I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello, hello.

How are you doing?

Given the time that we're in, where a lot of us are in lockdown or self-isolation or social distancing or quarantine.

I felt like actually this isn't a bad time to revisit the topic of

improving communication in our intimate relationships and I want to stress that's not just romantic ones that's really in any of our close relationships where we want them to develop and grow in terms of intimacy and who we are and how the

relationship progresses over time. We want to feel good in that relationship. We want

that relationship to be mutual and we want to be able to, yes on occasion, speak up about the things that we need to speak up about.

But a lot of us struggle with communication in our intimate relationships, especially around

conflict because we see conflict as a bad thing, whereas actually it's a fundamental part of intimacy. Something I have

said many times over the years is that when we say that we never ever ever ever ever ever disagree with someone that we've never

had a fight in our relationship, something's up in Funky Tan. Now I'm not saying that we have to be

fighting all the time. Of course not. I'm not saying we have to be disagreeing for the sake of

disagreeing, for the sake of creating conflict. But conflict is a fundamental part of intimacy. of So somebody isn't being as truthful as they could be.

I'm not saying that they're being shady.

I'm saying that in an effort to please and be loving,

that we might not be sharing our innermost feelings and thoughts.

We might not be expressing concerns when we need to.

So in the first deep dive into this topic, that was in episode 170, I talked about conflict

and the five stages of relationships. So this is where I use the

framework that I've come up with that explains the five stages that a relationship can go

through and how the stages reflect intimacy. They're not

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