Okay, everybody, welcome to episode seven of our ongoing series about emotionally focused

couples therapy with Leconin.

Hi.

How are you?

I'm great.

Well, today we're going to do our second exercise, which is an exercise called highs and lows.

Any couple can do it at any time. And before we actually

get into it, just really quickly, we were talking about this because this question kind of came up

of, you know, you are an emotionally focused couple. I am. And we were like, no, do you,

what do you do when you have arguments in your own relationship? Right. And you brought up a good point.

No matter how much you do this work, things are still going to come up, right? Absolutely. Conflict is still going to start and it's still going to happen. Right? We all get stressed. We all have frustrating days. We're all annoyed with each other at times. And it's going to come out. So this isn't about stopping those things that happen or making

sure that they never happen again. It's about knowing what they do, what to do with them when they

come up. Got it. And so what we have to do is when we notice we're getting into our negative

cycles, some couples come up with a name for it, like the torrent. We're doing that dance

again or we're doing, we're in our cycle again. And the idea is you're more aware of it because

you've done this work. So you can identify it and you can slow it down when it's happening and you can

repair anything that's that's happened in the course of the interactions so that you're not increasing conflict,

you're actually down-regulating conflict, and then you can actually talk about whatever it is

that you talk about. Like one of the things I often say to my husband when I'm in this place

and I feel like he's not getting me, I will tell him that. I'll say, I feel like you're not getting

me. I feel like you're not with you. I need to know that you're with me. And that cues him in because we've done some of this work between ourselves. He knows what that means now. Right. And he's able to go, okay, I see what you're needing right now. Okay. Yes. Got it. We can slow it down. So tell us about highs and lows. What is that exercise and how do we do it?

Yes. So I love giving my couples a highs and lows exercise. It's so simple to do. But the idea behind this is we're so distracted in our relationships today. We have so much going on.

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