Research shows that despite the unprecedented challenges so many couples are facing in this increasingly uncertain and unstable world, what remains constant is their longing for closeness and connection.

However, research also indicates that partners need more resources and skills to navigate intimacy, communication, and conflict. This workshop fills that need.

 Intimacy is fostered by sharing our feelings, needs, and thoughts with others who are open to listening with their ears, hearts, and bodies. However, oftentimes, our communication gets shamed, censored, or rendered unconscious by our past traumas, fears, and the critical voices that live inside us and in the world around us.

As that which lives within us moves forward and outward to touch our partner, our messages can be obscured and twisted by unseen forces. For example, inner criticism dwells in the shadows, hampering our ability to speak clearly due to self-hatred and causing us to perceive messages as criticism, erecting an armor that stands between us.

In the same way,  cultural messages live inside of us, telling us who and how to be—whether a woman, man, non-binary, able-bodied, or neurotypical—colonizing our communications, twisting us into a shape that is not our own. And then, when we reach across to touch our partner or to communicate, our words bend and tear before they reach their ears and heart. In turn, they hear the mixed messages pouring through us and end up confused, distant, and further away from the bond we hoped to share. 

What’s more, between us lives shadows that we have yet to explore—our fire that lives in our cool and calm, our vulnerability that lives in our toughness, our brilliance that we hide behind, our feigned humility, and the pain that lives underneath our smiles. These don’t go away; they find ways to express themselves through our bodies and tones. So even when we speak, the messages of these shadows pour out of us into the other, but not clearly enough for them to truly know us and make that human connection. In this workshop, we will explore these critics, these internalized oppressions, and these shadow selves—how they operate in our communication and how they interrupt the flow of intimacy in our relationships.

You’ll discover ways of revealing these parts of yourself to one another, transforming difficulties in your relationship into the intimacy you desire, into your shared humanity, and into the messages that connect you, draw you closer, and build bridges.