The top 3 conversations that couples struggle with

Welcome! In this episode I chat about the 3 most difficult conversations to have with your partner. Can you guess?

1- How you feel

2-Finances

3- Sex

Which topic do you struggle talking about with your partner?

Disclaimer: Although I am a licensed therapist, the information in this podcast is not therapy and not intended to replace mental health counseling.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:38

Welcome to the Feel and Find Out podcast. I'm your host, Raquel Delusha, and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and solo private practice owner. I have spent my career helping adults and couples understand themselves and their emotions so that they can be more authentic in their lives and relationships. I am here to help you find out who the F you are by actually feeling what you feel. It's time to change the way we view our emotions, our inner world, and the way we communicate so that we can thrive in our relationships, our businesses, and truly align with our felt sense of self. I am bringing you clinical insights from the therapy room, personal lived experiences, as well as some experts in the mental health industry and beyond. So take a deep breath and let's feel and find out. You know, I'm doing something a little different with this season of the podcast, and I invite you to get curious about it. I am going to offer downloadable interactive worksheets. Now, I hate the word worksheet, so let's call it a document. Um, a document that includes questions and reflections and sort of ways to really get to know your parts and yourself when it comes to the topic of the podcast episode. So you'll see in this episode, I talk about doing a series for couples. And so this worksheet or document will be about your connectivity and your relationships, and it will kind of dive into that a bit further. I'm offering this for free. This is just meant to be something to help you grow and learn a little bit more about yourself and your relationship in the context of what I talk about in these episodes. So if you are interested, there is a link in the show notes that will take you to a place where you can fill out your email and you will receive uh these worksheets. And if you get out my email list, you will get them before the podcast airs. So you will have access to them first. Um, and you can follow along and do your own work. All right, enjoy the show. Welcome back to Feel and Find Out. It has been far too long since I have recorded an episode. I my last episode was like April or May of last year. It is February of 2025. And you know, life has just been lifing, okay? Just a lot of moving parts, a lot of things happening in my life, in your life, in the world, in the lives of my clients, for my kids, for my business. And so there was very little inspiration, um, to be quite honest. So many things to talk about, but just little inspiration, little motivation, I should say, to do so. Um, but here we are, and I want to begin a series of episodes really dedicated to couples and relationships. And if you're not in a relationship, you most likely have been at some point in your life, romantically, that is, and you most likely want to be at some point in your life. And if not romantic, we all have familial relationships, friendships, coworkers. So we are relational beings. We are in relationship with another human, at least one, most likely. We do better health-wise when we have said relationships. And relationships are a place where great dysfunction can occur. So I thought we would start off season two, I will call it, of Feel and Find Out with relationships. And today we're going to start with conversations with your partner and why they can be so challenging based on the topic. So, as a couples therapist, I've spent years working within the system of a couple, and I notice the topics that are most difficult and create the most conflict are feelings, emotions, right? Uh sharing with each other how one feels when it's perhaps too vulnerable, too risky, or when you're upset with your partner and don't know how to say it. So the first one would be emotions. The second one would be finances. You know, what do we do with money? How do we spend money? How do we save money? So, so in-depth when it comes to finances, because we actually have our own attachment style to our finances, and we all have a money origin story, much like an emotion origin story. So finances is a big one. And the third is sex. How much sex do you have? How much do you want to have? How do you have sex? What do you like in sex? What are your preconceptions about sex? What are your desires or fantasies? I could go on about that. So there's many more, you know, parenting styles, that's another one. Uh responsibilities in the home, that's another one. Uh family matters, so dealing with each family of origin, that's another one. But I think what we're gonna start to focus on are those three I mentioned, which would be emotion, finances, and sex. And this episode is just sort of more of an intro to that and letting you know what to expect from each episode that will follow. And just to kind of get back on here and say, hey, I'm here, I'm still around. I this podcast is still here. I'm still here to help you navigate your emotional worlds, connect with yourselves, connect with the people in your life. So this series is going to be really based on why can't I connect with a partner based on the difficulty I have talking about these three things, either all of these three things or one of these three things. What I like you to do, if you're here for this, is get curious about how you express your feelings to your partner. And this can be both feelings of love, adoration, affection. How is it for you to express those? Is that difficult? Do you not, are you not someone who is very verbal with how you feel to your partner? As far as I love you, I miss you, I want to, I want you here with me. You know, I loved when you, you know, thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate you. All that all those words of affirmation, words of affection and appreciation. Do you struggle sharing that? Andor do you struggle sharing, I was really hurt when I didn't like how you said that. When you said that to me, I got triggered regarding this. Usually when expressing distress in a relationship, partners tend to go for the you said this to me. You never do that. You always do this. Why do you always speak to me like this? Why can you never just be there for me? I guess I don't do anything right in your eyes. I guess you don't really want to be with me or love me. Right. So going more on the attack, more on the confrontational um line of communication instead of the, hey, this is what happened for me when I heard you say that. So that is how we're gonna deep dive into the topic of sharing emotions because it's either, you know, one of those two things is difficult. And maybe both are difficult for you. Maybe it's hard to express love and affection. And maybe it's also hard to express when you've been hurt or you feel wronged in some way. Maybe you haven't been able to make the connection between something your partner does and says with how it triggers a past experience from either a relationship, an experience in your family system. Maybe it's triggering a core belief you have about yourself. And instead of being able to say, wow, I just got really triggered. I I remembered when I, you know, was in my teenage years and I didn't do something, I got really shamed for it. And that's how I felt just now when you said that, I didn't do this well, and that is why I acted out, or that is why I shut down. And it gives your partner this deep understanding and opportunity for compassion for your response and your experience. As opposed to when you react from a place of a trigger, all your partner sees is that reaction, whether it's anger, whether it's yelling, whether it's stonewalling, so completely shutting down, whether it's the silent treatment, whether your body language changes, you withhold affection. So these two things are really important to talk about. They get in the way of so many relationships. And often when I see couples, you know, one of those two things is not happening in the way that it needs to to build security in the relationship and safety. The next piece, so the next episode will cover solely talking about money and how to achieve more balance in money conversations, but it really starts with understanding your own conception of money, your own relationship with it. You know, do you have a scarcity mindset? Did you not have any growing up? Do you always feel like there's never enough? Do you, you know, are you really frugal? Do you put every dime away? Do you not want to like do you coupon clip if that's still a thing? You know, are you maybe have a lot of money in the bank, but you won't spend any? Or you don't have a lot and you have a lot of debt you spend on credit cards. And does this behavior and style of relating to money differ from your partners? And how does that help you to build wealth, a future together, you know, stability financially? So we'll dive into that. And then sex, you know, sex is a big part of a romantic relationship. Now, there are couples who both do not find value in sex, and that is perfectly okay. And most of the time, I would say, at least with people I see in therapy, there is some sort of discrepancy between desire, where one partner has higher desire, wants to be intimate sexually, to feel emotionally close, whereas the other partner wants to feel emotionally close before they can be sexually intimate. And neither partner knows how to share this with the other. And what they wind up doing is either having sex because it's obligation, or not having sex at all and building resentment. And it winds up having a negative impact on the relationship because of all that is unsaid and unspoken regarding how they feel about sex, how they relate to sex, their relationship with sex, their history, if there's any type of sexual trauma in their lives, any type of beliefs they hold about sex and intimacy. I mean, this is this one could probably be a several part episode. So that's kind of why I'm setting it up today as letting you know what's to come. And if any of these things stand out to you, I want you to think about between now and next episode: how do I communicate about my feelings to my partner? How do I communicate about money to my partner? How do I communicate about sex? Okay. And I think in another episode, we'll also talk about stress and how stress levels are communicated, how they're navigated and worked through in a relationship, because sometimes we deal really well with stress individually, but not as a couple. And that can create a lot of disconnection as well. So that's what's to come. I'm really excited about it. If you have any questions or want to hear an episode about a different topic that comes up between couples, let me know. Find me on Instagram, the dotraquel.delusha. You can send me a DM there. Lots of fun things happening in my practice. I am hiring an associate therapist. So there will be a second therapist at Interbloom Therapy Services in Phoenix. I'm so, so thrilled about it when that is all locked in, said and done. I will be sharing that person's information. They will do very similar therapy to me as far as the trauma work, the couples work, EMDR. And uh that's gonna be really exciting. So if you're in the Phoenix area and you need a therapist, I have maybe one or two more openings in the next couple months for a new client, but I'm going to be scaling back as I fill up my new therapist with clients. Um, you can also check out my website, innerbloom therapyaz.com. I gave it a little makeover recently. So some cool things happening on the business end. And, you know, I'm here to help you navigate some of these conversations, some of these, you know, um how you connect to your emotions. And as always, we are just here to take a deep breath and know that we can feel to find out. I'll see you guys next time.