Presence, processes, and paradoxes of growth from the practice of Antonia Dolhaine.
Welcome to our reader requested newsletter series on growing thriving relationships! This series is divided into the following five parts, with previous editions hyperlinked below for ease:
3. Seeding the Future
4. Metabolizing Pollutants
5. Harvesting Gold
Today’s newsletter will cover Part 3, and the remaining 2 will be covered over the weeks to follow. By the end, you’ll be equipped with the foundational tools and frameworks you need for your relationships to flourish!
Seeding the Future
So you’ve determined your ideal conditions to thrive (week 1) and have found/become a synergistic growth companion (week 2)… what’s next? Now that you have all this fertile garden space between you, what seeds do you want to sow in that space?
Are you co-creating an orchard? A field of wildflowers? A manicured heritage estate?
Your relationship is a blank canvas you are both responsible for, and in the immortal words of Aristotle, “nature abhors a vacuum”. Meaning, if no one can decide what intentions to plant in the shared space of the relationship, nature will waste no time deciding for you both, and there’s no guarantee you’ll like what she has in mind. The more clarity and alignment you each bring to your shared vision, the easier it will be to bring it to fruition.
And the only way to create clarity and alignment around your vision is to: talk about it—often!
So many people dance around having direct conversations about their relationship vision for fear of rejection. Instead, they do this sneaky detective thing, gathering clues and asking oblique questions, hoping they’ll get all the information they need without ever being vulnerable. This tactic mimics safety—but it’s not safety. Not only does playing detective undermine trust in your relationship with yourself and others via the pursuit of covert agendas, it also wastes precious time.
Direct, vulnerable communication saves time and creates relational safety.
I personally want you to reject, or be rejected by, what’s not for you. You can’t do that if you have wounded parts of you in the drivers seat of your life who are more committed to attachment than authenticity. If you want to co-create thriving relationships, you’ll need to offer those parts of you your loving attention, and perhaps even the support of a trained professional (like me, bonjour!).
In the meantime, here are some prompts for you to explore together:
Once you’re clear and aligned on your vision, then comes the next step, and the next one, and the one after that… for as long as you are in relationship, which is…
Co-Creating the Container of Your Connection
We tend to think of relationships as a status—something you’re either in, or you’re out of—as opposed to a way of being, or an entity in and of itself. In thriving relationships, there is a shared understanding that you are tending a living, breathing, evolving co-creation.
You are always co-creating your relationship, either consciously or unconsciously. It becomes what you feed it.
When we co-create unconsciously, we tend to feed the relationship with our repressed fears, insecurities, anger, and shame. The relationship then becomes a hell garden—a mirror showing us the exiled parts of ourselves we’ve been incapable or unwilling to witness (more on this in next week’s newsletter…).
When we co-create consciously, we feed the relationship our love. Our connections become a safe place to reclaim and integrate the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled to our unconscious, as well as to nurture our individual and shared dreams.
So ask yourselves, is the current container of your relationship supporting your individual and shared visions, or is it not? Where could it be more supportive? You are relational architects—design some stuff! Regular experiments keep your relationship alive and dynamic. If something isn’t working, change it! And if the new thing doesn’t work, keep tweaking until it does. You have infinite tries, until death, to get it right.
Even when you find the perfect configuration, keep your grip steady, but relaxed. You will both likely outgrow it at some point. The health of your relationship depends on your continual willingness to compost the old and birth the new.
Austin and I are in our fourth year together, and the container of our relationship has already undergone hundreds of deaths and rebirths. Our connection becomes sweeter and more nourishing with every cycle.
Assigning Roles
Just like gardens, thriving relationships aren’t set-it-and-forget-it enterprises. They require steady care to grow into your vision, and keep the weeds from creeping in. To that end, agreeing on roles and responsibilities is a must. It is simply not enough to leave this part to chance, whim, or societal conditioning—it must be done consciously and with intention.
Let your individual strengths and preferences inform this process.What are you each good at? What do you enjoy doing? It’s important that the work of tending to your connection be something you both take pleasure in, or at minimum, joyfully tolerate. Even maintenance tasks like conflict navigation can become pleasurable when you are both (1) skilled at it, and (2) trust in the deepened connection that becomes available on the other side of it. The idea is to spend most of your time in, or expanding, your zone of relational genius for your mutual benefit.
Of course, we can’t be in that zone all the time. Life happens—people get sick and injured, cars break down, climate and political crises erupt and throw our rhythms into disarray. As such, it’s important that we know how to do each other’s jobs when needed, and be willing to ask for help when we’re struggling. This ensures we stay in the zone of interdependence, and avoid tipping into unhealthy patterns of dependence.
The invitation is to schedule some time to evaluate your current roles. How balanced are they? How well-matched are they to each other’s strengths? Is there space to co-create even more joy and consonance in the way you tend your garden?
— Antonia
And when you're ready for the next step…
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