Most issues that bring couples to therapy are familiar laments: “We don’t have sex anymore.” “I can’t take the dirty socks everywhere.” “All my partner does is work.” Some are earth-shattering, like experiencing a betrayal or coming face to face with a dealbreaker. But they all reveal the same underlying distress: People don’t feel connected to one another; they’re missing the essence of the relationship. Feeling disconnected is a significant loss, and couples come to therapy hurt, angry, and depleted, saying they have nothing left to give to foster the closeness they long for. They wonder how they can ever get that feeling back. It is possible. The key to feeling connected is first feeling safe. I collaborate with couples to find their “dance,” a new way to be with one another, which creates the foundation for a connected relationship — their secure base.

Of course, it starts with communication. Exploring unexpressed feelings, wants, and desires and addressing the details of interactions creates safety and connectedness. While we explore the hurts, we help shape new speaking and listening skills that cultivate care, empathy, and curiosity. As communication shifts from debates about winning to conversations that seek understanding, healing ensues, and trust grows.

The Power to Change the Dance

The most powerful way to create safety and ignite connection is with body language, facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, tone of voice, and even how we move through space. It’s known as non-verbal communication. It’s the cornerstone of attachment. Neuroscientists contend that a person’s sense of safety mainly comes from non-verbal cues. Most of us are unaware we send powerful signals with our posture, gestures, and voices. Between 50 and 93 percent of what we take in from others is expressed without words. Non-verbal communication is what regulates relationships. It can work against us, or we can become aware of it and use it to change our lives.

How can this “Superpower” create a connection? We can intentionally shift posture, movements, eye contact, and tone as quickly as we shape verbal language. I begin collaborating with couples on their “new dance” by asking “choreography questions.” While exploring their words, we simultaneously consider the non-verbal components: Where were you in the room during this impasse? Describe your tone. Were you looking at one another or on your phone? Then, we expand this inquiry to learn the specific steps of their “dance .”Where do they sit at the dinner table? What does the greeting look like when someone returns home? How do you want to be received after a long day?

Of all the non-verbal expressions, touch is among the most effective. It is essential to learn how physical touch works in the couple’s relationship, what it means to them, and how it makes them feel. If the couple is responsive to touch, we may use an intervention like “noticing when your partner gets it right,” with a hand on the shoulder, eye contact, and a smile. It will raise the impact of the praise and catapult our couple’s connection. We practice this in the therapeutic space and encourage its continuation into their lives. If touch isn’t the couple’s preferred language, we explore the best way to signal positive messages.

Parenting Moves

Children are especially attuned to body language. Couples looking for parenting support are empowered by understanding the impact of their non-verbal messages. Children test boundaries and exert control by separating parents, leading to marital conflict– which then causes children to feel unsafe and act out more. We help parents present a united front with consistent limits to interrupt these dynamics. Having a united front sends a message of safety to children, gains their cooperation, and reduces acting out. But when parents stand next to one other while setting limits, they create a parenting coalition that conveys a sense of security far more powerfully than words. And they don’t have to agree about every aspect of child-rearing to have one another’s back stand next to one another.

I encourage parents to greet one another at the front door with a hug, sit next to one another at the dinner table, and call the other parent in front of the children to say, “I care about you.” I ask parents: “What else can you do? “How could you present yourself to your children to convey the message: “We are in this parenting thing together?” One client, whose partner was out of town, came up with the idea of going to their bedroom and making a quick phone call to their partner. It took five minutes, and it sent children the message that no amount of distance separates their parents. There was no begging for extra TV time that night. The client changed the “dance.” Strategies to send non-verbal messages can also support single parents and divorced parents engaged in co-parenting.

Targeting Trauma

Couples with one or more members who have experienced developmental trauma or are experiencing current relational trauma like an affair are susceptible to non-verbal cues. Memories of traumatic events are stored differently than narrative memory. Overwhelming experiences are “remembered” in our bodies. This capability impacts our ability to read cues in the social landscape as safe or non-safe. Often, couples see danger and rejection when none is present or intended. For instance, a client who experienced abandoning parents may feel rejected and unworthy if their partner comes home from work and suddenly checks their email. This typical misstep may trigger a well of pain from the past that doesn’t fit with the present. The injured person may automatically “shut down” in a self-protection mode, responding with robotic answers and avoiding touch. The other couple members then feel confused rejected, and distances themselves, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. These unspoken misunderstandings cause significant relational injury, which raises the stakes and the need for interventions that target the couple’s “dance.” Attending to the couples’ non-verbal, automatic responses is the key to creating the security required to foster connection and healing. What we say matters, but how we say it means more.

Practicing Ethical Non-Monogamy and Polyamory

Supporting couples in creating the relationship they want is an exciting aspect of treatment. All connections are invited, and anything is possible when the mission collaborates to create a secure base of connectedness. Connecting entails exploring non-verbal, automatic reactions and engaging reflective responses to find the couple’s unique “dance.”

Love is an illusion in the sense that it seems like something we give and receive. It seems like something we need to survive. And in some ways, it is.

Where Love Starts

We need love in the sense of belonging, literally as children, to get our most basic needs met. It is crucial for our physical development at that time that we have an adult to provide us with food and shelter, and if we are lucky, some sense of emotional support.

We are biologically wired to adopt whatever beliefs those who can provide food and shelter for us. To ensure our physical survival even if they are not very healthy or loving towards us.

As we get older, we become more self-sufficient. We are able to safely question the environment in which we were raised. In some cases, the pain of discovering we did not receive the love we “needed” may lead us to make it our life’s mission (knowingly or unknowingly) to fill the hole of that grief.

RELATED GOODTHERAPY ARTICLE: Love, Relationships, Aces, and Aros

Where the Need For Love Leads Us

The undercurrent of our subconscious may constantly be asking: How can I get love? Where can I find love? How can I prove I am loveable?

On the one hand, the need to experience love and belonging remains. Our lives are interwoven, and we are interdependent within the structure of our society.

The overfocus on this need to belong, however, can become emotional, and sometimes even physical. If we have not learned how to draw and respect healthy boundaries around what we are willing to exchange for “love”, it becomes problematic.

Instead of going inward to touch our deepest selves, we look outside of ourselves for confirmation that we are worthy. We look for people to tell us we are good, loveable, and deserving of connection. We want something to disprove the pain we hold about not having that message clearly and undoubtedly embedded in us.

Sometimes because of challenges with caregivers, and other times because of experiences of other kinds of loss or pain that we were not equipped to handle as children, we try to get the outside world to fill that perceived need.

But we were worthy the whole entire time. Our parents’ shortcomings had nothing to do with us, just as our shortcomings have nothing to do with our children.

RELATED GOODTHERAPY ARTICLE: Real Love and Social Media

What Type of Attachment is Healthy?

Insecure Attachment

Data suggests about 40% of Americans have what is considered “insecure attachment” resulting from the perception or reality of lacking the kind of ideal healthy bond with an adult.

Some of the results of this inner struggle may look like an obsessive need to:

• Please or be liked.
• Over-explain or over-justify our actions.
• Avoid intimacy.
• Have a lot of “enemies”.
• Feel hurt when someone honors their own needs instead of putting yours first.

In some more extreme cases, it could look like controlling or manipulating another person or staying in relationships where abuse is happening because of “love” or trauma bonding.

Healthy Attachment

Healthy attachment is kind of like learning a foreign language. It is much easier as a child but by no means impossible as an adult.

Unlike learning a second language, you may not receive the increased sense of outside accolades for your achievement. But, if you know what your challenges have been, the inner knowing of your resilience can be its own reward. And your relationships will likely improve dramatically when you take ownership over your own healing no matter how unfair it may feel to have to work through it.

We may, unintentionally, not only cause ourselves suffering, but also project our unmet needs onto others as something they are meant to fulfill for us. We could unknowingly, be tasking another person to prove our worthiness to us which is codependent in an unhealthy way.

Even though it is not our fault that we ended up with this struggle, it is still our responsibility to work through it.

RELATED GOODTHERAPY ARTICLE: From Captivation to Commitment: 5 Phases of Love Over Time

Learn to Love Yourself

These concepts are relatively easy to understand intellectually, but teaching the body, mind, and nervous system that we can cultivate a love within ourselves that cannot be taken away is a total game changer.

It allows us to experience a deeper meaning of love that creates greater stability within us and provides for our most authentic expression of self to shine through.

As we learn to let go of subconscious conditioning, we rebuild our lives and ways of connecting with others without the constraints of what we thought to be true about our worthiness. We better tend to the foundation of our internal world.

We gain trust in our newfound wisdom. We witness our strength and resiliency and the love that was already within. We become more peaceful inside and naturally feel the pull to live more authentically and freely on the outside.

Who are we when we realize we have all of the love we need inside ourselves already? How does our ability to love others without such a tight grip on them is exactly what we want them to change? We can still experience loving connection and belonging while being sovereign and accepting love as a state of being already whole within us. Our relationships may deepen in ways we never knew possible.

For the L.O.V.E.

Here’s an acronym that may help folks on this sacred journey back to the love within:

L– Let the tower of familial, environmental, societal, and even self-conditioning fall. Choose to rebuild your ideas of love and connection with what makes sense with the level of insight you carry now.

O– Own your ability to have some authority over your emotional and spiritual development in a self-compassionate way. Someone else could be experiencing something like what you are and see it completely differently. That’s good news. We can shift and change. But the brain’s learning centers shut down when we are in spaces of shame, so commit to addressing it from a place of natural gentleness with yourself.

V– Vow to stay on a path of personal evolution and choose to interact with others on a similar approach so you can gain experience supporting each other in healthier ways. A fatty substance called myelin coats neuropathways that are used frequently and allow the brain to think more automatically that way which means we get better at whatever we practice.

E-Everyone has a history we aren’t fully aware of because they may not even be fully aware. Please do your best to draw healthy boundaries where needed but also remember that how people treat us is not usually as personal as it feels. They may be acting from their own insecurities around lovableness, and we may be perceiving from ours.

The GoodTherapy Registry might be helpful to you. We have thousands of Therapists listed with us who would love to walk with you on your journey. You can find the Support you need today.