Self-Mastery Comes First
Couples therapy is often individual therapy done together. Growth begins when we stop auditing our partner and start examining our own contribution.
Most people believe their suffering is caused by other people. Their partner. Their boss. Their childhood. All of that matters and none of it is imaginary. But lasting change begins somewhere else: with the capacity to see yourself clearly, in motion, while it's happening.
Relationships rarely fail from bad communication. They struggle because people don't understand themselves. Technique cannot fix what awareness has not yet reached — that's why communication scripts work in the office and evaporate at home on a Tuesday.
I've spent close to two decades with individuals, couples, executives and teams, and the pattern holds across all of them. The person who can name their own contribution has options. The person who can only name the other's contribution has only complaints.
As Jung put it: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That sentence is the entire premise of the work I teach.
Self-mastery first. It sounds like an individual project and it is anything but — it is the only reliable path into genuine contact with another person. Everything else follows from it.
Psychotherapist, educator and organizational consultant in Los Angeles. He teaches Relationship Mastery, an eight-week live class.
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