The Art of Relating
When people are attracted to one another this drive to connect is often a magnetic pull towards relational healing: a chance to repair what once went wrong. Our Trauma drives our Erotic Charge.
We are sensitive to how we're impacted by our partners.
Relationships can feel both enlivening and expansive and also often challenging and confusing. Sex brings all our issues right to the surface and we are behaving in Sex as we are in Life, we often just don't realise that.
How we show up sexually depends on many things: how sensitive our bodies are and our capacity to pick up and transmit signals from our inside and outside worlds, who it is we're relating with and how safe we feel with them, what is the state of our body and nervous system in the onset of intimacy, our capacity to hold sexual energy, the list goes on.
Our trauma tends to inform how much sexual energy our systems can hold and how we react to our partners subtle and sometimes not so subtle behaviours. Sometimes we can experience ourselves very differently in response to the same partner, or to different partners. Other times we experience consistency in what shows up time and time again.
It's critical to stay connected to ourselves when we relate.
It's important to remember that we are each totally unique. We are individually tailored machines responding to multiple unique moments in time. In every moment we have choices in how we respond and yet often we respond in default ways. When we move too fast, we lose the capacity to respond rather than react and we loose our choice.
The key to excellent relating is to stay present to oneself and to stay in your body, not operating out of the mind, dissociating or finding your centre of gravity outside yourself: either tending to the needs of your partner or trying to manipulate them to get what you want rather than asking for it. It's critical to know what's happening inside YOU and to be able to tune into and communicate what you need whilst staying open to and loving towards the experience of the other.
For most of us that's much harder than it sounds.
In therapy we use relationship to heal our disconnection.
Psychosexual Somatics® therapy (PST) works to increase your capacity and tolerance for Life-force energy, to pull your centre of gravity back into you, to identify and rectify boundary violations, to support you to identify your needs and put them equal to those of others, to develop presence and drop the need to perform, to open the heart, to tolerate states of vulnerability and to support the physical body to let go of bracing against the potential that others might ultimately be out to harm us in some way. In PST we make more space for Love.
We were disconnected from our Eros (life-force) energy through relationship and it takes healthy relationship imprints to reconnect those neural pathways.
That's why choosing a therapist you can feel completely safe and relaxed with is such a critical component to the effectiveness of this treatment.
In IFS you deepen the connection to yourself. Looking at things from the inside out you start to tune into and listen to the subtle voices that make up your experience, that will guide you to where you are, or are not, responsibly taking care of your body and your deeper feelings and needs. You will learn to increasingly come back to yourself in your daily life and especially during times of relational or sexual challlenge, to slow down and to discover what's really wanting to happen. Self energy, that central core of who you really are, builds over time as you show up for yourself over and over again, buidling trust in the inherent leadership in your system that have have been lost in the past due to experiences of trauma.
