Hello, AwakenYou listeners, and happy Tuesday! It has been a reflective week over here in my world. I am coming off of an intense beginning of April, which is also the beginning of the second quarter for any of you business-minded listeners, while I dive into my goals for this month. I am creating a course to bring live to audiences who want to learn how to change relational dynamics while also preparing to launch a deep dive into a year-long advanced relationship mentorship with my mentor and coach, Aimée Gianni which starts this coming weekend with live intimate training with a small group of outstanding coaches in Las Vegas.

So many of you have asked about how coaching can help you change your life and how your life would be better, so that’s what I am talking about this week: the value and positive outcomes of working with a marriage/love/life coach, whatever you want to call me. Let’s say it like this: a life coach specializing in bringing love, joy, playfulness, connection, and peace to your most important human relationship, the one with your spouse. Today I will share three different positive outcomes of hiring a marriage coach. Still, just like I mentioned last week in Ep 62: How To Change Your Marriage Without Changing Your Spouse, the actual positive outcomes far outweigh what I can include in this short episode.

Fully embracing YOU

This was not originally on my list of three outcomes, but as I started writing, I could not not include this one because, to me, this is the positive prize outcome above any other. Suppose you have ever felt uncomfortable in your own skin, felt like you need to agree with the crowd to fit in, and chose to run and hide from the idea of getting together with others because you fear you won’t fit in. In that case, this is the one thing that will propel you forward towards your life dreams the fastest. The freedom that will come when you feel free to shed the different costumes you don throughout your day and learn how to process the uncomfortable emotions you feel when asking questions because you don’t know what someone is talking about instead of acting as you do. Freedom to not agree with someone or not even have an opinion either way and instead connect on a deeper level by hearing more about their why. Freedom to say no to a gathering because you’re just not into it instead of saying yes and then debating over attending or not and ultimately ghosting.

The value you will get out of coaching from this one takeaway is the gold that keeps me coming back to my coaches. To dig into seeing the ways you might be abandoning yourself for the sake of what others might think, including your spouse, or to “keep the peace” will always open you up to living a life you love living.

Learning how to make ALL relationships work for you, even those you choose to “end”

Think about the top five people in your life that you have what you might call a “difficult” relationship with; maybe it’s your mom or dad, a sibling, your spouse, a child, a friend, a co-worker, or a boss. Imagine what it would feel like if someone waved a magic wand and dissolved any relational conflicts you have with these five people. How might your life feel “easier”? How might you have more time and energy to do those things you love doing by learning how to make these relationships work for you? Less overeating, or over drinking, overspending, or whatever your numbing action of choice is? Or how about the mental energy spent on thinking about how they need to change or time spent ruminating over their actions, or time spent in conversation with people you love about how awful these people are? Let go of those things, and you have magically opened up time to rest, workout, hug your spouse and children, be playful, and plan out your best life.

Being able to look at everyone with an empathetic view is a value that will come from working on only ONE of those relationships, and better yet: when you work on that relationship with yourself, whammo, you start seeing everyone else through a whole new lens.

The value of learning about emotions

Off the top, most of you might not see the value in learning about emotions and the impact they have on your life and your relationships when you start to understand their tremendous power and see how you are utilizing their power against yourself. Emotions are the fuel behind everything we do, the things we do that we love and appreciate, and the things we do that we aren’t so proud of. Better yet, once we see how these actions directly impact the results we are getting in our current life, it helps motivate us to find a better and different way.

Learning about emotions helps us become aware of common triggers to our familiar and not-so-proud responses. As we become more conscious and aware of the emotions we are feeling we start to become aware of what we need to do to start creating a new dynamic that makes us proud of how we show up, it has us planning our new responses instead of relying on deeply engrained ineffective responses. When we learn how to utilize the power of “positive” emotions and diffuse the destructive power “negative” emotions, we take our power back in all of our relationships. Then we have the power to influence others to show up differently.

There you have it, three powerfully positive outcomes you will get when you take the bold step of harnessing the power that is locked up inside of you and let it out. You will start showing up more comfortably as yourself, create new relational dynamics with all of the people in your life and learn how to use the power of emotions to move you forward instead of keeping you stuck. That value you cannot put a price on because it will pay you back in ways you never imagined, as in a love life brought back to life, a trusting relationship with yourself, and a better connection in every relationship, which might even lead you to that promotion you’ve thought you’ll never get!

If you have any questions about how to start working together, please reach out via email (christine@christinebongiovanni.com) or message me on my social channels. I would love to find time to get to know you better and discuss how you can start creating these results in your own life.

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I am a marriage coach who helps women and couples go from feeling powerless to change how they feel about their marriage to feeling powerful and taking ownership of how they feel. My process isn’t about changing your partner; it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your marriage, and through this process, you will begin to find that your partner will change as well! If you’re ready to take yourself to a place where you can finally fall in love with your life and your spouse, then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s talk about the next steps to making your dream life your reality.

Happy Tuesday, fellow AwakenYou listeners; it’s great to be here with you today. I hope that today’s message inspires you to feel a little, if not a lot, different about what is possible for you in your marriage and in your life. I know that many of you are in different places when it comes to how you feel about your marriage, some of you feel pretty happy about your relationship with your spouse but want to tweak a few things, and then others are miserable. Some of you who feel unhappy wonder if you married the wrong person and if you should leave. In contrast, others of you are committed to staying in the relationship while really hoping that you can change this listless relationship dynamic into something more fun, exciting, and passionate. No matter where you are in the marital feels spectrum, I want you to know that it is completely possible to change your marriage without changing your spouse and today, I will share a few of the hows.

There are so many ways that I help you change how you feel about your marriage that has nothing to do with leaving your spouse or changing them. Actually, every single episode here in AwakenYou addresses ways that you can create that change. Still, there is often more to it than listening to episodes and taking stabs at creating the change on our own. Don’t get me wrong, it is entirely possible to listen to episodes like this, read some books, and create a new marital dynamic all on your own, just like it’s possible to change a lifelong disordered eating pattern all on your own, but enlisting the help of a professional will speed up the process and help you see things that only an outsider can see. So what holds most people back from seeking one on one help? Typically what I see is all sorts of fear. Fear that it won’t work, fear that there might be something wrong with them, fear of admitting they have a problem, fear of opening up the “pandora’s box” of their life only to find out that there is no hope for them, fear of stepping into something more amazing than where they are right now, fear it won’t last. Oh, and then there is all of the shame that they are feeling under that fear, the shame that is telling them that they are getting what they deserve in the love and passion department and that they should be happy with what they’ve got.

Okay, so back to where I started, today I want to share three different ways I help people change their marriage without changing their spouse, and I will most likely continue this episode in the future, but let’s see where we get with it today’s chat.

To begin, I want to share a bit of my own story when it comes to the work of changing how I felt about my marriage because I vividly remember when I refused to “succumb” to the idea that I needed to do things to change my relationship. These things include, but certainly were not limited to, wrapping my naked body up in saran wrap and greeting him at the door when he came home from work (no lie, thank you, Joy 😉), dressing up to make special meals served in candlelight, and folding all of his clothes “neatly” whatever that is and putting them away. I had a whole list of actions that I “should” take to make my spouse and me happy, but the problem was, at the time, taking these actions from a place of joy, passion, excitement was not at all accessible to me, and I wasn’t interested in faking it, it felt awful and cheap. Now, I am not saying any of these actions are good or bad; I’m saying that from the place of where I was ten years ago, these actions didn’t align with how I felt about my marriage at the time and my journey was about looking at how I felt about my marriage and why. My journey was about looking at what was going on inside myself instead of the helpless, powerless position of waiting for Jeff to show up differently so I could feel better. This is where we start.

Taking your power back

We are completely powerless when we require others to be different than they are for us to be happy. This is true in our relationship with ourselves, our spouses, children, family, friends, and co-workers. In AwakenYou we take a look at all of our different power leaks and one by one we seal each leak. We start by looking for some of the smaller leaks and with each power leak we seal, we gain a little more power or strength to search for the next leak and start sealing it.

This starts by checking in with ourselves, how are we feeling when our spouses are on the phone during dinner? Zap…power leak. We check in with ourselves again and notice how we are feeling when we go to bed and our partners don’t join us…zap, zap, zap…power leak. Then we check in again and notice how we feel when our spouses don’t initiate conversation but when their phone rings they seem to be in their element chatting away with the person on the other end of the phone…ZAP, ZAP, ZAP!!!

When we check in with how we feel we discover something about ourselves, we discover how we are thinking about what is going on in front of us and how it makes us feel. Once we have this information we start to understand why we’re acting the way we are and why we are getting the results we’re currently getting in our marriage. From here we get to work on learning how to accept where we’re at and deciding what we want to do about it. Do we want to change our actions and lead with a different emotion? Do we want to speak out loud to our spouses and share how we are feeling about the version of the story we see?

We begin to see where we are feeling powerless and then we have an opportunity to decide how we want to change the dynamic which seals the leak and supplies us with the power to do what makes us feel better.

Learning how to set boundaries

This goes hand in hand with taking your power back. You take the time to look at what you are doing in your marriage and why. Are you packing their lunch because you think it’s your job or because you love to make sure they have something healthy to take with them for the day? Are you having sex with them because you don’t want them to go looking for it outside of the marriage or because you want to learn how to explore your own emotions so you can open up to enjoy the experience fully? Are you going to another one of their boring work events because you feel obligated, or can you say, “Not this time, dear; I think I’m going to relax and take a long hot bath, but thank you so much for inviting me!”

Becoming familiar with setting personal boundaries will help you be more honest in your marriage and accept your decision so that you can have fun. Maybe you chose to say yes to that boring dinner, then accept your decision, stop looking at all of the ways this is going to be the worst evening ever, and start searching for all of the ways it is going to be amazing; you’ll be surprised at what a great time you can have!

Learning the tools to resolve conflict in a healthy way

Conflict is all around us, and it will always be a part of a healthy marital relationship. You did not marry your clone; yikes, that might be an interesting dynamic huh?!? The fun thing is that when you start to learn how to address conflict, it becomes an interesting way to start getting to know more about your spouse! When we close down or fight against conflict, we never get to see our partner’s perspective, which makes us very narrow-minded. Many of us crave more intimacy in our marriages, and having the tools to work through conflict helps us get to know our partners better and ourselves. It makes us think more about our perspective and why we see things the way we do because we will actually be presenting it in a way that helps our spouses better understand us, and the opposite is true for them. They get to voice their opinion because we are actually asking them about it because we are genuinely interested. From there, we get to decide what we want to believe, and it’s ok if we each believe something different. Go back a couple of episodes to Ep 60: Differentiation: Could Your Differences Be Your Marriage’s Assets? and discover how you can actually grow closer by learning more about your differences.

When we learn how to work through conflict, we start to become more in touch with our emotions; we better know what is starting to come up for us, which allows us to make better choices. When we feel some resistance coming up, we can note it, and then come back to explore that resistance during our quiet time. Then, as with all things that you are learning, with practice, it will take less and less time to understand what is happening to you. You will start to notice patterns, and with those patterns, you will learn how to deal with them more effectively with time.

These are three ways in AwakenYou that we work on changing your marriage without changing your spouse. We start with you learning how to go from powerless and hopeless to powerful and full of hope by looking at your relationship dynamics, how you are showing up in your marriage, and becoming clear on what that is creating for you in your life. We then get to the work of deciding what you want to do moving forward; we create a plan and start moving towards that vision. It is the most exciting journey you will ever go on, so buckle up and let’s go for a ride!

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I am a marriage coach who helps women and couples go from feeling powerless to change how they feel about their marriage to feeling powerful and taking ownership of how they feel. My process isn’t about changing your partner; it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your marriage, and through this process, you will begin to find that your partner will change as well! If you’re ready to take yourself to a place where you can finally fall in love with your life and your spouse, then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s talk about the next steps to making your dream life your reality.

Welcome my AwakenYou listeners! I have just returned from the Life Coach School Mastermind in Austin, Texas, and I am on fire to get this quarter going! This month I have several fun ways for you to learn more about yourself and the ways you can grow and develop a more connected relationship with yourself and your marriage. First, I want you to get yourself registered for this month’s AwakenYou Masterclass which is all about creating the connection you desire in your marriage. In this class, we will explore different aspects of connection and look at how you like to connect while also taking some time to recognize how your spouse likes to connect to understand better how they show up when you are in your element. Join us by clicking on the link provided and learn how to find more connection in your marriage.

I also want to remind everyone that this is the last week to throw your hat in the ring to win a $100 Amazon gift card! Yes, you heard that correctly; over the past three weeks, I have been giving away a $50 Amazon gift card, but this last week in celebration of AwakenYou in your marriage’s first anniversary I decided to double the gratitude, so, right now, please, scroll to the bottom of my podcast page and write a short review sharing what you love about AwakenYou so that other people can find the help they need to start feeling better about themselves and their life so that they can get back to a place where they love being with their spouse. All you have to do to get entered is take a screenshot of your review and attach it to an email to christine@christinebongiovanni.com, you can also send it to me as a DM on any of my social platforms or from my website. This is the last week to enter!

This week I want to talk to you about the different stages of awareness and behavioral change, which ultimately are the different stages or levels of awareness that you walk through when you are changing behavioral patterns. Specifically, today I am going to speak about emotional behavioral patterns because it is our emotions that dictate the changes we make. I’m going to talk about eight different stages of awareness that I see when most people are doing the work of changing behavioral patterns that they developed in the early stages of their life. Understanding these stages will help you better recognize where you are in the continuum of change in your own life and help you better understand and evaluate where you are to keep moving forward.

I think too often, we have an idea of what we would like our life to look like if things were going in a way that we think would make us happy. Let’s look at weight loss. With weight loss, what I saw over my thirty years of working with athletes is that we have an idea of where we want to be and when we’re not there, or we can’t seem to make it there in the amount of time we think is acceptable we give up and decide we have failed. In the recovery world, I like to share that relapse is a part of the recovery journey; it doesn’t indicate failure but when we make it mean failure, guess what happens? It takes us a whole lot longer to get out of our relapse.

It’s the same when it comes to changing the way we interact with ourselves and others that we are in relationship with, which we will be focusing on today. Let’s dig into these steps of awareness throughout our change process and see how we can use it to propel us forward instead of holding us back.

The first stage: no awareness or understanding of the problem or habitual dynamic

I wanted to include this stage because it’s where many of us start with the different ways we interact with ourselves and others. Our awareness is what we do; it seems normal like it is who we are and how we deal with life’s circumstances; it’s “in our blood.” Throughout these different levels of awareness, I will use an analogy that I first encountered in the first meditation app I used way back when I started meditating, Headspace, where they used a hole in the road analogy. In this first stage, imagine you are walking down the road, a road that you commonly use, and there is a big hole in the road that you fall in. You are angry at the hole, the people who dug the hole; you are in the hole for a very long time before getting yourself out.

The world has happened to you.

Stage two: awareness of the problem or habitual dynamic

You become aware of a different option, but you don’t completely understand it or that there would feel better than where you are. You walk down the same street with the same hole; you don’t see it; you fall in it and are utterly annoyed that this has happened to you again.

Stage three: awareness of the problem after an occurance but don’t do anything to create a different result

This is where you keep falling in the hole, blame the world, it takes you a long time to get over it, and you keep doing the same thing, getting the same result.

Stage four: awareness after occurance with an evaluation and steps to create a different dynamic

You know the hole is there; you think about it and how you will avoid it, but you still fall into it. When the hole is in front of you, you don’t actually see it, and you fall in, but now you see that it is your own doing, and it doesn’t take you as long to get out of the hole.

Stage five: awareness while the old behavior is happening and you continue with the old behavior

This is where you step into the hole, realizing you stepped in and just let yourself fall. It feels awful, but you get up, dust yourself off, see your part in the problem, evaluate and move on.

Step six: awareness during the old behavior while able to interrupt and choose a better option

This would look like falling into the hole, grabbing on to the ladder, that has always been available to you, and climbing out. At this stage, you are still evaluating how you can no longer fall in the hole.

Stage seven: awareness of the old dynamic as it is approaching but still fall into old behavior

This will look like seeing the hole coming but falling in anyway. You don’t make it a big deal; you catch the ladder and climb out, moving on with your day and evaluating how you will catch yourself earlier next time.

Stage eight: awareness of the possibility of old dynamic before falling into old behavior patterns and choose something different

This is where you see the hole coming, know it’s there, and walk around it. Eventually, you continue to walk around that hold and don’t even notice it being there.

The truth is that there are many mini-stages in between all of these stages. There will be times when you are at stage eight, and because of the circumstances, maybe lack of sleep, an illness, stress at work, the hole arrives, and you fall in it. As frustrating as it may be, you recognize that this was your own doing, you stepped in the hole, and you climb out and move on.

This is the process of change, and it is the process you will go through with any behavior you are trying to change. In our relationships with ourselves, we are constantly looking at how we treat ourselves, and those habits change as we let go of the more obvious ones. Then we go to work on the sneakier ones, the ones that seem helpful but are actually just as destructive. As we do this work with our own self-relationship we also do this with our outside relationships.

Everything we do here in AwakenYou is about growing your relationship with yourself so that you can learn how to have a better relationship with your spouse. What we do here is ultimately about honoring our true selves, and the better we get at that, the better we can show up in our marriages. I absolutely love this process, and every day I get to see for myself how this work makes me feel so powerful in changing my own relationship with myself and with Jeff. You deserve a better relationship with yourself and your spouse as well, and I hope that as you listen, you will discover that spark to create the change you have been dying to make. I’d love to help you find that spark; schedule your free coaching call or book a call to talk about our work in AwakenYou and how it will help you start to love your life and your spouse!

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I am a life coach who works with women and couples struggling with how their lives and marriage feel through awakening their true selves. My process isn’t about changing your partner; it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your life and marriage, which will have you see your partner changing as well. If you’re ready to take yourself to a place where you can fall back in love with your life and your spouse, then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s talk about your next steps to a life you are crazy in love with!

Welcome to April AwakenYou family! I am so excited for this quarter and the fun things I will be creating to help all of you on your journey to loving this life we are living. Yesterday I did the work of planning out my projects for this quarter while also working on some fun business and pleasure trips, including ending the quarter celebrating my birthday! I have three excellent AwakenYou Masterclass I am preparing for you where we will dig into your relationship with yourself, your spouse and practicing how to commit to what is true for you and your life values, beliefs and ideals. This month we will be working on Creating More Connection and creating connection that feels good to you, instead of what society has taught you about marital connection, you can find the link to register for this one hour class in the show notes and I would also suggest you go back to Ep. 59 Creating Connection That Feels Good To YOU to better prepare for the class. If you’re able to listen to that episode you can start the practices that I share and then in the Masterclass you can share how it’s going and get help with implementation.

Before we get started, I also want to remind you that I am celebrating AwakenYou’s first anniversary, and I have a special request and gift for those of you who have been listening; the request I have is that if you have been learning and enjoying the episodes, you write a short positive review on whatever platform you listen to these episodes. After you submit your review, take a screenshot of it and send that screenshot to me in an email (christine@christinebongiovanni.com) or send it to me in a DM on my Instagram or Facebook page. I will add everyone who submits a review over the next four weeks into a lottery where I will draw one name a week to win a $50 Amazon gift card; anyone who does not get drawn as a winner will stay in the lottery, so please write a short review and share it with me so I can add you! You have just two more weeks to get yourself entered so go ahead and do that while you are listening to today’s episode.

This week I am digging into a concept that I was introduced to last summer at my Advanced Relationship Training. As with most of the concepts I share here, I like to take some time to absorb what I have learned, conceptualize the theories, take them into my own life and observe what happens while I practice them. I imagine, if you are anything like me anyway, that sometimes when you are listening to therapists or coaches or any relationship expert, you may hear words or concepts that completely fly over the top of your head. Like, “oh, I hear that, it may make sense, but I’m not sure I get it.” that is my brain anyway when I listen to some of my favorite relationship experts. Differentiation was one of those words. It was quite abstract when I first heard it, and what I have learned to do with concepts that my brain isn’t quite able to understand is to give it space to grow. Sort of back to the garden analogy, with plants that I’m familiar with, I get them, and I let them do their thing, but with new plants, plants I’m not so familiar with, well, if I treat them the same typically there isn’t a good result. Instead, I have to do some reading up on their needs and pay extra attention to them, giving them space to thrive, and through that time, I start to understand them better.

Differentiation has been this way with me. I’ve allowed it to sit and marinate in my brain; my ears perk up when I hear it brought up in conversation or a teaching or coaching session, I get curious about it. It becomes one thing that gets past my RAS (Reticular Activating System – the brain filter that has you seeing that red convertible you’ve had your eye on everywhere you go – thank you, Mel Robbins for teaching the world about this phenomenon). Today I’m going to share what I’ve learned with you so that you can start seeing how important it is in your life and marriage. Today I’m going to share what differentiation is, including the opposite ends of the differentiation spectrum, why we might fear opening up to be differentiated from our spouses and other close relationships while digging into the evolution of our sense of self, including how many of us get stuck unable to develop a solid sense of ourselves and lastly why we want to increase our differentiation and four steps to doing so. Ready? Set. Go!

What exactly is differentiation in your marriage and relationships?

Differentiation is the active process of a person being able to define their thoughts, feelings, wishes, and desires to others while also tolerating and accepting their partner doing the same. When we can do this, we can hear what our partners have to say, take their thoughts and opinions into consideration without needing to agree or take them on as our own fully. It allows you to consider someone else’s opinion without making their opinion wrong and without making your opinion wrong, no judgment on either side.

Differentiation is sandwiched between autonomy or individuality, attachment, or togetherness. Many of you have heard me talk about the evolution of many relationships where we often start with attachment and togetherness and then move into more of an autonomous/individual sort of relationship, which feels very lonely, hence the roommate type of marriage existence and then when a couple is devoted to creating a more intimate, joyous, adventurous relationship they will move into a differentiated or interdependent type of marriage.

The attachment or togetherness relationship is where one or each person in the relationship desires to be loved and needs to belong in higher priority than their personal preference. They exist more in a reflected state of self where their worth is defined by how the other person treats them. This side of the spectrum has us giving up our desires and becoming absorbed into the other person.

Whereas in the autonomous or individuality relationship dynamic, there is the desire to be who we want to be without any compromise or leeway for the other person’s desires or beliefs, it has us shut off from the other person’s needs and desires if they are different from ours.

Differentiation is the ability to stay connected to and know your thoughts, feelings, and values while at the same time also being able to be close to another who might have different thoughts, feelings, and values. It has us being able to accept each other’s differences without reacting to them.

Fear of opening up to our differences

Our level of differentiation is modeled by our parents, our primary caregivers, and our family of origin. Typically, we will re-create what we see modeled to us. This modeled behavior often has us afraid of showing our truth, our authentic selves, our values, and beliefs for fear that others won’t agree or like their position possibly leading to an argument or the other person picking up and leaving. This fear leads the person to show a water-down or false version of themselves to their partner and the world.

From here, I would like to take a look at the evolution of our sense of ourselves to help us better understand the dynamic where we create a state of dependence or attachment to our spouses.

Evolution of our sense of self

Reflected sense of self

A reflected sense of self is where we start. As a relational being, initially, we rely on the feedback we get from others for our perception of ourselves because we are unable to do so ourselves, our pre-frontal cortex is not developed at this stage, and this is where we will start to develop our own self of sense as that portion of our brain develops. Initially, we are dependent on our caretaker’s feedback to get to know ourselves. As we grow into adolescents, we continue to develop this reflected sense of self through interaction with our peers. This is where peer pressure steps into our perspective: are we accepted as we are or not? What do we need to do to feel accepted?

In this state, which is often the state we are in when we enter our love relationships, we are constantly looking for external positive reinforcement and our sense of being loved; we are avoiding or dismissing anyone who may be critical or not creating that validation for us. From this state, we often conform to the crowd we are with without revealing much of our truth to avoid feeling rejected or unliked.

A solid sense of self

A solid sense of self comes from the process of building our self-confidence and being less dependent on other people’s beliefs, values and opinions to validate ourselves. Our self-validation comes from within. It’s knowing who we are, knowing our worth and value regardless of the circumstance and what other people think. We can stand in our truth AND allow others to be wrong about us AND allow others to stand in their own truth without any need to change them to feel better.

The development of a solid sense of self is a lifelong journey that contains several different facets, including our intimacy and sexual experiences.

Why would a person want to increase their differentiation?

In a nutshell: to keep your life and relationships from getting boring and lonely. Without differentiation, relationships get stale, interactions become safe and repetitive which prevents growth and change. Undifferentiated relationships don’t challenge each other to try new things, explore, and take any risk.

Let’s look at some benefits of creating more differentiation in your marriage:

• To become myour most authentic self, creating personal freedom and a life that is big and beautiful
• It helps the relationship become more open and accepting which then develops intimate enrichment
• You provide a healthier psychological and emotional model for your children
• Open up and improve ALL relationships, allowing you to let go of your ideas of how others should show up in the world so that we can enjoy them and giving ourselves permission to do the same without trying to control what other people think of us.
• It attracts others who are more differentiated which brings more interest and dynamic to your life

How to become more differentiated

First, we start with ourselves by building a solid sense of who we are, which is the work that we do in AwakenYou, by spending time getting to know ourselves intimately. We learn about our emotional triggers and our strengths and weaknesses while learning how to strengthen our weaknesses.

We learn how to self-regulate (listen to Ep 35: Emotional Regulation In Your Marriage) when we notice ourselves or our spouse being triggered to remain calm or take a time-out so that we can keep our minds open instead of closed off. Learning how to recognize triggers and dysregulation allows us to pause and re-schedule the session after taking time to evaluate. It’s then knowing how to self-soothe from this space and get your mind and body back into a safe space, listening to Ep 38: Self Soothe To A Happier Marriage will help with this.

Lastly, agreeing and committing to continue the work together, or on your own, towards growth, knowing that marriages are self-growth mechanisms. Know and understand that relationships are like a crucible, using relationship expert David Schnarch’s metaphor for any intimate, committed relationship. He says that a relationship is a hot and visceral place where you constantly rise, flourish, fail, “die”, and become reborn. Both of the individuals in the relationship continue to stretch and re-invent themselves knowing the only way to grow is to step into the fire!

So there is differentiation for you; I would love to hear your take-aways, your questions, and what you’d like further clarification on while you start becoming aware of this dynamic in your own relationship. Are you differentiated or is this the first time you’ve heard of the concept?

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I am a marriage coach who helps women and couples go from feeling powerless to change how they feel about their marriage to feeling powerful and taking ownership of how they feel. My process isn’t about changing your partner; it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your marriage, and through this process, you will begin to find that your partner will change as well! If you’re ready to take yourself to a place where you can finally fall in love with your life and your spouse, then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s talk about the next steps to making your dream life your reality.

In celebration of my first anniversary, I have a special request and gift for those of you who have been listening; the request I have is that if you have been learning and enjoying the episodes, you write a short positive review on whatever platform you listen to these episodes. After you submit your review, take a screenshot of it and send that screenshot to me in an email (christine@christinebongiovanni.com) or send it to me in a DM on my Instagram or Facebook page. I will add everyone who submits a review over the next four weeks into a lottery where I will draw one name a week to win a $50 Amazon gift card; anyone who does not get drawn as a winner will stay in the lottery, so please write a short review and share it with me so I can add you!

Next, I also want to remind you of my free coaching session challenge. This month I am challenging myself to help 25 people by sharing 25 free mini-coaching sessions. Right now, I think many of us are wondering what is happening in our world and what our near future holds, I know for me, I feel torn wondering how I can contribute, and this is what I came up with. Sharing my time helping people like you find some clarity around what is happening in our own life. Sometimes I find myself feeling guilty for getting coaching on things that could seem unimportant in the worldwide scheme of things, yet what I know is that the more clear I get with my personal life struggles, the more I can free up my energy to help others in need.

The past three months I have been taking some deep dives into the concept of becoming more aligned with our truth, who we are at our core, and being true to that instead of hiding our truth under the veils of people-pleasing, hyper-achieving, hyper-rationalizing, hyper-vigilance, perfectionism, control and falling victim to our circumstances. During this time I have been reading and absorbing concepts, meditating on them, applying them to my own life, and watching what unfolds. It’s been a fascinating three months and the foundation of the journey I take my clients through in my AwakenYou coaching program. Much of my work has been around opening up to my truth and recognizing when I am taking actions that go against that truth, and that is what has helped me tear down all of my dysfunctional relationship ideas and begin the process of rebuilding my life and my marriage into something that feels beautiful and real. As I am preparing for my April AwakenYou Masterclass where I will help you Create More Connection, I am applying many of the things I have been taking with me from what I have been learning. In my archives, you will find several different articles and episodes that talk about connection, so if you search the archives, eleven pages will pop up with your search but there are two that talk directly to the topic of creating connection. There is the article: How To Create Great Connection In Your Marriage and Ep 19: Three Ways To Create Connection In Your Marriage; now, this week, I am digging deeper into the exploration of what YOU want connection to look like in your marriage and what feels good to YOU. The reason I am digging into this is that sometimes we hear or believe a story about what connection should look like based on who knows what, our early childhood, sitcoms, romance novels, or that couple you see at the mall walking hand in hand so today let’s dig into what creating connection that feels good to you is.

Both of the previous articles and episodes have so much great information in them, and this episode will definitely have some overlap. Still, I want to encourage you also to read and listen to deepen your understanding. Creating connection that feels good to us is a journey, like all of the work we do here because most of us aren’t 100% sure what we want connection to look like. Some may think having more sex is the connection they need; others might want more gifts, time together, their spouse to help out more around the house, or more cuddle time on the couch without the distraction of a screen and the comfort of knowing they have a choice as to whether sex follows that couch time or not. Today I want to focus on discovering what connection means to you and then going there to start exploring, so let’s figure out what connection means to you, what a connected marriage looks like in your mind’s eye, and what it might look like for your spouse and we’ll develop some actionable steps for you to start the journey.

I would also like to include a caveat to everything that I am sharing in this episode and honestly, in all of my episodes where I am talking about actions to take in your marriage to help increase intimacy and understanding of your partner. I understand that many of you listening may not be in an emotional place to start taking these actions, a real story I want to share is when Jeff and I were working with one therapist who suggested we each come up with “date” ideas, do all of the planning and invite the other to join. It didn’t work, and the reason it didn’t work is that we had so many other things to work through before getting to this place. BUT, I want to share is that this COULD have worked had she then helped us work through what worked well and why, what didn’t work well and why, and then what would we do differently. She didn’t help us work through the resistance we were having to pull off these dates, she didn’t work through what was going on inside of each of us that was blocking us from feeling awful and inauthentic about these dates. I share that to help you better understand that yes, taking this advice and moving forward with it may not be where you are at today but what you can do is start working through what is in the way of you following through and as you resolve and dissolve these obstacles inside of you, you can move closer to taking the actions I talk about today. So bare with me and give yourself some grace and compassion if you still feel hopeless about carrying out what I talk about.

What does connetion mean to you?

Here is where we start. I want you to take this question to your morning writing practice and take 10 minutes to contemplate your answer. Even better, I’d like you to write that question down on a piece of paper, then set it down and meditate for 10 minutes without trying to answer the question, and then after that ten minutes is over, grab your pencil and write all of the things that come up for you and don’t be shy. Write it all down; this is only a thought download, not an “I have to do” list, don’t overthink it, just write.

I have explained connection in the past by our thoughts about someone. While I think that definition does work well with many people in our lives, I have found that there is another layer to that when it comes to our marriage and our intimate relationship. We definitely want to have positive connection thoughts about them. Still, we want to create quality time together, activities that build our inner knowing of each other; listen to episode 37: Love Maps: Getting To Know Your Spouse, activities that we enjoy and help us feel bonded to our spouses.

I also want to recognize that some couples can feel bonded and connected without doing many activities together, which often means that they have done the heavy lifting of getting to know each other intimately in the early stages of their relationship, thus building a sturdy relationship foundation. They have less “work” to do to keep it strong. If you’re here, it suggests to me that it’s possible that you didn’t build a solid relationship foundation, and by the way, many of us didn’t and that’s why we’re unhappy living in a marriage that feels like living with a roommate. This is where our work begins, building that solid foundation through getting to know our partner through connection activities.

So now that you’ve done a download of what connection means to you, you may or may not have some actual actions in that list. If you have activities listed, separate them and take some time to write why each one of these activities would make you feel connected to your partner. If you didn’t write down actual actions, then now is the time to do so; what are the things you might want to do with your spouse and why? This step is important because it helps you see what the purpose is, what your end goal is, and why it’s important to you to see why you want to be the creator/planner of this activity.

Looking at your past

For a short moment, I want you to re-visit the past in your marriage where you may have tried to create connection through any of the above activities or any activity. I want you to go back and pay attention to what happened, write it down from beginning to end; then write about what went well during that past scenario, what didn’t go so well, and what you made all of that mean. If you “gave up” on that activity why did you give up? It’s so good to go back and re-visit so that you can learn from the experience but often what we do is make that situation mean that they don’t love us, that they don’t want to participate with us, that they aren’t contributing. But when we can look at it more objectively, we can learn and understand why we’re thinking these unempowering thoughts about what happened. Also remember from Episode 57: Do You Have Bad Marital Relationship Memories that when we are unhappy in our marriage it will be hard for us to remember the things that went well in those past experiences but ask anyway. It may take you awhile to remember, write the question down and come back to it because for sure, something did go well.

Time to get your spouse involved

Before I dig into this, I want to recognize that many of us are not in the place right now to start this next step, and if you’re not, I want you to know that you can keep working on this connection piece on your own. With what you have already done, you can skip this step and start doing the work of implementing the things you want to do in your marriage, and it’s through this process you will start digging into what comes up for you. If your partner isn’t into this self-help stuff (little do they know that they are if you are and little do they know that it will get them more of what they want in this marriage too, but let them discover that on their own while you go about the business of creating the life you want), then you actually will get accelerated work on your growth journey because it’s always more difficult when our spouse isn’t playing along the way we think they should.

If you’re up for having a conversation with your spouse about everything you’re learning today, then the first place you could start is by listening to this together, having a conversation about how you want to prioritize spending time together, and getting to know each other. You can share that you’ve done this exercise of writing down things you’d like to do and why and that you’d love to share it with them to find out what, if any, of the items listed they might be interested in doing together. Also, share that you’d love it if they came up with a list of things they’d like to do together; bonus if they come up with their why so that you can start actualizing these activities together.

Remember that you are the influencer here, the initiator. You will first want to ask if your spouse is interested in creating more connection and intimacy in your relationship. If their answer is yes, then understand that they most likely won’t know how to create it and that is where you step in. Also, note that each of you might have different opinions about what connection looks like for you, this is called differentiation and it is a healthy part of the marital relationship. There may be some things on each of your activity lists that are no’s for either of you and this doesn’t need to be a problem unless there aren’t any yes’s. There is also an opportunity to create conversation about the no’s and explore what is a no for you or them; sometimes, our no is an auto-response instead of a thought-out response. Having discussions around what you like or don’t like helps you get to know your spouse better and helps you get to know yourself better. You could ask if they are willing to explore this with you or that you are inviting them to join you on this journey while together, you will see what happens.

The planning process begins!

Now it’s time to start planning which includes writing a list of all things that need to be done to make the event happen. I would say the majority of the work will be mind management work because so much will start coming up for you as you begin this new thing! Aside from that, and of course that is where I come in hint: free coaching session, there will be things you want to do before making this happen, like very first: setting a date and time! If it’s cuddle time on the couch, then planning what else you might be doing, will you be having drinks or dessert or playing a game? If it’s having your first Relationship Huddle, you will want to have the questions ready, share them with your partner so they can prepare if they choose to, and think about what you want to discuss/share.

If the activity is a bit “bigger” than those, let’s say a date night out. You’ll need to decide who does what, are they willing to be a part of the planning process, do you need a sitter, where you go, what you will do, and what time you need to leave. Better yet, since spring is coming, and that means picnics in the woods: who’s going to pick the place, who’s going to plan the food and pack it, who’s going to figure out the drinks, pack the blankets. Part of this process is to speak your truth, so if you have been the one in the past who does ALL of the planning while holding a bit of resentment inside then, it’s time to speak up about what you want help with and what better way than to share the to-do’s and let them decide what they’ll be responsible for. Don’t forget to include everything you do to prepare the house before you leave: shutting windows, turning heat up or down, taking the dogs out and kenneling them, getting kiddos to the sitters.

Remember that these don’t have to be couples-only activities; they could be family activities where you commit to paying attention to each other and speaking honestly about your needs, or they could be activities with friends or even strangers!

That’s what I have for you this week, my friends, exploring the type of connection you want in your marriage and starting the process of making it your reality. Remember, the premise of everything I talked about today was speaking your truth and creating what you want. Though you may not necessarily know what you want connection to look like in your marriage, the only way to know is to start doing things. Conversations, trips, meals, dates, adventures, events, parties – what’s up on your try it list? I’d love to hear what you want more of in your marriage and what you are doing to get it!

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I am a life coach who works with women and couples struggling with how their lives and marriage feel through awakening their true selves. My process isn’t about changing your partner; it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your life and marriage, which will have you see your partner changing as well. If you’re ready to take yourself to a place where you can fall back in love with your life and your spouse, then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s talk about your next steps to a life you are crazy in love with!

Hello AwakenYou listeners, and welcome to the first-anniversary celebration!! I cannot even believe that it has been a full year of weekly episodes, so much fun, so much growth, and more to talk about. To celebrate, I have a special request and gift for those of you who have been listening; the request I have is that if you have been learning and enjoying the episodes, you write a short positive review on whatever platform you listen to these episodes. After you submit your review, take a screenshot of it and send that screenshot to me in an email (christine@christinebongiovanni.com) or send it to me in a DM on my Instagram or Facebook page. I will add everyone who submits a review over the next four weeks into a lottery where I will draw one name a week to win a $50 Amazon gift card; anyone who does not get drawn as a winner will stay in the lottery, so please write a short review and share it with me so I can add you!

Next, I also want to remind you of my free coaching session challenge. This month I am challenging myself to help 25 people by sharing 25 free mini-coaching sessions. Right now, I think many of us are wondering what is happening in our world and what our near future holds, I know for me, I feel torn wondering how I can contribute, and this is what I came up with. Sharing my time helping people like you find some clarity around what is happening in our own life. Sometimes I find myself feeling guilty for getting coaching on things that could seem unimportant in the worldwide scheme of things, yet what I know is that the more clear I get with my personal life struggles, the more I can free up my energy to help others in need.

This week I am revisiting my first blog and podcast episode where I wrote and talked about How To Start Loving Yourself. Almost three years after that first blog I wrote, I find it fun to see how this topic is still relevant today. When I started writing and recording, one of my thoughts was that this information would be outdated by next year, but I have yet to find that true about anything I have written or any of my mentors have written. While we continue to learn more and more about how the brain works, the concepts don’t change all that much, we might learn new and more effective approaches, but often we still need to understand the very basics to comprehend and implement the new. This week I want to elaborate on self-love because it is the premise of creating a loving relationship with anyone else. As I move along my self-love journey, creating the marriage I dream of being in; I see how this journey is never-ending, in a beautiful way.

In episode one, I talked about starting loving yourself and how that process was as easy as deciding. What I meant by that statement is that before you can begin the journey to self-love, you have first to recognize your poor treatment of yourself and then choose to stop—agreeing with yourself that you won’t continue to treat yourself like a worthless, second-class citizen, which of course, we know here in AwakenYou that there is no such thing. We are all born equal and worthy and fully lovable, each and every one of us.

Step 1: Recognizing your self-abandonment and deciding you’re done with it

Recognizing when:

• You put yourself down and are hyper-critical of yourself
• You put yourself last, only giving yourself the left-overs
• You ignore your desires and making them low-priority
• You run yourself ragged in hopes of earning the love and respect of others
• You numb yourself with food, work, helping others, drink, the screen instead of pausing long enough to ask yourself what is going on
• You don’t listen to your heart but instead go along with what others want to do
• You break promises to yourself
• You don’t give youself the luxury of getting help working through personal problems
• You don’t open up, admit your struggles and recognize that you need help

When we take time to pause and listen to our soul, we give ourselves the gift of self-respect, and the journey starts by recognizing that we are disrespecting ourselves and understanding that if we can’t give ourselves this gift, we will never be able to give that gift to anyone else entirely.

When I think about respecting others without respect for myself, what comes to my mind is a beautiful flower on a weak or broken sem, the supply of nutrients in the stem is cut off, causing the flower to wilt and die before it’s time. But when we love ourselves, the respect we share towards others comes from deep within, from our roots, and there is true life and honesty in the shared respect. OUr admiration comes from a solid source instead of a weak, broken source, a source where we are drawing our worth from what bits we might get through the admiration of others. Now when that admiration motivates us, as in how envy can sometimes do by seeing what others have, noticing envy, and recognizing it as something we want, that’s when we can draw fuel from that emotion and create what we see in others.

This first step is about awareness and the decision to change, no matter what. This is where we realize that there is another option besides self-abandonment, yet we don’t quite know what the opposite would be – so we start to notice when we do things that don’t feel good for us. We have to start paying attention because these actions are familiar to us; we have to pause and begin noticing the action and tune into our bodies to discover how this action is making us feel. The more consistent we get with this practice, the better we get to call it out and interrupt the old pattern and then start creating the new habit of course correcting. This is a gradual practice that might start with simply stating you won’t treat yourself like that anymore. When you feel comfortable, you can begin replacing the old action with something more supportive.

Let’s say it’s beating yourself up when you are getting dressed. You will notice this practice and how it makes you feel. The next step is stopping yourself; imagine you are talking to a duplicate of you standing in front of you and talking to that person like she is your very best friend. Remember this will feel awkward at first because it is new; you have conditioned yourself to hate your body, give yourself grace and allow it to feel awkward, over time, things will shift for you.

Step 2: Practice

You have to be committed to a result that you dream of. You have to start visualizing how it is you see yourself treating yourself, and in that visualization, you must imagine and start embodying how that new way will feel. You keep visualizing where you are going and believing that the practice will get you there.

Yes, there will be days when it feels awful, and it will seem like this is the dumbest work you have ever done until it isn’t. Meaning if you keep moving forward, find an accountability partner to help you step through the process, over time, you will start to see the fruits of your labor. Like any other good thing in your life, it took cultivating. You can pay someone to come put in a beautifully lush garden in your back yard, but if you don’t do the work of tending to that garden, it will, over time, become a mess.

I want to remind you that you have two things going on when you are working on treating yourself with self-love instead of self-abandonment. You are learning a new way of being while also unlearning an old way of being. Using the garden analogy, it isn’t as easy as having someone come in and remove the old and replacing it with the new; it is you going out into the garden and doing the work of removing the stuff you no longer want in your garden beds and planting new seeds that need to be nurtured. Those old invasive plants and weeds will keep coming back wanting to overtake your new growth, but when you go in and consistently remove what you don’t want, you leave space for the new to flourish. You can tell it’s springtime as I create this episode!

Step 3: Seeing the obstacles

Back to the weeds and invasive plants. As you build this new path in your brain, this new way of thinking, you will run into obstacles that appear to be stopping progress, like after the spring rains come and the heat cranks up, and the weeds start overtaking your life. There are going to be days when you are over it, you don’t care about your gardens, let the weeds have their way, but then you remember your old garden and what you dream your garden will look like one day and that you actually enjoy being out in the garden, even if it is pulling weeds. You go out and do what it is you know you need to do to get the results that you know are possible.

When it comes to body image, you may notice discomfort coming up for you when you tell yourself that you love yourself and that your body is entirely lovable, as it is twenty pounds heavier or twenty pounds lighter. That discomfort might drive you to buffer with food, meaning you feel uncomfortable about positive self-talk; that discomfort has you seeking something that makes you feel comfortable, food. Now you’re back to negative self-talk because of the food you ate. Time to pause and recognize that you were just wanting some comfort, that this self-love stuff is all new and it’s ok. This might be where you reach out for some added support.

Step 4: Rinse and repeat

Continued self-growth is a continual cycle of the above. You start to get comfortable in your body and your clothes, you stop beating yourself up in one area of your life, and low and behold, a weed pops up in your garden, and then that untended weed leads to another and another. This is the process. This is similar to pain in the body. The body will concentrate its efforts on the most important “pain” let’s say, you sprain your ankle, all of a sudden, your lower back issue seems to have gone away until your ankle is better. Healing one pain will always reveal the next or think about your phone. Let’s say you love your phone and its new features, but eventually, something about this new version bothers you, and finally, a new version is released that may or may not cure your discontent.

It’s completely up to you, but you may choose to stick with life as this new person who has resolved body image self-abandonment and not address other ways you may self abandon – like saying “yes” to the dessert your partner brought home “just for you” when you really don’t want it. Know that this is ok until it’s not ok. Until you realize you want to eliminate this “lying,” the process is always the same. Remember that it will feel awful for a while but you can remember the journey and also know that each journey is different, some more difficult than others.

What’s important to remember is your reason for wanting to change so that you can focus on that when things get unmanageable and always count on your accountability partner for support!

Each journey is a journey of self-discovery to your next best self, which is better equipped to elevate others. I’d love to hear what you are working on to strengthen that relationship with yourself and what questions you might have as you work through this process. Remember to book your free thirty-minute coaching session; I look forward to being your accountability partner!

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I am a life coach who works with women and couples struggling with how their lives and marriage feel through awakening their true selves. My process isn’t about changing your partner; it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your life and marriage, which by the way, will have you see your partner changing as well. If you’re ready to take yourself to a place where you can fall back in love with your life and your spouse, then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s talk about your next steps to a life you are crazy in love with!