What’s the best Valentine’s gift?

The best gift you can give your beloved for Valentine’s Day isn’t roses or chocolates or a candle-lit dinner. The candles will soon burn down, the dinner will be reduced to dirty glasses and plates. The chocolates may last more than a night, but they’ll be gone within a week.

By Monday morning it will probably be back to business as usual. But what does that look like to you?

Will you spend time together in bed and over breakfast and kiss goodbye before you both head off for the day? Or will you leap out of bed, grab a coffee and hit the road with barely time for a quick ‘Goodbye’?

And Monday evening? Can you look forward to loving closeness and a sense of peace? Or is it more likely to be an argument about something that’s really not that important, like how to stack the dishwasher?

If you’re the couple who still does something for Valentine’s Day, even though the rest of the year it feels a bit tense between you, then you haven’t given up. In that case, the best gift you can give your partner is the work you do on yourself. But maybe you’ve not yet figured out how to do that.

That's where I can give you a hand.

Plotting the dance which ends in tears

When I work with a couple I start with data gathering. This is the first stage of Relational Life Coaching. We spend 90 minutes together while both partners tell me what exactly happens when they fall out. With their accounts of two or three incidents, we start to see the pattern that has been repeating for years which has become so entrenched in how they communicate.

From this we can see the ‘dance’ they’re engaged in. For instance she may feel unheard and tend to pursue him for attention and he withdraws, so she pursues even more and he withdraws further – and angrily this time.

Within this dance there will be some losing communication strategies. They fall into five categories:

• Needing to be right

• Having to be in control

• Unbridled self-expression

• Retaliation

• Withdrawal

These five losing strategies never help us resolve the issues – they just make things worse. But it’s really important to realise that if you are using a losing strategy, that isn’t who you are – it’s just what you’re doing at the moment.

You may have been doing it for a very long time – maybe since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. It’s something that served you well when you were young, but now you’re an adult it doesn’t serve you anymore.

If you’ve spent years of your relationship using some of these losing strategies and caught up in a dance which ends in tears, it’s important to remember that this isn’t who you are and it’s possible to change what you’re doing.

Discovering the origins of our losing strategies

Together we dig into how these patterns got started. What was happening in your childhood and adolescence which meant that they made sense? What were you defending yourself against? This stage always involves both partners, because no one had a perfect childhood – we all had something to deal with.

It may have been abandonment, whether it was because you were sent away to boarding school or because your parents weren’t emotionally available to you or just not there most of the time. Or maybe you were abused or perpetually scared – never knowing when Dad would come home drunk and angry. Perhaps your parents fighting could have driven you to a place where you didn’t have to listen to them.

Whatever it was you can start to see the links between the past and your behaviour in the present.

The patterns you see playing out in your couple’s dance are adaptations you created as a child, so we call that part of you your ‘Adaptive Child’.

Healing the inner child

Once the two of you have made those connections you can start the work of healing. This is the second stage of couples work – helping your ‘Adaptive Child’ to feel safe so that they no longer feel the need to lash out or run away.

This is where you both start to re-parent yourselves. Good parenting involves

• nurture – kindness, compassion, listening to the child

• guidance – showing the child a way, rather like a compass

• limits – setting boundaries and making sure there are consequences when the child crosses them.

When you re-parent your Adaptive Child you give them just that: nurture, guidance and limits. And you make it clear that you – your ‘Wise Adult’ part is in the driver’s seat now.

Healing and repairing the relationship

The third stage is to build your connection ‘muscle’. Letting go of old, destructive patterns and replacing them with kindness, care and healthy boundaries takes a little practice.

You might think of this part of the coaching journey as a relationship dojo. You learn a new ‘skill’ like speaking with kindness instead of criticism or replacing judgement with curiosity. Then you practise it – at first it doesn’t come naturally, but over time you get better at it. The more you practise these skills the easier they become and the more natural they feel.

If you want more love in your life, this is the best gift I can think of to give your partner.

And I have a gift for you. If you’d like to give this a go, right now you can purchase my online course, Unlocking Intimacy: Navigate Conflict & Nurture Lasting Connection, with 50% off – until midnight on Sunday.

Use the code STVALUI50 at checkout to get your 50% off.