A-B-Cs for Creating Safety in Your Relationship, Especially in a Pandemic

This COVID time of uncertainty heightens… well everything! How can we stay “safe,” not just physically (by staying home), but emotionally as well? To help people create safety through couples therapy and mediation, I’ve honed the following principles which I call the A-B-C’s. They integrate a Psychobiologic Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT)1 with an interest-based Divorce Mediation approach.2 This integrated process begins existentially, by helping each person to articulate what is most important, and how each wishes to live his/her life. Couples therapy and divorce mediation guide both people to reach agreements, whether living under one roof or two. Especially when separated couples co-parent, these A-B-C’s can be instrumental in reaching agreements that enable their children to feel safe. Thus, whether you are partnered up or not, living together or apart, you can still create safety within your relationship. A is for AWARENESS To sustain successful therapy or mediation, it is important to gain a better understanding how you feel and what makes you feel that way. To feel safe, two important and related pieces of theory are relevant: your attachment style and your (brain’s) threat response. For evolutionary survival, our brain is wired to pick up the negative — any threat! — in the environment. The giraffe at the watering hole survives when s/he interprets bushes moving from a lion, but not the wind. As human animals, we sometimes interpret the wind a...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Communication Relationships Attachment Style coronavirus COVID-19 Source Type: blogs