Sex.Love.Power.: Sacred Sexuality, Conscious Polarity, and Waking Up In Love
Our pleasure can be the fuel for abundant, sustainable work, service, and play throughout our long lives.
Our sexuality can be a wholesome pillar of our daily experience.
Our marriages can be fueled by desire rather than duty.
Monogamy can be the hottest place on earth.
It’s a confusing time to be a heterosexual, monogamous couple. The love and passion you desire may be more an inner urge than something you really see people around you living. But there are a growing community of devoted couples creating monogamy as a conscious spiritual crucible. There are couples using their marriages to fuel their leadership and service and activism. Welcome to Sex. Love. Power. where we convene the conversations that unlock new possibilities in your life and relationship. I’m your host Michele Lisenbury Christensen. Over the past 26 years, I’ve helped thousands of couples create the love and sex they desire. Kurt and I, in 23 years of marriage and adventures together before that, have suffered, avoided, dared, and triumphed in countless ways. Now, I’m here to help you get more peace, more connection, and more passion in your days and nights, so you’ve got the energy and attention left over to be the change you wish to see in the wider world. Everything you want in love and sex and beyond starts with YOU, and it starts right now. Let’s tend your flame.
Sex.Love.Power.: Sacred Sexuality, Conscious Polarity, and Waking Up In Love
The 5 Losing Relationship Strategies
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If you think you have more relational skill than your partner does, yet you keep getting sucked into the same high-conflict spiral with them, this episode is for you.
There was a time Kurt and I were paying $850 a session to work on our marriage with Terry Real. In one of those sessions, Terry told me I was indulging in "unbridled self-expression" in the way I talked to my husband. I felt smacked in the face, and then embarrassed, because this was the exact move I already taught my own clients to stop making. These five patterns are understandable. They are forgivable. And they simply do not work.
In this episode I break down the five losing strategies, the attitudes and behaviors that sabotage your relationship even when you consider yourself a world-class partner:
- Being right: arguing over whose view is accurate, holding "I told you so," choosing to be right over being loved
- Controlling your partner: the blatant kind, and the subtler kind where your moods, your warmth, and your interest in sex all hinge on them pleasing you
- Unbridled self-expression: the eye rolls, the sarcasm, the words you can't take back
- Retaliation: what Terry Real calls "offending from the victim position"
- Withdrawal: the difference between a loving pause and the stonewalling John Gottman names as one of the Four Horsemen
Your homework: find the one or two of these you do most, with compassion for yourself, and resist cataloging your partner's versions (that's losing strategy number one!). Next episode, I'll give you the winning strategies that reverse these losing strategies.
Ready to elevate your relationship with my help? Book your free Relationship Audit, together at ourlegacylove.com/leadinlove/free/audit-1 or on your own at a 1:1 consult.
Connect with me on Instagram: @tinylovehabits
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