Author: Joanna Intara

One of the things I love about being a parent, is that my children let me know very directly what they need, how they need it, and exactly when they need it by.

Sometimes I can do really well with responding to it, and sometimes I fail.

And when I fail I like to repair, ASAP.

And one of the best ways that I know how to repair is to create a sacred family ritual of that particular subject.

For example, my daughter told me about language that I was using that she didn’t like.

She had a point, and I really heard her and repaired whatever harm my language had created for her.

She then started to tell me about the associated times that my language had been harmful and I decided to keep asking her until there was nothing left.

So this is what I recommend that you try.

If there is harm, or hurt simply sit with the person and keep asking them to tell you about it until there is nothing left.

Do not judge them, do not interrupt them, do not tell them why you did it, do not explain yourself or justify your behavior.

Simply listen to what they’re saying.

Simply listen.

And be available for support and then watch what happens, watch the level of connection increase, watch your own ability to handle overwhelm improve, and watch your children feel more secure

Tell me one thing you’re going to do this week to fix a situation that didn’t go so well.

Remember, it’s your turn to feel released from overwhelm, and if you follow these things I guarantee you they’re going to deliver you to the other side, you simply have to practice them to start.

And look, if this feels too overwhelming to do on your own, that’s when you get professional support and this is exactly what I help couples with every day!

We have been covering the subject of how in your family life to deal with repair, attunement, emotional overwhelm and creating specialness rituals in your family unit.

And it’s not easy because I know you’re busy so I’m going to get straight to the point.

The word ‘re’, literally means to do again and the words repair, and regulation, and revisit are all about redoing the things that have been difficult or overwhelming or challenging.

Let’s face it, those things are going to happen because we’re so deeply human.

But instead of resisting them, the little nudge I want to give you today is to simply remind yourself that you need to just simply make it ok to begin again.

Begin again.

Try saying it to yourself right now in the face of things that are challenging.

Begin again.

When things feel overwhelming or you didn’t do the repair correctly. or when you hurt someone or someone hurt you, we all know it was unintentional and we’re human so we need to forgive ourselves, you need to forgive yourself and let it be simply ok to plainly…

Begin again.

Next time you’re in a conflict, next time there’s a difficulty, next time there’s a challenge, next time you feel hurt or that things didn’t go well in the conversation, simply come back to, begin again.

Begin again.

Begin again.

What’s one situation this week that you can acknowledge to yourself, that it would that would be great to begin again, Or to have a fresh start?

I’m going to redo something I said to my husband yesterday that didn’t quite come out the way that I wanted, so I’m leading the way.

Join me?

That was really fun on our live stream yesterday.

I love it when people give themselves the gift of being able to take five minutes and get the things that are going to catapult them into love, sex, and closeness, even while being parents.

Why?

Because so often, what I hear from my clients and what I’ve experienced as a partner and as a parent is this overwhelming sense that somehow we’re just supposed to know how to do repair and to deal with things that are overwhelming.

We can feel so stuck, and hopeless and you can wonder how the heck you’re ever going to have hot sex, love and closeness relationship that works with your family and that’s a good role model for your children.

These were things I often wondered about and had to honestly deeply practice becoming better at if I wanted to be a parent who had their children feel secure.

I had to really dig deep in my own soul and really open up to massive support, practices and inner healing in order to now be at the place that I am today which includes much ease with repair and dealing with overwhelm that parents can experience and often do, and also how to deeply attune to yourself so that you can also be very connected to your children.

I also had to learn how to create sacred rituals with my family that resulted in us all feeling much closer and more connected and continuously gave support for healing which was needed when we made mistakes because we are human after all.

So if you’re reading this and wondering how the heck you’re going to do the job of parenting with these things intact, I’ve got just the thing for you.

Check it out.

Where we are going to dive into:
– What you need to do to have more healing and harmony in your family so that there’s greater ease of connection and closeness.
– The number one thing you must do when there’s overwhelming so you can feel safe and relaxed again.
– My go-to family ritual that helps create closeness and healing and intimacy for everyone involved and that emotional intimacy.
– When you learn how to do THIS, your connection with each other, with your kids AND your partner, will become more loving and more easeful.

I KNOW in my bones it works because I’ve practiced it literally for the last 30 years and in every relationship, I have been in.

I have walked countless couples and individuals through these very challenges so that they can be close with each other, and have a secure family unit which only does wondrous good things to create hot sex, love, and closeness in your marriage.

Not only that it will help provide the perfect role model for your children as well to take permanently with them in their journey throughout life.

Who would want to resist that?

Feel free to message me if you’ve got any questions.

There’s such a palpable sweetness that happens when you’re sitting in the room with clients or working with them and the issue of repair, attunement and regulation comes up.

You know, the number one job of parents is to help their children feel emotionally regulated which is very difficult when we haven’t learned to do it for ourselves.

Which is another way of saying emotionally not overwhelmed nor underwhelmed.

And sadly, we’re still learning how to do this so it’s very often that grown adults who mean well, smart and intelligent grow up and not knowing how to do these things really well in their own partnerships.

This results in such a deep complaint of disconnection, hurt, resentment and bitterness, and one of the constant things I hear with my couples who are parents, which are many, is that they are overwhelmed and no time for special anything.

Many of you who own businesses, startups, online practices can feel deeply overwhelmed and wonder where there’s time for anything personal or how you’re going to figure out this work life family balance.

This was the complaint of my clients Sara and Sal who came into the session space together but it was like they were two distant people who barely knew each other.

Sara looked hard, long lines of what looked like anguish to me on her face, a tight jaw, and pursed lips were her consistent presentation.

Sal seemed a bit numb, and his eyes looked cloudy and when I tuned into the frequency in the room it felt hard and bitter and so this told me that there was probably repairs that needed to have happen, not to mention valuable resources that needed to be brought in so they could learn how to manage overwhelming experiences and create special time for them and their family.

Sara started, “Sal, when I’m feeling overwhelmed you just seem to avoid me. There’s no healing that happens after we seem to talk about things and I feel unseen and that we’ve lost the sense of specialness between the two of us.”

Sal’s stiffened. “Sara, I don’t know what else to do, no matter how much I try to support you in things feeling connected and healed between us, I feel like I fail you, and I’m not motivated to create special times between us because you’re unhappy and I don’t want to disappoint you again.”

So often, I hear this complaint in a few different versions.

And I knew that the work we needed to do was to help them learn how to:

– Repair, so that whatever lurking hurts, sadnesses, disappointments, and left over injuries and wounds could actually get the proper attention they needed. I helped them do this by bringing in deep forgiveness that helps people word actually how to ask for forgiveness, and how to offer it in a way that is not blaming or critical or diminishes the person for needing the forgiveness to begin with.
– Regulate difficult states of overwhelm. This meant having resources in their tool box to help hold literally difficult or overwhelming states. For example, this meant being able to have understanding, and presence in their bodies that could serve the function of being containers to actually hold the difficult overwhelming experiences. From my understanding of deep developmental work, I also know that reparenting our inner mother and father who may not have contributed to our own ability to manage overwhelming experiences, is deeply critical and I watched how Sarah and Sal let this work in and actually began to find a lot of relief because they now have some creative tools on how to address their wounds and how to address it with each other.
– Not only that but they also learned attunement, the ability to really tune into where the other person is and learn to put language to it. This requires learning the language of feelings, and also the language of sensations. From my deep study of trauma work and sensorimotor psychotherapy, we delved into the world of being present to sensation, and how to work with that in a way that helps the body learn to become resourced.
– Ritual, we dived deep into how to create sacred special practices to honor what was really important to them and or their family, and we created massive family ritual experiences that were honoring, and respectful to each person in the family. With all these new tools in their toolbox, Sarah and Sal healed a huge piece of disconnection in their relationship. They repaired, they handled their overwhelm, they learned how to deeply attuned to themselves and each other, and how to create sacred special rituals of meaning for them and their family members.

I know that these two aren’t the only ones who deal with some version of this, and if you’re reading this I want you to know I really truly get you, and I know how much you struggle with not having these things, I know that hurts, the overwhelm, the lack of anything special feeling going on, and the feeling of not being seen.

They’re really painful and you don’t have to live that way, not anymore.

Which is what ended up happening with my clients. Three months later they decided to renew their decision to continue working with me, because their family life had shifted, they were feeling so much more connected, and repairs and overwhelm were flowing the way they needed to.

I want this for you!

So what I’m wondering is, what is ONE thing you can do to commit to bringing in repair in your relationship in any way that’s needed?

Feel free to send me a private message, I know this is deeply personal information for pretty much everybody out there, and I want you to feel safe and know that I have your confidential back if that is what is needed in order for you to be safe to open up.

I want you to have all the repair and management resources that you need, in addition to all the being seen and seeing each other resources that you also need so people feel gotten.

All this results in the feeling of closeness and connection and healing that I am living now because I went through what you might be going through and I know how to get to the other side by following exactly these steps.

Now it’s your turn to feel this, and try it on and go really deep with it so you can have it too.

I want to really share with you, that I wasn’t the best at having parenting be easy for me.

While I was born with a lot of ability to be a good mother, learning how to do the partnership dance with my husband, and sorting out the necessary inner resources that were required to have a really good relationship and a really good family life like I have now were not something that I was just born with.

I had to learn through my own experience.

With some of you, I’ve shared that I didn’t know how to do repair or deal with overwhelming feelings.

And one of the things that I understand and excel at now so deeply is that the primary job of a parent is to help their children feel regulated.

What I mean by regulated is to help them process experiences so that things are neither overwhelming nor underwhelming, but to keep them at a healthy level of engagement.

Well, given the dysfunctional family that I was born and, there were lots of regulation issues and also my husband had regulation issues as well, when it came to dealing with emotion.

I know there are thousands more like me because I have been hearing about it for over 25 years!

And so for us, for a long time we had to really endeavor to develop the inner resources so that we wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with any particular emotions.

There were times when I would look at him and say, “This is just too big and overwhelming, I don’t know what to do.”

And then he would say, I’m feeling that way too, I want to be bigger than this, but I just don’t know how to support you, I can barely even support myself.”

I know that I’m not alone when I speak of these things, and maybe you’ve tried your own ways to deal with overwhelm as well, and wondered how to do the management of your emotions really well.

It’s something I see every week in my practice.

One of the things I know from my work is learning how to deal with emotional overwhelm, by metabolizing the sensations in the body through movement, presence and release.

I knew I needed to do this through all my earliest formative experiences.

So both my husband and I had to go back to the drawing board of our earliest experiences and literally work our way through them by addressing all the difficult emotions that needed containment, and addressing them and giving them actually what they needed.

This meant we had to dig deep into our own ability to birth the inner mother and father that were deeply needed in order to support each one of us individually, and then we could come together as a family.

We had the support of many mentors, deep mature adult friendships with other couples, lots of trauma resources, and lots of support on how to literally hold presence through our hearts and our minds and our bodies, the sensations and thoughts and feelings that accompany overwhelm.

Not only did we do that, but we also learned to deeply repair and to take full responsibility for our own experience while also learning to be empathic and to care for each other’s experience as well.

I remember a time as we were working through this, that it would be so sweet when we could really deepen into the level of maturity that was needed in order to shepherd our relationship in a good way.

And I’m so glad that we did this, because now we have a relationship where we can attune to each other and this results along with healthy management of our feelings and sincere repair and throw in a sprinkle of good family rituals to honor the important things, that the amount of closeness and connection and intimacy skyrocketed.

We healed,
We forgave each other,
We learned how to master emotional regulation,
We learned how to do repair in a really sincere way,
and we learned how to create sacred and meaningful family rituals,
like saging the house together,
or pulling tarot cards together and having a family discussion about what was most helpful.

My job is to help each couple create their own family rituals that fit them and that it’s exactly what I do with my clients that help them experience closeness, family unity and collective healing and honoring amongst them. All of this leads to greater intimacy, ease, and energy freed up to create the hot sex, love and closeness relationship they desire.

Of course, the kids, they love this, even my sweet son would say when he was three, Mama can I ‘stage’ {of course he was talking about sage…} the house? (I didn’t have the heart to correct him and tell him that the t was an extra letter), because his sweetness and sincerity were so special.

I want you to have all these healing benefits as well, and I know that you can, when you do some of the things that I am suggesting above.

I want you to feel close and connected and have the healing resources that you need because you do need them, and you cannot survive and thrive in love where both people come together with their conditioning without it.

I hope you’ll drink this in and take in the good nourishment that’s here.

What’s the first step that you can take this week to start getting going on this for yourself?

For me, I’m going to take an inventory of any places where I still feel there is a need for this, and going to make a list and plan a time with my hubby to connect with him and I know he’ll listen to me even if it’s uncomfortable or even if it’s difficult because we’ve done that work. Wouldn’t it feel great to know the same was possible for you?