1. Establish Deep Rapport
Create a heartfelt, authentic connection with your client. Building this safe, intimate container allows them to feel truly seen and heard, setting the foundation for trust and openness. The client feels safe when ALL their feelings are honored and welcomed.
2. Highlight Relational Strengths
Start each session by acknowledging what’s going well in their relationship. Encourage the client to share a recent positive interaction, personal strength, or breakthrough they've experienced in their relationship. This primes the session for growth by focusing on what’s already working before diving into challenges.
3. Assess the Current Relational Landscape
Invite clients to reflect deeply on their current reality. Through compassionate questioning, help them uncover the specific dynamics, emotional triggers, and recurring themes that are shaping their relationship. Encourage ownership of both the challenges and their role in co-creating the current dynamics. Ask for a rating of dynamic as X/10 from each partner
4. Reflective Paraphrasing
Mirror back your client’s thoughts and feelings to clarify and validate their experience. This active listening technique ensures they feel understood, helping them explore their emotions more deeply.
5. Emotional Validation
Acknowledge the emotional undertones of their relationship. Normalize feelings such as frustration, hurt, anger, or longing. Reassure them that these are valid human experiences in intimate partnerships. This fosters emotional safety and nurtures the coaching environment.
6. Self-Awareness Exploration
Encourage clients to reflect on their emotional reactions during relationship interactions. Ask them to rate their feelings (X/10)in key moments and explore any internal physical sensations that arise. This helps them better understand their emotional landscape and the triggers that impact their relational dynamics.
7. Addressing the Status Quo
Explore what might happen if the current relational patterns continue unchanged. Help the client uncover their fears about stagnation, as well as the impact of staying in a cycle of unfulfilling dynamics or unresolved conflicts.
8. Body Scan for Emotional Regulation
Guide clients through an eye-closed body scan to help them connect to their internal physical sensations. Teaching them to regulate their bodies will empower them to stay calm and centered during difficult conversations or triggering situations.
9. Values Clarification
Help clients clarify the core values governing their perspective. Encourage them to articulate what matters most to them and how these values shape the current situation and long-term partnership they want to build. This clarity helps in aligning actions with their highest intentions.
10. Reframing Perspectives
Assist clients in shifting their perspective on their partner’s behavior. Encourage them to explore their partner’s actions with curiosity rather than blame, fostering empathy and opening up new ways of relating and resolving conflicts.
11. Uncovering Hidden Payoffs
Explore any unconscious benefits the client may be receiving from maintaining the status quo. Recognizing these can uncover resistance to change and shed light on deeper relational dynamics. Often hidden payoff is an attempt to stay in rapport with their family of origin (ensure belonging).
12. Defining Desired Relationship Outcomes
Work with clients to share their desired outcomes. Ensure that these are specific, measurable, and aligned with their personal and relational values. This clarity is essential for focused growth.
13. Exploring Relational Motivation
Delve into what achieving these relationship goals would mean for the client. Discuss both the emotional and practical benefits of realizing these outcomes, helping them tap into their deepest desires for connection and intimacy.
14. Visualization of Ideal Relationship
Guide clients through a visualization exercise, where they see themselves in a thriving, deeply connected relationship. This future-focused practice reinforces their commitment to doing the work necessary to bring this vision to life. Until this vision is clear in the clients mind, they will not be able to create it.
15. Uncovering New Relational Possibilities
Encourage creative thinking around new ways to approach their relationship. By helping clients see alternate solutions or fresh ways of interacting, you empower them to explore new relational dynamics.
16. Commitment to Relational Action
End each session with a commitment to specific, actionable steps the client will take before the next meeting. These actions anchor the session’s insights and provide a clear path forward for their relational growth.
This structure creates an ongoing, deepening journey of self-discovery, relational healing, and transformation. It helps clients cultivate more meaningful, conscious, and loving relationships.