Why I do this work.
My wife and I have been together seven years and are now married. What we have built between us didn't happen by accident. It happened through years of deliberate work, and what we have now is a container trusting enough to hold both of our hardest material. We've each gotten safe enough to let the parts of ourselves we spent decades hiding, so we wouldn't be cast out of the tribe, or out of the relationship, finally be seen.
We use our relationship as a mirror. When something hard surfaces, we don't point it at each other first, we look within. We're grounded in the idea that each of us belongs first to our own inner beloved, and that the relationship we've built together, the we, is the third thing we both serve and the ground our decisions stand on.
That's the practice I bring into council. Underneath it sits thirty-five years of navigating relationship myself, and a Somatic Leadership Coaching certification from the Strozzi Institute. The training gave me language and structure. The thirty-five years, and the seven inside this marriage, gave me the thing the training points toward.