I was grateful and honoured to see that Serenne Therapy recently got featured in The Best Vancouver as one of the Top 5 Marriage Counsellors in Vancouver. I am so passionate about this work. Every day I get to sit with people in the heart of some of the most important relationships in their lives, witnessing, supporting, and guiding people to make meaningful positive changes in their relationships.
It’s work I am very familiar with myself. In my own partnership, I’ve been doing this deep relational process for nearly a decade now: working on our dynamic, working on myself, and working on healing intergenerational patterns we grew up with in our own families. It’s profound, and also overwhelming, how much of the past we each carry with us into daily life, into the living moment that unfolds breath by breath, thought by thought, action by action. If you, reading this, have had some experience or practice into unpacking even the seemingly smallest of fights and triggers that can happen in intimate partnership, you may know just how much of the past is present daily. We carry beliefs and feelings from our whole history that impact how we react or respond in any given moment, thus having ripple effects into the future. Moment by moment, we are all co-creating this reality we are all living. We each play a part.
Having had a child of my own fairly recently and being deep in the parenting journey, I see this past-present-future playing out more clearly than I ever have before. Every day I’m humbled by the parenting experience and just how all-encompassing it is. Little children are so vulnerable, so powerless for such a long period of time. So at the mercy of their caregivers. I have ever-growing insight about how bloody hard it is to give consistent care to a little growing being. It requires a wide network of care, of safe, loving, resourced relationships. A village, in other words. Most of us have heard that phrase: “It takes a village to raise a child.” I can now see how true that is; but even beyond that, it takes a village, a network of support, to have wellbeing at all, in every phase of life. We are so connected, so dependant on each other. We need each other. We always have, and we always will.
And so I do this work, and session to session I walk away feeling even more inspired to keep going. Because what I see, especially as more and more couples come to therapy, are people desiring to become more and more relational. What does that mean? Being relational is valuing the relationship, the connection, between people. It is, to quote couples therapist Terry Real in his book Us: “Moving beyond you and me consciousness… to Us consciousness… which embraces the whole, acknowledges our relationship to the unseen, the orphaned, the exiled.” In becoming more relational, we move towards listening more deeply, to understanding more, to caring more, to paying attention more. Both to our partners, but also to ourselves.
Becoming more relational also means listening more deeply to our needs and values, to sharing more from our heart about our vulnerabilities, our fears, our desires; to allowing parts of ourselves forward that have once been hidden away or forgotten about. Becoming more relational means claiming and defining the Self more, but not in a move towards over-individualism or selfishness. It means knowing ourselves more deeply, so that we can also know our partners, friends, children, etc, more deeply. It is both showing up more fully as Me, and also Us.
It sounds like big work. And it is. I would argue that “Us” consciousness is fairly new on the planet. We’ve seen historically that societies that have tended to move towards either extreme on the relationship spectrum, collectivism vs individualism. At either end, gone too extreme, these polarities can be harmful. Moving toward the middle ground, towards being relational, is the balance point. At the core of it is the principle of mutuality: “This has to be good for me and you.”
That principle of mutuality is, not surprisingly, also at the core of attachment theory, one of the most researched theories of human development and now widely understood to be at the core of human wellbeing. Research shows that we depend on safe relationships to be well. Without safe relationships, we get harmed. Safety is a core need. And yet, as a decade in this work has shown me, many, if not most of us, have experienced unsafe, or misattuned relationships. And may have also been unsafe or misattuned ourselves. Without awareness, support, and guidance, even with our best intentions we may not have skillfulness relationally.
So as I sit with couples, often in the heart of their biggest conflicts, whether it be around living situations, money, sex, family, children, housework, any topic you can think of, I come back to this question: “What happens if you two think like a team? If what happens next has to be good for both of you?”
What happens next can play out both practically, as in negotiation and compromise; but on a deeper level of consciousness, what happens is that people begin to become more relational. “Us” consciousness grows. This way of thinking and acting moves us beyond right or wrong, moves us beyond you and me - moves us towards connection, and safety. It moves us to a place that we long for, dream about, but often feel we don’t know how to get to. We want more connection, but what does that mean, anyway? Scrolling on our phones doesn’t give it to us. Reading the latest headlines about things happening around the world doesn’t either. Even in our partnerships, the most intimate relationships in our life that we’re supposed to be able to turn to for safety and understanding, we can feel disconnected, alone, and disheartened. A sense of “If even here I can’t be safe and understood, then where?” can arise. We can turn away from each other, when really we need to be turning towards each other and leaning in even more.
We all need support to have healthy relationships. Especially if we didn’t grow up with the model for safe and loving intimacy, we may not have seen it embodied, may not have received this relational energy for ourselves. Or even if we did, there may be differences in our adult relationships that are hard to navigate without additional insight and support. I am relieved to see some of the old stigma around couples counselling fading in our collective consciousness: that outdated, false belief that “going to relationship therapy means we’ve failed, or something is wrong with us.” More and more couples come in committed to growing in their emotional awareness and literacy, and that is really what this work is all about: learning how to deepen our understanding and care for ourselves, and each other.
Because the future is relational. We need each other. And we need to value, and prioritize, our relationships. I am honoured, and excited, to continue offering this work. Every day is an opportunity to grow together.
