What is Couples Therapy?
What is couples therapy? Couples therapy is holding a balance, of selflessness and selfishness. Within the work, Zoe Hicks teaches you and your partner how to rapidly increase your emotional intelligence in order to heal. We learn to balance the contradictions, how two opposite truths can occupy the same space.
What is couples therapy?
Couples therapy is a unique and wonderful way to actually change and heal and grow. When struggling with mental illness, or when struggling, period. We have to become both more selfish and more selfless in order to keep everything together. We do.
Selfishing, a new word I just made up, is the act of building boundaries.
I go to sleep at 10 p.m., I am going to selfish and get off the phone with a friend or lover or partner by 10 p.m., or I am going to selfish and make my child be in bed by 9 p.m. Selfishing is about boundaries.
Then we move into selflessness, the glorified martyr, but also essential in a selfish world.
We move from me, to we. We work to rapidly increase our emotional intelligence. This work is rooted in Gottman. My favorite book of his, is The Seven Principles to Making Marriage Work. We turn towards our partner, rather than towards our phone. We turn towards our partner, rather than out the door. How often when your partner asks for you, for your attention, for your love, for your care do you respond? And in turn how often does your partner respond to your “bids” for attention, love and care? We all need to be cared for and loved and paid attention to.
Mindlessness, going in five directions at the same time, will not be beneficial for anyone, and this is our societal rough patch, right now.
Our tech heavy society with a dollop of sincere ADHD leads many people to this continual state of being. As your couples therapist, I ask you for more. Pay attention to your partner. Work opposite emotion. Do one thing at a time. Treat your partner with the kindness you treat your clients, or co-workers. She or he is the most important person in your life. Stop taking that person for granted. That person is not responsible for your happiness, you are. At the same time, you both will effect one another deeply. We work continually with the understanding that we are walking contradictions. To thrive requires this.
To heal requires accepting where you are while at the same time accepting the need for you to change.
We work in dialects, this theory is grounded in Linehan. Dialectics are when two contradictory truths coexist in the world without one overtaking the other. Acceptance and change. Selfishness and selflessness. In couples work, the primary question is what am I doing here that is hurting my partner? What am I doing here that is helping my partner? And your partner is pulled to ask the same question. While also asking yourself, what am I doing here in this life that is hurting me? What am I doing here, in this life, that is helping me?
“I saw that you were perfect, and so I loved you. Then I saw that you were not perfect and I loved you even more.” – Anonymous
If you live in New York or New Jersey, feel free to reach out for a couples session, email me at: hello@zoerosehicks.com. Let’s connect!
The Breath for Anxiety, No this is Not about Meditation
How to breathe thru anxiety, anxiety means you care. How to care without being overwhelmed and flooding. Here are a few steps I encourage you to take.
The breathe, a place to center one self to stay in the present, to breathe. To Alleviate Anxiety:
When anxiety comes in, breathe long shallow breaths thru your nose, counting 5.5 seconds and exhaling at the 5.5 seconds.
Do not push the anxiety away. Let it be there.
Imagine the anxiety a bundle of butterflies, and have those butterflies sit next to you. Or imagine you are the driver and have the anxiety there, a companion next to you in the passenger seat.
Do not take a deep breathe thru your mouth it will just spread the anxiety.
Do not try to push the anxiety away it will simply become stronger, just allow it to be there as you take long shallow breathes thru your nose.
I highly recommend The Lost Art of Breathing by James Nestor, or this excellent Podcast episode by Max Lugavere where he interviews Nestor.
The Pronoun “We.”
The dance between security and autonomy. How to thrive within a partnership, within your career, within your life.
We live on this continuum too much security can cause depression, too much autonomy can cause anxiety.
How do we balance this within our relationships, within our careers, within our lives, especially during this sensitive time as we land a new normal. Zoom meetings, and shopping online, and then sometimes not or peering into the jaws of the debt accrued over the past few years due to the slippery slope of this pandemic. How to establish security? How to establish autonomy? Within a marriage, we need to utilize the pronoun we.
The moment a partner refuses to disclose finances, historically it is because she/he or they are hiding something. There is no security in secrets. How to provide autonomy for the partner who utilizes that need via money, reallocate a different way to ensure there is autonomy whether it is opening up the marriage, or ensuring the marriage has deliberate separate vacation days, I do not know. What I do know is that there are solutions as we discover how every person thinks and feels, there are solutions that can elevate a relationship from two I’s to a we. Initially the first step is to work opposite the emotion. Do what you do not want to do. Rather than spend on yourself, do the opposite, give that money to your partner. Do the opposite of what you would want to do to benefit your family.
“The secret Alice is to surround yourself with people who make your heart smile, it is then only then that you will find Wonderland.”
Alice in Wonderland