Helping Couples Own the Relationship They Say They Want

Emotional safety is one of the most common things clients tell me they want. And when I ask what it would actually look like, the description is often made up entirely of things their partner does.

I want to work with whatever the client brings, so I'd never want to correct a goal like that or substitute my own idea of the relationship they should be after. But I would want to slow down and get curious about it, because in my experience there's real opportunity sitting in those moments.

Most of these goals haven't actually been articulated

The first thing worth noticing is that emotional safety is often a phrase rather than a description.

When I ask a client what it would actually look like, you can sometimes watch their wheels spin. They've been carrying this word for months, maybe years, as the thing that's missing. And they haven't yet taken the time to say what it would consist of on an ordinary Tuesday.

So part of what we're doing is simply helping them articulate it. What does emotional safety look like in this relationship? What would you be doing differently if you had it? What would he be doing?

And then something usually surfaces on its own, which is that almost everything in their picture is something the other person does.

The influence question

This is where I'd ask some version of: how are you going to influence this relationship to have more emotional safety? What does that actually look like?

I'd say something close to this out loud:

"So as I hear you, I hear emotional safety being about what he does. And yes, you both have a part in cultivating and fostering and nurturing a relationship that allows both of you to come back to it and feel safe, or feel received. I'd love to hear from you — what can you contribute to creating more of that?"

Notice that I'm not suggesting the other partner doesn't have an equally important role here. I'm always careful to balance the responsibility for the relationship across both partners. What this question does is add her part back in, which is often the piece that's gone missing.

What clients see when you ask it

What tends to happen next is worth sitting with, because it can be uncomfortable and it's also the whole point.

They start to see how other-dependent their goal actually is. And more importantly, they start to see how disempowered they've become inside it. If emotional safety is entirely a function of what he does, then their experience of the relationship is something that gets decided elsewhere, and all they can do is wait.

That recognition, when it lands, tends to do more than any reassurance I could offer. It's uncomfortable, and it also returns something to them.

What her part actually consists of

I want to be careful here, because this can be misread as putting the work of emotional safety on the person who has less of it.

Asking a client what she can contribute is not asking her to manufacture safety on her own, and it certainly isn't asking her to accommodate more. What her part looks like depends entirely on what's happening between them.

Sometimes cultivating emotional safety means both partners bringing more kindness and more openness to the differences between them. And sometimes, when the other partner hasn't yet taken ownership of his part, her contribution is setting a healthy boundary. Those are very different answers to the same question, and both of them are hers.

So if a partner is genuinely being unsafe, her part is almost never more patience. It's more likely to be a limit, clearly stated, and what she does when it isn't respected. That's still influence, and it's still hers, and it doesn't require him to change first.

I'd also say that whether a relationship is safe enough for this work at all is a question the assessment phase should have answered well before we're setting goals together.

The goal underneath everything

There's an aim I'm carrying through all of this, and I do say it directly to clients.

I want to continuously empower each partner to be able to have the relationship they're describing. Not to be sitting and waiting for permission, or waiting for the other person to come to their senses, in order to feel whatever it is they want to feel.

I'd rather have that in the open early than have it operating quietly in the background, so I'll say something close to: my hope for both of you is that you feel empowered to create the relationship you aspire to be in. You are the co-architects of your relationship, and this won't work if you're not both taking ownership of your part.

Naming it does a few things. It tells them what kind of process this is going to be, before anyone has been singled out. It gives each of them permission to work on their own part without that being read as selfishness. And it means that when I later ask one of them what they can contribute, the question doesn't arrive as an accusation, because we've already agreed that's the direction we're heading.

Waiting is a position clients often arrive in, and I think it's understandable — usually there's a long history behind it. But as long as someone is waiting, their part of the work hasn't started yet.

This is the accountability piece of the model showing up in something as ordinary as goal-setting. When a client can name what they will contribute, they've moved from describing what they need into describing what they'll do. And in IGA that shift is where the assessment phase is actually headed, well before we're doing any processing work together.

Mobilizing each partner toward individual responsibility while holding shared goals is part of the assessment phase we work through in the Integrated Growth Approach training.