Free Fall

What brings two people together, creating a lasting connection filled with love, passion, and excitement? And what can ultimately extinguish that spark, that fire? How is it that people who once felt such deep love and attraction can, in a few years, find themselves feeling alone, misunderstood, even dead inside because the passion has been replaced with pain?

The key to avoiding these pitfalls is to understand the common stressors that can negatively impact your relationships and how each of these stages builds if not addressed. The secret to alleviating these stressors is to communicate with your partner in a way that fulfills their deepest desires and needs.

Loss of Attraction

The only difference between an intimate relationship and a friendship is intimacy. When that desire, that deeper connection, begins to wane, the passion in your relationship starts to fade. When two people are attracted to each other, it’s very easy to cut each other slack and overlook problems. When attraction begins to diminish, partners can start to get irritated and frustrated.

Why does attraction diminish?

It’s not a physical issue. Loss of attraction is often caused by depolarization. Depolarization occurs when partners no longer experience the play of masculine and feminine energies between them.

The woman feels too insecure to relax into her feminine, and the man becomes bent out of shape and loses his masculine backbone.

Many couples spend years in this state and get used to the loss of passion. However, attraction can shift in a matter of seconds—a woman could go from feeling tight and controlling to free and radiant once her husband makes her feel appreciated, needed, and loved.

If the lack of attraction is not addressed, many couples then...

experience…Irritation, Frustration, Emotional Stacking, and Stonewalling.

To have a good relationship, you need to have five times as many positive communications as negative ones. To have a great one, you need even more! When you feel a loss of attraction and realize you can’t successfully influence your partner, you stop communicating. You begin to experience resistance, resentment, rejection, and repression.

Resistance

Resistance is when your partner does something that bothers you, but you choose to not say anything.

Resentment

If you don’t speak up when your partner does something that bothers you, this feeling becomes resistance and it goes deeper into your psyche, casing you to feel built-up tension that you choose not to address.

Rejection

What happens next, after your resentment builds up inside you, is that you create a level of toxicity and abrasiveness toward your beloved. You feel like they can’t hear you, don’t understand you, and will never understand you, which creates a feeling of helplessness within your relationship. This stage is very difficult to escape and will ultimately either cause your relationship to end up in the final stage—repression—or require immediate work to overcome.

Repression

This stage feels numb. You have entered a phase of your relationship called learned helplessness, where you’ve lowered your expectations and have chosen to go outside the relationship to have your needs met.

Some ways people meet their needs might be through work or business, friends, alcohol or drugs, or sexual outlets outside of their partner, such as affairs or pornography.

Loss of Physical Attraction

With the onset of frustration and irritations comes the loss of physical passion. Why? Because in order to experience passion, you need to be open with each other. If you’re feeling critical of each other, misunderstood, or neglected, you are no longer open, and thus, passion doesn’t flow. With the loss of physical passion, your partner might withhold love or intimacy. Here, you again feel learned helplessness because you can’t please your partner.

At this stage, there is a danger of destroying intimacy forever. You must make it a priority to put yourself in a state that promotes passion, not tension or upset. Otherwise, a lack of physical passion will lead to a loss of commitment.

Loss of Commitment

Once you feel a lack of attraction and passion, you’re no longer committed to understanding your partner or meeting their needs. Commitment breaks down when people don’t feel needed, appreciated, or understood.

Because you don’t feel loved or needed, your energy goes elsewhere. You’re in a happy state with others—out with friends or maybe at the office—but not at home. This is the beginning of the end for your relationship.

How do you stop this loss?

You need to ensure that there’s no threat—that you don’t have one foot out the door and that nothing or no one else is a higher priority than your partner. You must make your partner feel that fulfilling their needs is a must for you, or you will ultimately experience incompatibility.

Feeling of Incompatibility

Feeling incompatible comes from not meeting each other’s needs, not being prioritized, and not making it a priority to understand each other in a heartfelt way. You don’t know your true potential together until you’ve taken care of the fundamentals and ensured that you are meeting each other’s needs.

You must take control of the meaning you are creating. Once you have a story about your partner, you will find evidence to make it true. Be careful about the story you create about yourself (e.g., "I’m not attractive enough," "I’m not good enough") and about your partner. Your story dictates how you think and what you do.

You can rewrite the story of your relationship or your life at any time.

Motive does matter.

When you start to understand and appreciate someone’s world, you cut to the core of what drives them.

You begin by discovering what already influences them - what they want, value, fear, or believe - in order to see the filters through which they experience life. You also must notice the environment they live in and how they fit into it, as well as how their life circumstances are affected by the rewards and punishments they are currently experiencing.

What stops us from moving forward, taking action, and being our best?

There are 2 primary fears we all have:

1.) we’re not enough

2.) we wont be loved.

Our quality of lives is found universally in one element: the ability to choose the meaning in any life circumstance.

Choose love. Be love. Expand yourself. Give to others without the need for anything in return.

QUESTIONS TO ELICIT CHANGE

Step 1 - Connect: understand and appreciate their world.

1. What are some of the events that have shaped your life?

2. What do you believe about yourself? Life? People?

3. What has your life been about up until now?

4. What is most important to you in life?

5. What is the primary focus of your life?

6. What is the story you have been telling yourself?

7. Why do you do what you do?

8. What are the primary emotions that drive your life?

Step 2 - Get Leverage

1. If you don’t change this, what will it mean?

2. If you don’t change this, what will it cost you?

3. What is missing? Why do you want that?

4. What would you like to feel instead?

Step 3 - Interrupt Limiting Patterns

1. Can I ask you a question?

2. Will you go for a walk with me?

Step 4 - Define the Problem

1. What is really stopping you? What is really true?

2. What is it specifically that you really want? What needs are you trying to fulfill?

3. What’s preventing you from getting what you want?

4. What are the primary sources of stress in your life?

Step 5 - Access Empowering Resources

1. What would be a more empowering way to meet your 6 human needs?

2. Which emotions do we need to strengthen?

3. What’s the truth that can set you free?

Step 6 - Condition The Change Until It Becomes a Habit

1. What would be different from this point on if you were living in that different state?

2. How would you handle the same situation if you were in this different state?