In romantic relationships, it’s common for one partner to be more interested in emotional or physical intimacy than the other.
This can create a situation where one partner feels like their significant other is smothering them, and their partner ends up feeling starved for affection.
In the world of psychology, this is what’s known as the pursuer-distancer dynamic.
And although it is quite common, the pursuer-distancer dynamic can wreak havoc on otherwise healthy relationships, creating resentment on both sides, and a situation where one person feels overwhelmed, the other feels neglected, and neither party feels fully satisfied.
This may sound like a totally untenable scenario, but the truth is, there are many methods for helping couples overcome these issues, and one of the best ways to do that is by using a modality known as relational life therapy.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what relational life therapy is, and why it’s so well-equipped to help couples caught in a pursuer-distancer dynamic.
If this is something you’re experiencing, and you’d like to learn more about a form of therapy that can help you and your partner resolve your intimacy-related issues, then this article is definitely for you.
What Is Relational Life Therapy (RLT)?
Developed by well-known family therapist, Terry Real, relational life therapy, otherwise known as RLT, is a kind of couples counselling that focuses on improving relationships and enhancing personal growth by exploring patterns of behaviour and communication within relationships.
Relational life therapy emphasizes the importance of accountability, emotional connection, and communication skills in developing healthy relationships, and it’s based on the belief that our early experiences with attachment and family of origin dynamics tend to shape our patterns of behaviour in the romantic relationships we have as adults.
RLT is also meant to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own feelings and actions and to communicate their needs and emotions effectively.
This allows people to develop greater self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and skills for setting boundaries, expressing their needs, and resolving conflict, all of which can help them to become more adept at building and maintaining a healthy romantic relationship.
How Does Relational Life Therapy Work?
relational therapy
Relational life therapy consists of three separate phases, each with its own specific goals.
This includes the data-gathering, or assessment phase, a second phase, known as the changing the dance phase, and the final phase, which is known as consolidation.
Let’s take a closer look at each phase, so you can have a better understanding of how relational life therapy works.
Phase 1: Assessment
The assessment phase allows the therapist to help both partners identify the underlying issues that are causing problems in their relationship, while gaining a deeper understanding of their own and each other’s communication styles, emotional needs, and patterns of behaviour.
For example, if one partner tends to avoid intimacy, this could be because they had to provide comfort and support to a parent after their parents divorced, had to be a best friend or surrogate parent for younger siblings, or have had controlling and intrusive parents. Alternatively, this could also be a result of the fact that emotional or physical intimacy was not modelled in their family.
Whatever the case, when intimacy avoidant people were growing up, typically, love was intrusive or was not modelled, and this phase of RLT helps to identify how those events have influenced their behaviour.
Phase 2: Changing the Dance
After identifying the underlying issues in the assessment phase, the changing the dance phase allows the therapist to help the couple to challenge dysfunctional patterns of behaviour and develop more effective ways of relating to each other by working on things like their communication skills, emotional intimacy, and power dynamics. This phase involves several key steps, including:
Identifying the negative cycle: The therapist helps the couple to identify the negative cycle of interaction that is causing problems in their relationship.
Challenging negative beliefs: The therapist helps the couple to challenge negative beliefs that are contributing to the negative cycle, such as assumptions about each other’s motives or intentions.
Creating a new cycle: The therapist helps the couple to develop new patterns of behaviour that can replace the negative cycle and promote emotional intimacy and mutual respect.
Improving communication: The therapist helps the couple to improve their communication skills by teaching active listening, assertiveness, and effective expression of emotions and needs.
Addressing power dynamics: The therapist helps the couple to address power imbalances in the relationship, such as one partner dominating the other or using passive-aggressive behaviour.
Phase 3: Consolidation
During the consolidation phase, the therapist will work with the couple to help them develop a plan for how to maintain the changes they’ve made, and continue to build a stronger and more intimate relationship.
This involves several steps, including reviewing the progress that the couple has made, acknowledging the hard work they’ve done to improve their relationship and celebrating the successes they’ve achieved, addressing any unresolved issues that are still causing problems, and finally, developing a plan to ensure the couple can continue to maintain the positive changes they’ve made.
How Can RLT Help Couples in Pursuer-Distancer Relationships?
relational therapy can help couples
In our experience, relational life therapy is incredibly effective at helping couples in pursuer-distancer relationships, and there are several reasons for this.
For instance, some forms of couples counselling focus almost exclusively on teaching couples how to stop destructive behaviour patterns and giving them the skills to deal with each other in a more appropriate and respectful manner.
But if you neglect to get to the root cause of the behaviours that are causing problems, which are often linked to childhood trauma, then it can be extremely difficult to actually put these skills to use.
With that in mind, relational life therapy takes a much more comprehensive approach to couples counselling, digging deep into the root causes of behaviour patterns, challenging the beliefs associated with them, and helping couples to forge a better path forward by focusing on what needs to change, and then offering couples a plan to maintain those positive changes over the long-term.
What’s more, many other models of couples counselling tend to promote the idea that your partner should accept you just the way you are, and should put up with your destructive behaviour, and be responsible for helping you to correct it. But many affected partners would argue that this just isn’t fair.
That being said, RLT puts the responsibility for healing childhood wounds and changing the destructive patterns of behaviour they inspire squarely on the shoulders of the person who’s engaging in them, and not on the partner who’s being affected.
Moreover, relational life therapy is also great for addressing grandiose behaviour, which refers to a pattern of behaviour where one or both partners display an inflated sense of self-importance, superiority, or entitlement, which can have a very destructive effect on a relationship.
It does this by helping couples to identify the underlying causes of this kind of behaviour, which can include things like fear of vulnerability, insecurity, or the need for validation.
At the same time, it also helps couples deal with these kinds of issues by encouraging them to not only recognize and challenge these patterns of behaviour, but also effectively address them by actively listening to each other’s perspectives, understanding how to communicate with each other in a more authentic and vulnerable way, and learning how to control their emotional reactions and responses to each other.
Are you and your partner dealing with intimacy-related issues? Contact us today to book your free consultation.
Josipa Katinic, Registered Clinical Counsellor, and founder of TalkOnline Counselling. TalkOnline Counselling is designed to help clients have a deep understanding of their afflictions, and how they’re affecting their lives, while offering them personalized, long-term solutions to help them conquer whatever it is they’re dealing with. Book a free appointment at /talkonlinebc.janeapp.com.
Article by: Josipa Katinic June 13, 2023