What is the basic yet profound recipe for a healthy loving relationship? Do you want tips on how to deepen your connection with your partner? How can highly sensitive people in relationships remain independent and not absorb their partner’s struggles?
In this podcast episode, Lisa Lewis speaks about building strong and healthy relationships and balancing sensitivity with strength for lasting love with Dr. Dean Sunseri and HollyKem Sunseri.
Meet Dr. Dean Sunseri and Holly Kem Sunseri
Dr. Dean Sunseri and Holly Kem Sunseri, co-authors of A Roadmap to the Soul: A Practical Guide to Love, Compassion, and Inner Peace, are seasoned experts in guiding individuals, couples, and families toward healing and purpose. Married since 1991, their dynamic partnership blends over three decades of experience in helping people overcome past trauma, break free from self-destructive patterns, and discover a deeper, more meaningful life. Their insightful approach offers both practical wisdom and heartfelt inspiration, making them captivating guests for any podcast focused on personal growth, relationships, or emotional well-being.
Visit I Have A Voice, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube.
IN THIS PODCAST:
- Using personal experience to help others
- The recipe for a healthy relationship
- Love the parts that need love
- How can partners support each other without becoming overwhelmed?
- Advice for people wanting to deepen their connection
Using personal experience to help others
One of the things that I know for myself is that I don’t teach or ask anyone to do something I haven’t done myself. So, for myself, I work hard on being authentic … and being in this relationship with Dean that he’s not just my husband, he’s my best friend. He is my business partner and my partner in life … [Our relationship] helps everybody around me [because] life is difficult and to have someone to share it with and to know how to do that makes all the difference.
HollyKem Sunseri
HollyKem and Dean’s relationship is a transformational space. They love one another and help each other to be the best versions of themselves, allowing them to live their lives outside of the relationship to the best, fullest, and happiest extent.
In this way, their relationship and what they have learned within it gives them so much scope for further education and transformation that can benefit other people.
The recipe for a healthy relationship
Dean explains that in general, to have a healthy and loving relationship with another person, you need to have a developing relationship with yourself and who you are as a person.
When you have spent time in your own life to take care of yourself and your needs, it can help you not to put the full scope of that responsibility on someone else. Therefore, each person lives their own life, but in a loving union, with co-support and encouragement.
I need to learn how to manage my own emotional pain. I need to learn how to manage my coping mechanisms with that pain, and to be able to communicate that with my partner because most often relationships don’t work when [you’re] overly focused on what [your] partner is doing or not doing.
Dr. Dean Sunseri
When both people are proactive in working on their personal lives, and they love one another and feel hungry to do the work to grow together in a partnership of two in-progress individuals, the relationship overall can become much easier.
Love the parts that need love
Externalizing the parts of yourself that need love is a great way to practice healing and real self-care in real-time.
In the process, I learned to love that. It became a way …. Of having emotional health … There’s going to be another part of me that says, “This is stupid, quit doing this. You should be over this by now”, but how can you love that too? If you have a teenager that’s acting out, do you just throw them out of the house? No! You love the teenager. It’s the same thing with the self … I don’t obey it, I just love myself through that.
HollyKem Sunseri
HollyKem explains how she learned to externalize the parts of herself that were wounded, triggered, or hurting, and how she started to see them as just parts of herself that needed extra care. Instead of berating or ignoring them, she faced and addressed them.
Once she got into the habit of caring for them, they slowly started to fade. It is not that she gave them power, but that she kept loving them when they came up.
If you have a crying baby, you don’t throw it out either, you love the baby, even when you don’t know why it’s crying. You just love it, and that’s what I realized we had to do with ourselves, and when we do that, all of a sudden these things become quieter, and they don’t come up as often.
HollyKem Sunseri
Another reason why this work is important when it comes to relationships is that you can learn to love people in the same way that you learn to love yourself in this way, with patience and understanding.
How can partners support each other without becoming overwhelmed?
Partners can practice;
- Communicating what’s happening for them internally
- hearing one another and seeking to understand them
- Separating the partner’s feelings and struggles from the other
Dean explains how, even in very close and loving relationships, there is an important aspect of being “solids and not liquids.”
If we’re liquids, and HollyKem’s upset … then I become upset too. Where if we’re solids who are in close proximity, then if she’s upset, I can stand, I can see it, I can validate it … but it doesn’t become me.
Dr. Dean Sunseri
This can be a challenge for highly sensitive people, to not become fully part of the environment around them. They can practice perceiving and understanding it, but not allowing themselves to be fully overwhelmed by it or to become it.
I think that the beauty of sensitivity is that you have a heightened awareness of what’s happening and what’s going on. The biggest struggle is to not take it on yourself as if it’s happening [to] you.
Dr. Dean Sunseri
Advice for people wanting to deepen their connection
Practice intimacy on a personal level. Dean describes it as; “into me, you see”, that intimacy is beyond a physical closeness, but rather an emotional or spiritual one.
Learn to manage your own, inner life, and then learn how to verbalize that to your partner, and vice versa. This creates a bridge that continues the life of a relationship.
Remember that you are worth it! You deserve to invest in yourself and leave generational wealth behind for the rest of your family, and those around you. No love, whether personal for others, is ever lost. It’s one of the best things that you can invest in life.
RESOURCES MENTIONED AND USEFUL LINKS
Visit I Have A Voice, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube.
BOOK | Dr. Dean Sunseri and HollyKem Sunseri – A Roadmap to the Soul: A Practical Guide to Love, Compassion, and Inner Peace
See also, She Rise Women’s Retreat
Find Out More About Sensitive in Nature
Practice of the Practice Network
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CONNECT WITH ME
Email me: lisa@amiokpodcast.com
ABOUT THE SENSITIVE IN NATURE PODCAST
So you’ve been told that you’re “too sensitive” and perhaps you replay situations in your head. Wondering if you said something wrong? You’re like a sponge, taking in every word, reading all situations. Internalizing different energies, but you’re not sure what to do with all of this information. You’re also not the only one asking yourself, “am I ok?” Lisa Lewis is here to tell you, “It’s totally ok to feel this way.”
Join Lisa, a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, as she hosts her, Am I Ok? Podcast. With over 20 years of education, training, and life experience, she specializes in helping individuals with issues related to being an empath and a highly sensitive person.
Society, and possibly your own experiences, may have turned your thinking of yourself as being a highly sensitive person into something negative. Yet, in reality, it is something that you can – and should – take ownership of. It’s the sixth sense to fully embrace, which you can harness to make positive changes in your life and in the lives of others.
This may all sound somewhat abstract, but on the Am I Ok? Podcast, Lisa shares practical tips and advice you can easily apply to your own life. Lisa has worked with adults from various backgrounds and different kinds of empaths, and she’s excited to help you better connect with yourself. Are you ready to start your journey?