“You can’t afford to keep avoiding this…”

- Terry Real

“Want a fulfilled and connected relationship?  

Then you have to stop avoiding tough conversations.”

But like many, you may do this for good reason: every time you try to speak up, it pushes your partner further away.

This causes you to fall into one of three common traps:

➡️ You retreat to the one-down position, where you go silent to “keep the peace.” The adaptive child in you is scared to rock the boat for fear of rejection, escalation, or being “too much.”

➡️ You bulldoze into the one-up position, demanding, criticizing, and escalating. You speak up, but your adaptive child is running the show so loudly that your partner can’t actually hear you.

➡️ You collapse. You and your partner both stop trying. Resentment builds, generosity dries up, and your once loving and passionate connection grows into a cold distance between you.

Over time, you may end up experiencing all three. And each almost guarantees you won’t get more of what you want (or you do, but at the cost of a loving and respectful relationship). 

Most of us never learned how to speak our truth and stay in connection. 

Learning the skills to speak up effectively in a way that empowers and invites your partner to come through for you, is totally new to our culture.  

The ability to operate from your loving and effective wise adult and replace old self-defeating patterns with a new way of speaking up that actually brings you closer to your partner.