Healing Relationship: Doing the Work Together

Engaging in foundational change is challenging. Doing it alongside others is vulnerable. Therapeutic work gives way to foundational change but it connect be done without effort and vulnerability. You'll have to listen to feedback. You’ll have to adjust your behavior. But, you want long, sustainable relationships with your partner and kids. You've got this. You can do it—your motivations are good!

Here’s What You Need to Know

The relational wounding we experienced as children impacts the struggles we experience in our parenting relationships. The fact is, we're injured in relationship and we heal in relationship. Ideally, this means that as adults, we are healing in the relationships of our choosing, with our partner and children, with the family that we make.

When you enter into a therapeutic relationship, it's the relationship that does the healing. This means that the way you and your therapist show up matters. Yes, your therapist is a clinician, but first, they are a fellow human being, aiming to create opportunities for relational healing by being real with you.

As a therapist, I get to participate in the earnest exploration of relationship, and I am deeply grateful for that. I have an insatiable curiosity about relationship and about people. I am excited to engage with you and your partner as you take a closer look at your own relational wounds, triggers, and patterns and as you create room for newness.

My flavor of therapy involves cutting through the habits established in a relationship, almost without regard. It’s bold, heavy-handed facilitation with dollops of humility, empathy and deep care. In my new Parenting Matters group, I bring this style together with the guiding principle that healing happens in relationship—as a group of parents aiming to address relational wounding and healing, we come together courageously to grow.

Healing in Relationship When You’re Parents

The Parenting Matters group is for couples who are parents. When I say parents, you’re probably thinking parents and kids, but really, this program is for couples who are struggling because they are parents. We’ll address parents' reactions to their kids, their partners and the role of existing relational wounding in those reactions.

Family relationships bring up all of our “stuff.” Minute to minute, we can experience the fullest gamut of emotions as parents—joy, warmth, concern, profundity, awe, sadness, and fear, to name a few. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our behavior is often informed by fear and a lack of emotional honesty—we’re afraid of failing as parents, afraid of hurting our children, afraid of change—and we do a decent job of hiding our vulnerabilities to the detriment of our myriad parenting relationships.

This program is designed to make explicit your individual and shared parenting struggles, honestly and safely, so you can learn from them, heal, and move past them.

And importantly, you’re never doing this work alone. In this program, you’re participating in relationship with your partner, your fellow travelers, and me (your guide/ coach), healing in those relationships. In any setting where you’re consciously addressing wounding and learning together, you are healing in relationship. 

Doing the Work

Participating in this program sets the parents’ relationship—and the parents’ healing of relational wounding—as priority. Choosing to do this work means knowing that your relationship dynamics 100% contribute to your family culture and mood. It means owning that your reactions are about you, not about your kids. And it means ​being open to the reflections of trusted others, no matter how that feedback is presented. Your willingness to do the work defines how or even whether you will be transformed in the process.

It's so easy to blame the other. Doing the work means owning that “My reactions are mine.” It means asking, “What is being triggered?” It means being able to share what we learn about ourselves with the people in our world who will be able to help us if they don’t feel attacked.

We heal in relationship. But we have a responsibility to do our own work, to actively participate in that synergy. 

Taking the Leap

If you’re committed to leaning in, learning of your blindspots and taking it to heart; and if your desire to heal in relationship is strong, please consider joining my Parenting Matters group. In it, you’ll be presented with opportunities to heal in relationship with your partner, your fellow travelers, and myself. A lot will be asked of you, and you’ll have the opportunity to make an enormous impact on an array of future relationships, it may even be your legacy.

If you’re up for the growth opportunity, reach out to me at holobeing@gmail.com for more information or to register for the group.