How can I create more intimacy in my relationship?

Does it feel like there is a huge wall between you? You cannot communicate and feel close to each other anymore.

Perhaps the number one question both individual clients who have relationship difficulties and couples have is how can I create more closeness in my relationship with my partner.

Have you reached a breaking point?

Can we bring it back or perhaps create what was not fully there before?

As February is officially the month of love, in this post I want to talk about the common barriers to closeness, connection and intimacy.

To change a pattern and relationship dynamic, we need to first understand it.

Previously I have written about creating connection following the Emotionally Focused Couples therapy model.

7 Steps for transforming your relationship – Part 1: Assessing relationship patterns and sore spots

This post is particularly inspired and informed by Terry Real and his Relational Life School.

We talk about losing strategies that couples commonly engage in and subsequently feel disconnected.

When we feel threatened in the relationship (the brain does not distinguish between physical or emotional threat) and we feel the need to defend ourselves, we engage in strategies that demonstrate a wall that does not allow closeness.

Many of these strategies we may have learnt in our childhood as we had to adapt to the environment to keep us safe.

(Read more here Childhood trauma: How did you have to adapt to survive your childhood?)

If we want to bring more closeness, we need to learn to change our relationship tactics and behaviours towards our partner.

Here I will list five losing strategies that create more distance in your relationship.

1. Being right – You and your partner may compete over who is right and who is wrong. Competition creates distance. It often stems from the position, that I am better than you. For the relationship, the details do not matter. What matters is the ability to hear and be compassionately curious about our partner’s experiences in the current situation.

2. Controlling – Micromanaging a partner and pointing out their faults creates distance. Who wants a boss and be controlled in a relationship? This can lead to fighting against it or resentment over time and a desire to leave the situation. Alternatively, a partner, who has low self-esteem, may shut down and lose their inner sparkle. There is no loving connection!

3. Unbridled self-expression – Being authentic and expressing one’s true feelings is encouraged to be connected and truthful with oneself but this does not mean being brutally honest without kindness and compassion for the partner. Giving all you think about your partner (even if in the heat of a moment) can be damaging to the relationship. Hurtful words cannot be taken back. There are more productive ways of expressing one’s feelings, such as using the I language and Non-violent communication.

4. Retaliation – Trying to put down fire with fire never works. It just ends up in a cycle of repeating patterns. The other person does not know how you feel in the moment by giving back all you have. The only way to start changing the dynamic is by one of you stopping the vicious cycle.

5. Withdrawal – John and Julie Gottman from the Gottman’s Institute studied hundreds of couples and found four key indicators and predictors of a married couple was going to end up in divorce. Withdrawing from a partner and stonewalling was one of them. Connection has been a human lifeline and the way to survive for thousands of years. When we are disconnected without a way to repair it, it just leads to more disconnection and despair. This is different from taking space to reflect and regulate our emotions.  

Being in a relationship is hard and many of them did not learn the best ways to create loving connections and often end up repeating old family patterns. Which losing strategy do you and your partner engage in?

Start becoming curious of your relationship pattern so you can start to see where you two could improve.

I hope you found this post useful. If you are interested in couples therapy, you can book a free 15min consultation to discuss it more https://calendly.com/drmarikovanen/15minconsultation.

I help couples to find each other again and create a more loving connection.