First 3-6 months of dating, the first 3-6 months following an engagement (or other ceremony) as well as the first year or two of the marriage.
Early dating, early commitment and the early marital phase, which is to say the first 3-6 months of dating, the first 3-6 months following an engagement (or other ceremony) as well as the first year or two of the marriage is the focus of this coaching.
I coach folks, in this stage, on establishing relationship agreements, guiding principles, core secure attachment skills, intimate connection rituals and healthy boundaries that facilitate safety and connection.
These core relational skills include emotional attunement, conflict repair, maintaining trust, intimacy, shared friendship, trauma sensitivity, self and co-regulation practices and learning to navigate triggers, as individuals and in partnership, with more compassion and skillfulness.
Early dating, early commitment and early marital phase
The first year of marriage or a committed relationship can be full of changes, adjustments and involve some turbulence as the relationship transitions to a deeper level of intimacy, life settles down more in some ways, while being more overwhelming in other ways, such as having to make decisions around finances, cohabitation, household labour distribution and, for some folks, parenting.
This is also a time when fears of boredom, stagnation, unmet needs or entrapment can come up. Couples in this stage can struggle with finding a balance of maintaining their autonomy and meeting the emotional demands of a growing relationship.
Whether you currently or historically tend to avoid conflict, often feel the need to push, please or “effort” for connection and security, by giving or doing “too much”, or tend to keep a partner at arm’s length in an attempt to preserve your individuality and freedom (and you may even engage in a mix of these strategies to varying degrees), my coaching is for you.
The early commitment and marital stages are where these differences can play out in unhealthy, destabilizing ways, and they are best addressed early to equip you and your relationship(s) or marriage for long-term resilience and fulfillment.
To reiterate, in these early stages, how we handle the progression of intimacy, connectedness, closeness and the vulnerability this requires, how we navigate the conflicts and disagreements that can arise, particularly around critical matters such as co-habitation, finances, parenting and personal values, is a solid predictor of long term relationship success or dissatisfaction, even divorce and break ups according to Gottman research.
Couples who showed a decline in attunement (turning towards, empathizing, understanding and tolerating difference), affection, shared friendship and repair (during and post conflict) attempts in this early period of marriage/committed relationships are shown to be more susceptible to divorce.
Post-commitment decline in responsiveness, conflict repair and emotional intimacy is associated with increased ambivalence about the marriage/relationship, which means couples can become conditionally committed over time (another pre-cursor for relationship collapse and the erosion of trust, according to decades of Gottman research).
Core program Features and Results
Showing up in your relationship(s) as your whole embodied self, with boundaried and radical authenticity in comfortably expressing your values, desires, needs, vulnerabilities, concerns, fears, hopes and dreams, so you can release the struggle of trying to be less of who you are or exhausting yourself trying to be someone you are not to try and preserve your marriage or relationship(s) at your expense, ending up more resentful, burnt out and dissatisfied as time goes on.
My coaching helps you with radically befriending and expressing who you are, what matters to you, what you stand for and need. I help you develop the capacity and relational skills needed to lead with compassion, courage and confidence in your relationships starting early, so you can benefit from a secure, honest, healing and loving relationship long term.
Conditional commitment means having one foot outside the relationship, so a partner stops slowly stop investing in it.
You may also be involved with someone who is less invested in the relationship than you are, which eventually leads to bigger problems like the pursuer-chaser dynamic devolving to broken trust, escalating conflict and even break ups.
My coaching is aimed at preventing this using frameworks rooted in the science of attunement, attachment, emotional responsiveness and trust, so you can spot and address this early, rather than allowing this relationship eroding pattern to persist.I will coach you on skillfully navigating, with a grounding in anti-patriarchal values, boundaries, standards and agreements around cohabitation, finances, parenting, birth control, where applicable, household labour distribution and emotional facilitation, so you can evaluate for compatibility on these relationship make or break matters early and hold the line on your safety and well being regarding these, long-term.
As Dr. Ellyn Bader’s work is an important influence on my coaching for couples in these early stages, my coaching emphasizes the necessity of differentiation, or defining yourself as an individual, with your own priorities, needs, beliefs, feelings and values, developing self-trust and further deepening relational practices on being authentic, accountable and skillful in about getting your needs met mutually, starting in the early stages of your relationship and marriage. This is especially healing for folks recovering from codependency, enmeshment and people-pleasing.
An indispensable relational skill I coach you on is nonjudgmental self-reflection and owning our part in relationships and underlying dynamics. This is the secret sauce to successfully navigating the early stages of a relationship or marriage, while laying the foundation of long term relationship success.
Expanding capacity for individual and shared responsibility in relationships, with compassionate accountability and repair processes is what separates masterful resilient relationships from ailing, unfulfilling ones.
Asooli coaching helps you with long-term relationship success, as I support you to compassionately own your part in any unhealthy dynamics and heal these early, effectively work through differences and disagreements, kindly navigate triggers and sensitive spots, and establish mutual agreements around collaboration and accountability. This is how you and your partner(s) can work as a team to consistently meet each other’s needs not only through the turbulence of this stage but for years to come.
It is why pre-marital and early marital counseling and our feminist oppression aware coaching can be so crucial in helping you establish a secure foundation of relational skills, agreements, boundaries, expectations, healthy trust and conflict repair processes, all of which result in intimate, fulfilling and joyful relationships long term.
This is also true of polyam relationships, attachment-based and otherwise.
IF you are in the early relationship period, the early commitment period (such as recent engagement or marriage) and would like to be supported in establishing solid, compassionate, healing and trauma sensitive foundations for long term relationship resilience and fulfillment, I am happy to talk to you more about how I can support you best.