Tag Archives: prevent divorce or breakup

Category: Emotional Healing, Weeding out the Killers: Criticism, Anger, Frustration and Resentment

Moving from Stuck in Emotional Pain to Healing Your Heart Once and For All

Pain in our bodies is usually there to tell us something. It’s a messenger.

If your ankle hurts after a fall, you’ve likely sprained it. Chronic heartburn could be an indication of a hernia. A migraine after a long day might be the result of tension.

You could pop an Advil for the ankle or the headache, and take some Mylanta for the sour stomach.

And you’d probably get some immediate relief.

But you’d only be addressing the symptoms. Unless you treat the root cause (get off the ankle, fix the hernia, or lower your stress levels), you’ll keep experiencing the same pain.

Not only that, but the pain can escalate in intensity.

Emotional pain in our hearts – and the way we often respond to it – works the same way.

How We Stay Stuck In Emotional Pain

When you feel under-appreciated, dissatisfied, frustrated, abandoned, or criticized in your relationship, you want to make the emotional pain go away.

And if you’re like the many men and women I have worked with, here’s what you’re most likely to do:

Unhappy couple

  • Fight with your partner
  • Withdraw from your partner
  • Leave your partner altogether

Yet, in each of these scenarios, you’ve only treated the “symptoms.”

Unless you uncover and dissolve the underlying cause of your pain, you will continue to hurt in love.

Pain in our hearts – the natural grief and other emotions that all humans feel – is a messenger too!

When you feel emotional pain in response to what your date or partner did – or didn’t do – that’s your inner compass telling you that there’s something that needs to be healed on the inside.

  • If you keep experiencing the pain of people leaving you, there is an underlying cause.
  • If you always feel like you’re the one giving in your relationship, there is an underlying cause.
  • If you feel like your partner isn’t sufficiently attracted to you, there is an underlying cause.

And you will keep attracting people and situations that trigger your emotional pain – whatever it is.

Heal Your Heart Once And For All

Just as physical pain resolves once you treat the underlying condition, your emotional pain will also stop once you treat the root causes…

  • That fight you keep having over and over with your partner will stop.
  • Those players you keep attracting will leave you alone.
  • That ache of dissatisfaction you feel in a relationship will vanish.

But recognizing where the challenges stem from can be tricky. After all, they’ve been with you for most of your life.

I’m a specialist in helping people tap into the root causes of their relationship pain.

If you want immediate help so you can zero in on exactly what’s causing the problems between you and your partner,

Please consider joining my 3-Month Relationship Navigation Intensive Program.

And if you think you ALREADY know the underlying reasons why you and your partner fight, you especially need this program.

I’ve found that most couples are completely wrong in their analysis of their own relationships, and their “diagnosis” is usually way off.

That’s precisely why they keep running into the same problems and experiencing the same emotional pain!

When you participate in The Relationship Navigation Intensive,

You’ll know how to truly heal your emotional pain and your relationship – and finally know what it’s like to experience healthy, lasting, and blissful love.

Click here to learn more.

If you are struggling in your relationship, or struggling to find your life partner,

I would be happy to discuss your situation and how the Relationship Navigation Intensive can help.

Schedule a 30-minute consultation on my calendar.

In the meantime, May Your Heart Feel Peace in Your Daily Relating…

I’m here for you. I’m on your side. 🙂

To Love!

Schedule 30 Minutes Now

Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist

Learn more about the Relationship Navigation Intensive

Category: Success Stories

Focus on What’s Working

I worked with a couple, Julie and Tom, who came to see me shortly after they got married. They’d called each other “soul mates.” However, once they tied the knot, Julie started pointing out problems, trying to get Tom to fit into the image she wanted her marriage to be like.

Save Your Relationship

In her attempt to nip the problems in the bud, she initiated conversations with Tom. She told him about the sadness and worry she was feeling.

She expressed her disappointment and frustration with the way things were going between them, and she tried to tell him what was important to her.

When she did this, he lashed out in anger at her and backed away. The “conversations” seemed to Tom like long, drawn out criticisms of how he was failing. He started saying, “I just can’t seem to make you happy.”

Guys will back out when they can’t make you happy.

They turn off. They see your happiness as vitally important and your unhappiness as a sign of their failure. It’s evidence to them that they can’t fix it. And over time, they shut down, spiraling into inertia.

Men don’t try, they only do. Can you see how that’s a set up for relationship failure?

The more Tom backed away, the more fear Julie had about their future, the more angry she became and the more she tried to get him to understand what needed to be “fixed.” It was a downward spiral.

The problem is that our brains are wired to look for danger and things we don’t like, and to call up past memories, so we don’t make the same mistakes again. It’s an attempt to avert disaster. It’s our survival instinct.

In order to make changes that will get you what you want, you must retrain your mind to see something other than what you’re wired to look for.

Julie and Tom had forgotten to high-light what was working in their relationship and express appreciation and gratitude for each other.

They were letting fear get in the way of their love for each other.

Love survives the inevitable ups and downs in relationships when we are conscious about where we put our attention and focus, and choose instead to express what we appreciate about our partner regularly to them.

Julie started coaching with me first, and what I worked on with her was to bring her focus back to the present moment and to turn her attention on what she liked, appreciated and valued – to remember why she had married Tom.

It was hard to do when we started working together because there was so much tension between them, but she was committed and persevered.

I had her call her energy back into this present moment by catching herself when she started worrying. She was re-training her mind to look for the things that she liked, appreciated, and were working, and then express them and only them to Tom.

Tom had to get himself into the present moment too. He’d been reacting with anger to Julie because of a memory of his previous long-term relationship that had ended badly. He’d seen himself as a failure. My work with Tom was to heal the memory of his past relationship, so that he wasn’t projecting worry onto his marriage with Julie.

By being in the present moment and focusing their attention and energy on what was working, they’ve been able to remember why they got married and co-create the future they truly want together.

Through our work together, they began expressing gratitude and appreciation for each other daily and enhanced the love they have for each other.

If you’re experiencing similar challenges in your relationship and wondering what you can do to turn things around, schedule a 30-minute appointment with me to discuss your unique situation and goals and what you can start doing right away to achieve them.

Click here to schedule now.

I’m here for you. I’m on your side. 🙂

To Love!

Schedule 30 Minutes Now

Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist
Category: Weeding out the Killers: Criticism, Anger, Frustration and Resentment

Criticism Kills Relationships ~ So get rid of it now!

Have you ever wished you could “get more flies with honey” instead of choking on so much vinegar?

Criticism Kills Relationships

Before you laugh me off, consider this: criticism is the first of John Gottman’s famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

It predicts divorce with more than 90% accuracy!

Criticism is an easy form of ego defense: we’ve all done it; we’ve all received it. Underneath it all, we criticize when we feel devalued by behaviors and attitudes that we don’t understand.

While failing to understand where your partner is coming from creates problems, failing to understand how the masculine and feminine respond to criticism differently creates lingering hurts that build up over time to destroy the love you share.

It doesn’t have to be this way when you understand what you’re dealing with!

At it’s core, criticism is judgment and the Masculine Provider/Protector judges.

He’s FANTASTIC at continually evaluating his environment for strengths and weaknesses because this is what makes him EFFECTIVE, successful, and damned good at his job!

The Feminine Supporter-Adapter, on the other hand, has a very deep and strong aversion to judgement because it directly affects her feelings, and she values her feelings the way she values her life!

When she feels judged, there’s no love, and her Internal Critic can trigger a Rage Response: it’s ugly, has no reason, she hates it passionately, but there’s a voice inside of every woman that continually knit-picks and tells her she’s wrong, she could have done it this way, she should have done it that way, and there’s always someone else better than her…

There’s no upside to siding with this ‘Ideal Woman’ from the outside!

Maybe it would be better to call her the Ideal Critic, in point of fact.

This is VERY IMPORTANT TO RECOGNIZE because the Feminine responds to criticism by adapting her behavior. This is who she is! What she does! Adapting to her environment is what makes the Feminine timeless and EFFECTIVE!

For a woman criticized once, there will be no twice, because she will change to get a better response. Thus, she instinctively uses criticism to solicit change in others.

But the Masculine will not adapt. It’s not his job. He won’t even think about it because he does not naturally read between the lines to interpret that change is needed.

WOMEN: No amount of criticism will ever change your man!

It will just make him retract, withdraw, resent and avoid you. You need to speak directly about what change you want and what it will provide for you.

MEN: Women experience criticism like physical violence and you will never find a common ground for “reasoning” in their response.

Obviously, judgment is not wrong, but it is important to understand where and when it’s appropriate.

So whether you’re a woman or man, single or coupled, the NEXT TIME A MOMENT TO CRITICIZE SOMEONE YOU LOVE rears its ugly head, I invite you to be curious instead.

Assume they have a good reason for doing what they do and say “I’m curious, what had you do ________ that way?” or “You must have a good reason for doing what you did, would you be willing to tell me about your reason?”

You’ll get a lot farther through understanding instead of assuming.

If Criticism has moved you to crisis, there’s hope and help! I offer Relationship Breakthrough Sessions for Singles, Couples or Partners Flying Solo ready to turn their dating and relating experiences around right now!

Click Here to Learn More and Signup!

To Love!
Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist

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Category: Building Rapport, Connection and Intimacy, Fundamentals of Conscious Partnership

Leveraging the Law of Attraction to Create your Ideal Partnership

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, wave a magic wand, stop time, and just take a minute to imagine your Perfect Lover and your Perfect Love!
Create a GREAT Relationship

Fantasize if you have too!

Right now.

Imagine your Perfect Lover and your Perfect Love and tell me:

What does it look like? How does your partner feel to you? What’s your favorite thing to share? What would you give to make this moment last forever?!

Meditate for a moment.

Take a deep breath and feel it.

Take another deep breath and feel it wash through your body and take your breath away…

Pretty luscious, huh? When you allow yourself to FEEL LOVE VIBRATE through your every cell and very being?

At the beginning of a relationship, this is what Love feels like.

Everything is fresh and fun. Each partner notices all of the good things. They’re looking hopefully into the future and feeling relationship BLISS.

They spend their attention and energy on what they hope will happen and overlook the little quirks and mismatches and become “invested” in their future together.

For my part? I would give anything to make this moment last forever…

But eventually this focus shifts and “reality” sets it.

Assumptions and unexpressed wants and needs accumulate, and the little challenges build up and become boulders.

Feelings get hurt, and hurts grow into glaring wounds until many couples find themselves in crisis.

What’s happening here is that the ATTENTION OF EACH PERSON IS TURNING AWAY FROM WHAT’S WORKING.

They begin knit-picking one another literally (in word).

Or figuratively (in behavior).

Maybe even both!

BUT IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, and here’s why:

We typically think of energy as how much gas we have in the tank.

This is true. But on a deeper level, energy is something that creates our reality.

WHAT WE FOCUS OUR ATTENTION ON ATTRACTS MORE OF THE SAME.

Instead of focusing on what’s missing in your relationship – on what’s not working – try focusing on what you like, appreciate and value about your partner.

MEDITATE ON WHAT YOU LIKE DAILY!

Tell your partner what you like, appreciate and value about them daily.

Your partner will respond!

From wherever you begin.

Starting today.

Seriously! 🙂

To Love!
Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist

 

P.S. If you’re frustrated and struggling with the heartbreak of relationship problems, maybe you just need a fresh perspective to get back to the place of Hope and Love! 

Schedule a Relationship Breakthrough Session and Find out How You Can Create the Foundation for
Lifelong Love and Companionship!

Category: Safety, Commitment and Getting Your Needs Met

Caution: Safety Can Matter More than Love!

Have you ever given much thought to what makes your partner feel safe? Noticed how men feel physically safe? And women experience real and imagined threats to their physical safety almost every day?

Safety FirstWhen men and women get into partnership, misunderstandings about Safety can create tension and break up relationships because men and women often experience safety in opposition.

Men have a much stronger sense of confidence in themselves and their ability to keep themselves safe because they tend to be bigger and stronger than women. Because of this confidence, men almost always feel safe moving through the world.

Women, on the other hand, continually evaluate their environment for potential threats and avoid them. From jumping at the loud voice of a man when he’s angry, to choosing the safest parking space, women move through the world with caution.

FOR THE MASCULINE: Anything that threatens his ability to keep the people in his life safe makes him feel unsafe.

FOR THE FEMININE: Anything that prevents her from “seeing” her environment represents danger. In fact, she actually needs to know what’s going on inside a man’s head to feel safe because instinct won’t let her take safety for granted.

The best way to understand this crazy dynamic is to imagine the masculine as a warrior. “His” job is to protect the people he has committed himself to protect. In order to do this, he won’t reveal his weaknesses or his strengths to ANYONE if he can help it OR unless he feels he is completely safe with them.

If he told the enemy who his family was, they would no longer be safe. If he told the enemy what the plan was, his squadron wouldn’t be safe. If he expressed his vulnerabilities, he wouldn’t be safe.

That’s right. For a man to share what’s deepest inside him, HE MUST FEEL SAFE.

Can you see how these instinctual differences might lead to conflict? When men need to know that women are safe to be vulnerable with? And women need men to be vulnerable in order to feel safe?!

Irritation, frustration and anger are unsafe.

The tone of a woman’s voice, the furrowing of her brow, and the sheer intensity with which she “expresses” her lack-of-safety-driven-feelings-about-things causes him to feel unsafe.

When he feels unsafe, he won’t talk, and his silence feeds her fear for her own safety and thus the cycle amplifies itself into a downward spiral of misunderstanding.

Many relationships have ended because of this dynamic. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

Take some time to explore what makes you feel safe and share it with your partner (or the person you’re dating)!

Talk about what creates the experience of safety for you, and what feeling safe makes possible for you!

When you understand what you need, and share authentically with your partner, your connection will be strengthened.

To Love!
Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist
If you want to learn more about the instinctual differences between men and women and how to avoid letting them run your relationship amok, I offer Relationship Breakthrough Sessions for Singles, Couples or Partners Flying Solo who are committed to creating Conscious Partnership.
Click Here to Learn More and Signup!
Category: Uncategorized

Do you ever feel like you’re hitting a brick wall talking to your partner?

Prevent miscommunication

If you’re like most men and women, this happens quite often. From a woman wanting to talk about her feelings and never getting to the point, to a man speaking in bullet points when she wants details.

The truth is that men and women are so different that we’d be better off if we ACTUALLY spoke different languages, because then, they wouldn’t think they were communicating.

We miscommunicate about: money, planning, children, who’s in charge of what, our needs, what’s important to us, how we like attention and affection. And that’s if you already are in a relationship.

The dating world is especially challenging. If you’re trying to connect with someone new and don’t know how because you don’t understand how men and women communicate differently, you’ll be in trouble, and probably spend a lot of time being single.

The world has changed, but our instinctual differences in how we communicate have not. To get to Partnership, you have to understand the differences between the masculine and feminine ways of communicating.

Did you know women tend to use about 25,000 words a day while men average 5,000? And as my father says, “Yeah, and that’s all you need!” I’d bet that most men experience the deluge of words a woman speaks as way too much.

Women (the feminine mode) tend to go on and on and on because the details help them to figure out how they can support the people in their lives. Men (the masculine mode) typically don’t care about the details because he just needs to know what needs to be provided.

Picture this scenario: A man and woman are talking. She’s asking questions to get to know him. He’s answering in one word answers. She’s feeling like he doesn’t want to connect and he feels like he’s being interrogated.

This does not bode well for connecting, now does it?

This week I want you to think of yourself as an explorer in another country learning to communicate with the natives (opposite sex). Be curious. Be open. Ask questions about how the person experiences life and their views of the world. Practice listening!

Do this even if you’ve been married for 75 years!

 

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Category: Fundamentals of Conscious Partnership

Get your REAL Happily Ever After

Have you ever had the experience of arguing with your partner about something important to you? Has your partner ever done something that brought up anger about something that happened long ago?

Creating your REAL Happily Ever After

Or maybe you’re worried that that same horrible thing will happen again?

Have you ever had a relationship end because you’d reached an impasse and couldn’t figure out how to get around it?

I see it all the time in my coaching practice working with couples. When the relationship starts each partner is noticing the good things and they’re looking hopefully into the future. Their attention and energy is going toward what they hope will happen. They’ve been successful at putting things that don’t match what they want, bothersome or upsetting things, far enough out of sight that they’ve managed to say, “I do.”

Unfortunately, the second the vows are said, their focus turns toward all of the things that get in the way of the “happily ever after” that each had assumed would just happen.

The “reality” sets in.

Assumptions, and unexpressed wants and needs build up. Little challenges build up over time and become boulders. Feelings get hurt. The laundry left outside the hamper moves from being an irritation to being a sign that our partner doesn’t care about us, or even love us.

Hurts grow into glaring wounds.

What’s happening is that the attention of each person is turning away from what’s working toward what is not fitting into the picture of “happily ever after.”

The problem is that our brains are wired to look for danger and things we don’t like, and to call up past memories, so we don’t make the same mistakes again. It’s an attempt to avert disaster.

It’s our survival instinct.

In order to make changes that will get you what you want, you must retrain your mind to see something other than what you’re wired to look for.

Love survives the inevitable ups and downs in relationships when we are conscious about where we put our attention and focus, and choose to express what we appreciate about our partner to them regularly instead of allowing ourselves to slip into instinct and criticize our partner for “what’s wrong.”

If you’re experiencing challenges in your relationship, maybe it’s time for a reboot? Request a Relationship Breakthrough Session for you and your partner to learn more.
Click Here to Learn More and Signup!
I’m here to help!
Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist
Category: Success Stories

Solving the Dueling Provider Dilemma

Fear of failure makes you hide from the inevitable breakup. But it also makes you hide from a real solution.

How to Prevent DivorceIf breaking up is the last thing you want, and you have no idea what to do to turn things around, read on because waiting until you’ve said horrible things to each other and you’re seething in anger never works.

One of my clients, I’ll call Margaret, reached out to me in February. She was terrified that her relationship was failing. She had good evidence that things were grim.

Her husband, I’ll call Mark, had told her he wanted a divorce and was looking on dating sites. Mark was no longer willing to talk with her about their relationship. He pushed Margaret away at every turn.

It felt like the life, trust and family they’d been building for the last 12 years was being ripped away from her, and they have a two year old daughter.

The good news is that she reached out before Mark had moved out.

The problem was that when their daughter arrived, Margaret became Mama Bear protecting her daughter, and she’d ignored Mark’s ideas about parenting. Mama Bear mode, by the way, is extremely protective and what I’d call masculine mode.

Margaret and Mark had had very different upbringings, and have very different ideas about how to raise children. This isn’t uncommon. Add to that that often the masculine and feminine have different ideas about parenting to begin with, and trouble brews.

They hadn’t clarified how they wanted to raise their children and both of them had assumed they were on the same page. Which they weren’t.

Margaret and Mark were experiencing an all too common scenario of two people in masculine mode. Or what I call, “Dueling Providers.”

This happens when a couple doesn’t have clear DEALS about something. In this case it was raising children.

Mark couldn’t even see the qualities he loved about Margaret anymore, and neither could she. Their situation had changed with the birth of their daughter, and they hadn’t renegotiated a new DEAL, so they were battling.

They were both protecting and providing for their daughter in different ways, and they couldn’t even see it through the arguments.

As Margaret and I began to work together, she learned how to navigate Mark’s masculine energy and make room for him to contribute to parenting their daughter.

She also learned how to change her focus from the problems they were having to finding good that Mark was offering.

It took about three months and now, divorce is off the table, they are planning a family vacation, and planning their next child.

If you’re frustrated and scared and don’t know where to start, the first step is to be open to the possibility that nobody is misbehaving and recognize that men and women are different – you and your partner speak different languages.

You love each other and resolving your differences is about developing consciousness in your relationship (it’s not about compromising).

It’s about learning how to navigate your differences in ways that work to empower your sense of partnership.

YOU’RE NOT ALONE – YOU HAVE RESOURCES.

Schedule a 30-minute appointment with me to discuss your unique situation and goals and what you can start doing right away to achieve them.

Click here to schedule now.

I’m here for you. I’m on your side. 🙂

To Love!

Schedule 30 Minutes Now

Kimi Avary
Relationship Navigation Specialist