Geli’s Holistic – Systemic Approach plus Masculine-Feminine Polarity Understanding
.
Personal Growth and Love is not a random event.
So many couples or individuals who would like to make their personal life, marriage or sexual intimacy work, get caught up with solutions offered in bestselling relationship and sex advice self-help books (or a friendly chat with mates over a beer, or …). Or they hope that someone with many years of experience in their marriage will have all the answers suitable for their own situation.
Somehow people seem to feel more comfortable applying someone else’s solutions as a readymade answer to their own problems. Unfortunately, most of those solutions can’t just be dropped into any relationships. Whilst solid friendships are invaluable as a support with (hopefully) impartial feedback and reality checks, or a much needed shoulder to cry on, their solutions out of their experience might not be what fits your experience.
We are all individuals from uniquely different backgrounds and life experiences with a lot of complex variables and issues all of which are rarely present in a specific couple or relationship.
Knowledge is important; you absolutely can’t get the best out of life without knowledge. But you can gather all the knowledge on earth and still not be able to do anything with it.
How do you know which parts of that knowledge to use and which to discard? How do you figure out how to apply that knowledge so it adds value and meaning to your relationship and intimacy? How do you apply that knowledge to your own specific life and family which may operate differently than other relationships within your circle of friends?
This is where custom-made coaching and mentoring come in, strategically suited for your own unique relationship and lifestyle.
The Best Way Forward: The Holistic Systemic Approach
We tend to isolate problem areas as isolated issues. No different really than cutting a finger and applying a band-aid plaster on it and take a pain killer. What I usually hear is, e.g. “Sex in our marriage was great, now it really isn’t. Can you please fix our sex life?”
My reply usually is, yes, this is possible, BUT depending what you ultimately want, I can’t prescribe you a magic pill, and give you a list of hat-tricks of sex position gymnastics, because your sex life does not exist in isolation to the rest of your marriage relationship.
You can’t just bucket out the water coming through a hole and think that the rest of the boat is ok.
Everything is connected to everything. Each part has some type of interdependency with all the other parts. Change one thing and it affects everything else. A ‘system’ – a couple in a marriage – a family – is more than the sum of its parts. Holistic approaches are a form of systems thinking. The universe is a system. Atomic structure is a system. And so is in any relationship.
Everyone’s actions, everyone’s pain or joy affect everything else
Everyone's actions, everyone’s pain or joy affect everything else
If you are holding back love and affection because of past pain, fear of intimacy; or you’re worried about something that happend during the day, or you have a physical, medical problem, you can’t just push it aside, pretend it does not exisit and try to have fun anyhow. You know as much as I do, this does not work – certainly not in a deeply meaningful and fulfilling way.
You’ll find that when I work with you that I’ll ask you all sorts of question that might appear irrelevant to your issues, however, in order to help you best, I need to identify and understand your model of the world – your understanding of your world, and the world you live in.
I also need to understand what needs, beliefs and ‘rules’ you value most highly, what influences you and what meanings you associate with the possibilities of taking steps towards change as well as emotional barriers.
This brings me to:
Strategic Intervention Coaching
Cloé Madanes is one of the originators of “Strategic Intervention” as part of Systemic Family Therapy.
She joined forces with Anthony Robbins in their effort to find solutions to interpersonal conflicts, to prevent violence and to contribute to the creation of a more cohesive and civil community (more)
Strategic Intervention (also called ‘Human Needs Psychology’ or HNP) originates with the understanding of the power of meaning to shape all aspects of a human being’s life, plus the belief systems and emotional patterns within an individual, individual relationships, and group dynamics.
Strategic Intervention coaching and mentoring aims to help people, couples, families and organizations to overcome conflict and personal obstacles by tapping into their own strengths.
This approach emphasizes learning to listen to the individual’s own subconscious mind in order to come up with solutions and plan a course of action to allow them to move forward.
In my work with couples and/or individuals, I draw on various disciplines of psychology. Apart from the above mentioned Strategic Intervention – Systemic Family Therapy, I also focus on:
Positive Psychology / Strengths Psychology and the Neuro-Sciences of Brain Repatterning
Positive Psychology explores people’s strengths and resilience both as an individual as well as the couple/family unit, rather than their weaknesses and dysfunctions.
Traditional psychology and clinical psychology (by and large financed by the psycho-pharmaceutical industry) tends to focus on so-called diseases or mental illnesses. This, to my understanding, reduces people to victims of circumstances, rather than empowering them to use and maximise their own inherent strengths.
Positive Psychology / Strengths Psychology encourages people to give new meanings to situations and issues and gives them the power of personal responsibility to rise above whatever was holding them back or stopped them from achieving their personal best and their dreams.
Although it is at times useful to gain a general understanding of the causes of dysfunctions and pain to get an overall bigger picture, I tend not to focus on the reasons of the wounds and damage, but rather I focus on results of healing and thriving!
One of the main issues I have with clinical psychotherapy and getting an in-depth understanding of a person’s past and damage/dysfunction history, is that it is actually counterproductive in a person’s healing.
During the therapeutic process of taking the person to the point of damage and opening up their old wounds again with their painful emotions, we are actually perpetuating the neurological reinforcement of emotion-brain association, rather than laying new neurological pathways to get a person to heal. It is so much better to use cutting edge techniques gleaned from the field of neuro-science to help people create their own new meanings surrounding issues, and assist them to maximise their own inherent strengths to master the situation.
Masculine-Feminine Polarity
Passion attraction has to do with Masculine-Feminine Sexual Polarity. Like with a magnet, same polarity repels and opposite polarity attracts.
For intimacy to fire, it needs that vibrancy and that blaze of attraction. It is not just confined to the bedroom. Polarity provides this aliveness, juice and passion as a lifestyle throughout your relationship.
Men and women have both masculine and feminine attributes and they can animate each according to the need of a situation.
Please note: The term masculine does not equal male; nor does the term feminine equal female! I use the terms ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ much like a colour, e.g. red or green. I do not use those terms to define them as applying to a specific gender. They are merely useful ‘shorthand’ for me to describe a particular characteristic.
Men have learnt to allow their ‘feminine’ side to shine when needed. They learned to express their emotions and nurture themselves. They learned to listen deeply with more empathy.
Women tend to cloak their unique and natural expression of ‘feminine’ radiance in order to succeed in today’s ‘masculine’—oriented economy that requires more ‘masculine’ attributes, such as strategic thinking, precision vision planning, etc.
All this is great and necessary not only to survive in todays workplace and societal structure, but it can create havoc in an intimate setting.
So, for example, if there is stress going on in your life or disagreements with your partner, you might feel more tension and shut down emotionally; or if you’re a woman you might be more tight, controlling and in a ‘masculine’ “I-must-win” perspective. It literally just takes a moment for that polarity to shift either way, and the same applies to him.
However, if you know how, it’s just as fast to switch that light, that fire of passion, back on again simply by recognising the dynamics of polarity and acting on it.
Again, for the sake of writing convenience I use ‘feminine’ for women and ‘masculine’ for men. I am perfectly aware that not everyone falls into the stereotypical roles. However, interestingly enough, research bears out that approximately 80 percent of people actually do have their very distinct masculine and feminine sexual essence mapping over with their gender.
