in stony silence.
Therapist: Sheila, how did that happen? Or why do you think it happened?
Sheila: Well, six years ago, I was flirting with someone at work. I didn’t mean to do it; it just happened. There was nothing wrong at home, really. It was an indiscretion.
Therapist: So what did you do?
Sheila: George found out. He looked at my phone. He confronted me. I admitted it and I apologized. I apologized again and again but it hasn’t done any good.
Okay. Cut! What is the solution? What does the therapist do? Is he confused? Does he figure there really is no way over this hump? George is still suffering, poor guy.
Therapist (to George): Why don’t her apologizes work, George?
George: Because I don’t trust her. What’s to keep this from happening again?
Therapist: Well, for one thing she apologized. Sheila, did you promise it would never happen again?
Sheila: Of course I did.
Therapist: But in your own heart, how can he believe you?
Sheila: I don’t know, really, what to do. I’m at a loss.
The therapist here has every reason to be confused. Except for the fact that as the therapist, he is not allowed to be confused! He is supposed to have answers. He is supposed to help these people toward a new tomorrow. That’s his job. The therapist believes that he can work it in reverse. If the couple starts to have good times together and talk together, then George will see that there is a real connection between them. And this is correct.
But there is one item that was skipped over. And it is vital to the whole project: The apology was never done correctly. The question lingering in George’s mind – how do I know this is for real? – is fair. He has heard nothing to assure himself that under certain circumstances it will not happen again.
Most apologies miss this fundamental point. And it cannot be skipped. It must come at the right moment in their work together in combination with growing levels of sharing of self. But how do you share yourself when you’re afraid of being vulnerable because the apology wasn’t done correctly?
You see the dilemma. They’re caught in a catch-22. Sharing will get them comfortable with who the other person is but without the proper apology that convinces George this will not happen again in the future, he is afraid to believe Sheila’s sharing and he is afraid to share himself. But without the sharing, he is not convinced of the truth of the apology.
The answer is the sharing and the correct apology must coincide and gradually come together. There will be no healing without it.
Which gets back to the original question: How? How will each feel safe? To answer this question, I created a 9-week intensive group and private therapy/coaching hybrid called Love Yourself. Here are the Pillars of it, what you come out with at the end:
*Inner Authority. This is the foundation on which everything else is built: Knowing who you are. Knowing your feelings, your wants, your needs, and what causes those feelings to change. It’s knowing yourself.
*Emotional Agility. One of the things you need to know in order to heal is what triggers you. We all get disturbed by certain things. We can hide it, even from ourselves – but it is doomed to come out somehow anyway. So this part of the program is to get clear on it. And to take the next step – conquer it. We can’t go through life having hurt feelings or exploding, or being depressed because something triggered all that. We need to have tools to make those feelings sweetly dissipate. Without sweeping the dust under the rug.
*Intentional Self-Adoration. We suffer from limiting beliefs. We know who we are but don’t like who we are. That’s got to change. The road to change is intentional. We learn to disarm harmful messages buried within ourselves. We intentionally replace those with the self-love and even adoration that is rightfully ours. Developing this self-compassion readies us for the next step.
*Compassionate Honesty. The strong framework of the above three pillars of the program gets us past resentment and bitterness. We now can clearly, honestly, and openly communicate in an assertive way what we think, want, need, feel, and offer. But it is filtered through a heart of compassion. This is key for a relationship and it deepens the connection between you. This is how you get the marriage you want out of first developing Self Love.
Now, we get to the keys to answer the question. When Sheila has a sense of Inner Authority and Intentional Self-Adoration in spite of her mistakes, she will have the patience to wait, lovingly, for George to see she is really, honestly, his; she’s not fooling around.
Meanwhile, George will work on repairing his lack of self-love, too. He will especially want to focus on the tools that govern his emotional state in Emotional Agility so as to get past the triggers that keep him worrying about the future.
Only then, will this couple start to be able to share their honest and true selves in conversation – Compassionate Honesty.
And how do they do all that?
With daily written, verbal, and thinking exercises, as well as exercises to change your body’s state (for Emotional Agility). By the time they get to Compassionate Honesty, they’ve laid the foundation to have a good conversation, one of depth and kindness – and truth. Those three together: depth, kindness, and truth, are the foundation of intimacy. And we make sure they will do all the work, too, with the Accountability System that I have in place!
If this is your dilemma, I can help you get clear on just how we will work that in one clarity call. Book here to find out for yourself: https://drdeb.com/book
When you’ve booked, be sure to fill out the application that is on another page you will be taken to. That info will help us in our meeting and it probably saves 20 min of talk time.