Over the years, I have often been asked about the challenges of couplehood, about the “Couples Harmony” method, about the masculine and feminine parts of the psyche, about the relationships between them, about how to use them in our lives and about healing relationships in various types of crisis. I’ve put these questions together in this section because they come up again and again, and the responses can also be helpful to many others.
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Working with the feminine and masculine parts within our psyche takes into account their importance to our ability to realize our vision. These parts differ from each other in their essence, and yet only full cooperation between them will allow them to fulfill their mission for us.
The relationship between the feminine and masculine parts within us is determined in our childhood, and is influenced by the relationship between our parents. If there was partnership between our parents, there will also be partnership between these parts. If communication between our parents was problematic, such communication will also prevail between these parts in ourselves. Not only will the relationships between these parts have an impact on the fulfillment of our vision, we will also reproduce these relationships in our connections with our partner.
Different developmental processes throughout our lives make it possible to change at least part of this important relationship. The encounter between the feminine and masculine parts within us, created within the coaching process, enables relatively easy change and healing of the relationship between them. It also allows us to create the cooperation and friendship that we want to achieve in our relationships with our partners.
Even if in a relationship, one chooses to work and improve the relationship between his own inner feminine and masculine parts without the cooperation of his partner, it can greatly affect the relationship between both partners.
For more information: the method and the article “The vision of relationships in our time and the Couples Harmony method“
Couplehood is the choice to live a shared life with another person. Living together creates a partnership for us in various issues in life, such as building a shared home and parenting. Along with everything they share, each spouse is a separate person with their own desires, their own needs and their own fulfillment.
Many times the experiences as a couple at the beginning of our shared path consume a lot of our time and energy. We learn to live and act together, we learn to share experiences and tasks and get to know our own abilities and those of our partner in this new situation, while at the same time, we’ll also develop new strengths for our lives together.
At this stage, at the beginning of the relationship, we tend to lose sight somewhat of ourselves, our needs and our fulfillment. We simply get a little confused by so much that is new, between ourselves and our partners, and then we start to feel less good about ourselves. When it comes to our needs, no one will take care of them as well as we can, even if we are comfortable in a relationship.
Taking responsibility for our lives means taking responsibility for our needs and our self-fulfillment, and it requires us to maintain a certain freedom within the relationship. The freedom we need is: the freedom to be who we are, the freedom to act for our truth, the freedom to act for our self-fulfillment and the freedom to choose how to share our life energy. Without such freedom we cannot have a happy life, with or without a partner.
Understanding and recognizing the need for such freedom, and the fact that it does not contradict our couplehood, constitutes the basis for creating freedom within the relationship. In addition, it is important to reach an understanding with your partner about the importance of such freedom, and to find a way together that both partners can live.
In order to create the appropriate cooperation between the couple on the issue of freedom, it is useful to use the Win-Win dialog also mentioned in the article “Harmonious communication“
Our basic needs are needs which, if they are not met, prevent us from having a healthy life. For example: food, drink, sleep, oxygen, together with touch, closeness and more. When a person’s basic needs are not met, he will feel it in his health, energy level and psychological state.
Living in a relationship does not change the need to respond to our basic needs. Many times in a relationship, we find ourselves in situations where we give up on our basic needs. This can result from a belief that it is impossible to build a life where the basic needs of both partners will be fulfilled, or from not knowing how to fulfill the basic needs of both partners.
Sometimes partners cheat on their spouses because essential basic needs are not being met in their relationship. Paying attention to unmet basic needs in a relationship may prevent sickness and even avert situations where partners may cheat on each other.
At the beginning of a relationship, each member of the couple is enthusiastic about their partner’s abilities in the areas where they feel weaker, and they happily transfer the responsibility for what they find difficult to their partner.
Over the years, each of the partners gets more and more practice in what he or she was already good at – and continues to be weak in what they always found difficult to do. This leaves the couple with strengths in the same areas as before, but creates a situation where each will lean on the other in areas where they were always weak and have remained so.
In order for each member of the couple to be more independent, it is important that they also do the things they are not good at and improve, so that each partner will be able to choose when he will do what needs to be done – or when his partner will take care of it. Such a situation, where both partners practice all their abilities, will leave them the freedom to choose each time what is more suitable for each of them to do and will reduce the extent of the “leaning” in their relationship.
When we want to realize a vision, we actually take our idea and realize it, which means we create the kind of solution that can be produced in reality. Part of the complexity of this process is that it requires us to use many different skills, for example: dreaming our vision, finding it, translating it into terms of action, feeling good about it, and more. All these skills are within us, but belong to different parts of our psyche.
In order to carry out the whole process and use all these abilities successfully, we must learn to utilize our inner strengths and to harness them in cooperation for the same purpose.
Working with the different parts of the psyche gives us the tools to achieve a state that will allow us to realize our vision.
Nowadays, when we are all individuals, the question is not if but how. When we take responsibility for our needs and do not offload that responsibility onto others, we can prioritize our needs according to how important we feel they are, and communicate this to our environment to produce understanding and synchronization.
When we agree to be in this space together, the way in which we share it will bring us closer.
The same is true of our feelings. As individuals, once we acknowledge our feelings we can share them with our partner and restore our sense of closeness and synchronization.
So the answer is yes, couplehood of two individuals is possible, and it also makes room for love, self-fulfillment and partnership in building a family.
The Couples Harmony method creates this possibility within us, between the feminine and masculine parts in the subconscious, and from that place it becomes quite simple to reproduce harmony in our relationships in the external world.
