[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. . I am Lisa Lewis, your host, and welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Over the last few weeks, I have been providing a series of episodes where each week I interview a couple’s therapist about how they would use their method, a couple’s therapist about how they would use their method of couple’s therapy looking through the lens of highly sensitive couple. In each episode, I ask the couple’s therapists specific questions about relationships between a highly sensitive person and a non-highly sensitive person. We talk about what issues may show up in the relationship and some of the best self-care practices for couples. I would love to hear your about these episodes. Please email me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Also, I wanted to let my listeners know that I will be hosting a live interactive webinar on Tuesday, January 18th at 4:00 PM, Pacific time, 7:00 PM, Eastern on how to feel comfortable in your own skin as a highly sensitive person so you can live the life you came to live. What a way to start the new year. To register please go to my website at, amiokpodcast.com. Today’s guest is Mary Kay Cocharo. Mary Kay is a Licensed Marriage Therapist and Certified Imago Relationship Therapist. For the past 30 years she has been passionate about helping people get the love and relationships they want and deserve. Welcome to the podcast, Mary Kay. [MARY KAY COCHARO] Thank you, Lisa. I appreciate you inviting me. [LISA] Yes, it’s so good to have you here. I like to ask all my guests that come on the show, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person or not and if you do, if you wouldn’t mind sharing a little story about that? [MARY KAY] You know, had you asked me that question years ago I would’ve said well, yes, of course I’m a therapist when I had this idea that people gravitate toward being a therapist because they have a high degree of empathy. And I do have a high degree of empathy, but I realized that the words “highly sensitive person” actually mean more than just having high empathy. I would say I’m probably not an HSP because I don’t have some of the other attributes, like I’m not over aroused by levels of sensory stimulation. I don’t seem to be particularly sensitive to subtle stimuli in the environment. I don’t know that the depth of processing is what it would be in a true, highly sensitive person. So I would say I’m definitely, if a it’s a continuum, I’m a little bit north of center in terms of being very sensitive, but the true, or what I’ve come t understand from some people I’ve worked with that truly are highly sensitive people, I don’t seem to a high sensory processing dimension. So I guess it’s a complicated answer and you know way more about this nomenclature than I do, but I think that’s how I would answer it today. Does that make sense to you? [LISA] It does make sense to me if you are like a non-HSP you as we would put it and just as you work with couples. And I’m just imagining just the type of people that walk through your door and the couples that walk through your door, you must see a variety of different types of people, whether they’re HSPs or non-HSPs. [MARY KAY] Well, yes. I heard in your introduction of me, I have been a couples therapists for about 32 years. So I’ve seen a great variety of people from different races and cultures and socioeconomic levels and age groups and different genders, same sex and hetero couples, and just such a variety of people. It’s been such a blessing to learn from each and everyone who walks through the door. I’m thinking about a couple I worked with where one of the, it was two women and they were married and one of the wives truly was a highly sensitive person, like just checked all the boxes; if you look at what makes someone have that particular label. We also know that it’s not that common in our population. I think I’ve read something around 15% of the general population truly has this greater depth of processing of sensory input and that hyper aware of the subtleties that create some arousal and one might even say over arousal of sensory stimulation. She struggled a lot in the relationship. I learned a lot from her because almost every couple who comes in is locked in a dysfunctional cycle of communicating where the way that they’re going about trying to solve their differences and their problems with one another creates triggering. That triggering happens in our limbic brains where our emotional brains are. We’re wired for survivor so we will fight or flee or freeze or submit or whatever it is we do to protect ourselves when things feel threatening. But this highly sensitive woman really would get flooded so easily. [MARY KAY] And for her, what was required was calm and peace because she had that extra sensitivity to emotional turmoil. It was extremely important for her to develop, for them really to develop conflict resolution skills that would help them to restore harmony with just a minimum of emotion strife. So in other words, she had a much harder time sitting in the conflict that other people might be able to do because it just was hitting her so hard in so many different directions. So I worked with her individually, as well as with them as a couple to help her really find that ability to get back to peace with her partner so that she wouldn’t feel so completely stimulated. [LISA] As you’re describing her, I mean, I could feel that pain that I’m just assuming that she must have been feeling. And that’s the thing about highly sensitive persons. When we’re overstimulated that depth of process we don’t want to stay in that way. We really want to have something different. Sometimes we don’t know how or the other person may not understand then we don’t feel seen or heard, or no one understands us. It’s not that we want to make it about us. We just want to feel better inside and also be able to connect with the other person, whether that’s a partner or a friend or a family member or coworker. [MARY KAY] Of course. I think it’s easy to really, this is, I’m going to say pathologize, the HSP, the highly sensitive person, because in the relationship they look like the troublemaker. They look like the ones stirring the pot all the time because they’re upset or because they’re processing something that seems minor to the other partner. So they can quickly become the problem or the definition of the problem in the relationship. That’s highly unfair because it’s not true. They are just the person saying ouch more often, and it’s such an opportunity for the couple to work through their ability to stay calm and peaceful while trying to resolve their differences and their issues. All couples need to learn to do that. I’m just saying that if the couple includes one really highly sensitive person, it’s that much more important to teach them tools and to get them learning how to work through things with a minimum of emotional strife, because it is so painful for that person who is highly sensitive. [LISA] And how are some of the communication tools that you use to help couples stay connected? [MARY KAY] Well, I’m as you said, I’m a certified Imago relationship therapist. I’m also certified in encounter centered couples therapy. Really both of them are communication models. Encounter centered grew out of Imago relationship therapy. My mentor, Heide, who’s now in Washington DC was a master trainer for Imago, went around the world, really introducing Imago to therapists many, many years ago, and slowly the way that she was using and interpreting the Imago model it grew into this other modality called encounter centered couples therapy, which really is a communication model that focuses more on the emotional connection between two people. It also brings in a lot of the neuroscience, like what we know about what’s going on in the brain when couples are at peace, when couples are in an argument or in a big fight. So the work is whether I’m operating from either of those two models, and sometimes it’s a hybrid, but it’s really all about out structuring the communication so that it slows down. And one of the things that Harville Hendrix, the father of Imago introduced into the couple’s therapy world is the concept of mirroring, that when your partner says something in therapy, you are prompted to mirror or repeat it back exactly as they said it. So the reason for that is that it slows down the process. Now we know that slower is better in terms of triggering. So when something goes very quickly like if you’re arguing and you’re going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, it’s much easier to get triggered into that limbic or that emotional place. Then the cortex gets hijacked. The cortex is the part of our brain that we’re using right now. Lisa, we’re talking to each other, we’re having words and understanding, we’re getting along. So when we’re endangered, when we feel like our partner is putting something out there that doesn’t feel good to us, we can flip into our limbic or emotional brains and the cortex gets hijacked. So now there’s just a lot of emotion and we can’t see solve our problems from there. So both of these models provide the structure, the mirroring to slow down what’s going on so that couples can begin to really hear each other at a deeper level and not just take in the words, but let those words settle into their very being. The neuroscientists tell us that takes six times as long as to just hear our partner’s words. So we want to slow it down, we want to really achieve mutual regulation, so that emotional regulation in each party is really the key and especially in these couples where one person is highly sensitive, so that we can maintain that level of harmony in the relationship, even when, or I should say, especially when there’s a conflict on the table. [LISA] Yes. As you said this, this type of modality for couples therapy really focuses on the emotional aspect of it. I would, as a highly sensitive person, that would be like, that feels really yummy because it’s so much about emotions and regulating emotions. [MARY KAY] Exactly. I think, this is kind of a pet peeve of mine, but there are a lot of marriage and family therapists who have read Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix, or maybe gone to one training and think that the whole model is just about, oh yes, get your partner to repeat what the other one is saying. You’re good. That is certainly one of the basic tools, but there is so much to this theory and it’s really deep and very, very beautiful because it helps people to go back into their limbic memories, those childhood memories, where we’ve kind of made a decision about things in order to survive. So for example, if you are in a family where mom and dad are very dysfunctional, there’s a lot of yelling and screaming or fighting they or converse, they barely talk. They function, but there’s no intimacy or no connection, the child is limbic in that space between mom and dad. So the child is watching this and feeling these emotions and some part of the brain is making a decision about how do I survive this? How do I survive this? So some people learn that they really need to expand their energy and get pretty loud to get their needs met. And other people will just shrink. It’s like the equivalent of the child hiding in the closet when mom and dad are fighting. Well, as an adult, we carry all of those emotional memories with us and they drive our behavior and they drive our emotions for decades until we can really become more consciously aware of what’s at the heart of the matter here? When I’m arguing with my partner, what’s this really about? Because it’s probably not about the dishes or the toilet paper roll, or the socks on the floor, but couples get massive struggle. Really what they’re doing is trying to heal some of these childhood stories, some of these wounds, and we’re not consciously aware of what’s driving that. So the therapy process in my mind is to slow down the interactional pattern and create some empathy for each other’s childhood stories so that we can heal. It’s not about problem solving it. We’re all pretty smart in our cortexes. We can solve our problems unless there’s an emotional block. So we want to look at what is the block, what’s going on emotionally, that’s making it hard to really just solve things. So the work is really very deep. It’s really slow. It’s really attuned. It’s attuned and it’s beautiful in that way. I see people transform. It’s like at my workshops and retreats, we talk about the levels of learning and something therapy is like, I came, okay, I didn’t do much. Then another level is I came, I learned some things, I’m going to go home and use them. Then the third level is I came, I learned some things and I have greater empathy for my partner. But we’re always going for that deeper fourth level of learning. It’s this, I came, I learned some things, I have empathy, but more than that, I am transformed. I will never be the same again because of what I’ve just heard and what I’ve experienced with my partner. So we’re always going for that fourth level and I’m very conscious of tracking where we are in the process. It isn’t like everybody gets to the fourth level in session one, but highly sensitive persons are way more apt to get to the fourth level because they are so sensitive and they have that biological difference in their nervous systems, which allows that opening. So it’s really fascinating and beautiful to work with these couples. [LISA] Maybe there’s a reaction or kind of emotional response when you get to that fourth level. What would that look like once when a couple gets there? [MARY KAY] As a therapist, you’ve probably had this. Even if you’re working with an individual, there’s that aha moment. You just see the light bulb go on. It’s like, oh, everything I thought up to now isn’t quite true. This is it. So there’s that aha, you’re this, or you’re that. I, sometimes, my assistants at my retreats will sometimes, after the couples leave on Sunday night, we’ll just look at each other and go, wow, that was wow. Because sometimes they even physically look different. There’s a lightness. they come in with heavy shoulders and they leave lighter and there’s laughter where there was only crying or sour faces before. There’s just a lifting of a burden and I can see it physically in them. But the moment that it shifts, it’s like the old narrative, the old paradigm, what they believed about themselves and about each other just falls away. It’s like, it just melts on the floor and there’s a new possibility. So when you see that new possibility, that’s the place where you really jump in and begin helping them construct a new reality about their relationship. That’s what people come to therapy for. They want hope, they want to believe that there’s a future that is going to feel better than their current moment or their past. So I think to get invited to be on that process with a couple is such a real honor and I take that really seriously when couples come to me and I’m sure you do as well as a therapist, but it’s really nice to be able to be a part of that. [LISA] Yes, that sounds so powerful. When you’re talking about it, it sounds very hopeful. [MARY KAY] It is hopeful. And one of the things that’s always important, and I think even more important with a highly sensitive person is to teach these couples some mind, body practices in order to regulate quickly when they feel over stimulated and if they’re not able to retreat from the stimulation. Because sometimes as a couple, sometimes you literally can’t get away. Let’s say you’re, I had it this week, this couple called and they had been driving. They were on a three and a half hour road trip and the husband got triggered and literally yelled in the car for three and a half hours at his wife. One has to be curious about what happened to him, what flipped in his brain to go into that limbic place and to not be able to get out for three and a half hours, but then also the trauma that, that created for her being the person in the car being yelled at for three and a half hours. So it’s really important to teach people how to self-regulate, how to have that mind, body practice that will regulate them more quickly so that when they get over stimulated, they’re not just dumping it into the relational space and traumatizing their partner with it, but rather know how to take a time out, know how to find a quiet place. If you’re stuck in a car it’s going to happen inside your own body it’s going to be about taking deep breath, pulling the car over, closing your eyes, checking in with your body, doing things that we can teach them in the therapy room to self-regulate. Then also how to use the relationship for regulation, how to do deep eye gaze, sometimes touch anchoring, but things that you can do together to regulate. But at the end of the day we all have to self-regulate first, because maybe our partners not in the mood to help us with that. [LISA] Yes. I’m curious, can you explain that? What is the deep eye gaze? What does that look like? [MARY KAY] There’s been a lot of research. If you Google eye gaze, there’s a lot of interesting research, but what neuroscientists have found is that when any two people gaze into each other’s eyes at about an 18 inch distance, and I’ll tell you why 18 in the moment, but when that gaze occurs, we have something called limbic resonance. So the emotional brain of one person begins to sync up with the emotional brain of the other. What we see on a functional MRI is the limbic brain or the reactive brain begins to calm down. It kind of goes blue when you’re looking at the MRI and what lights up is the cortex. So that means the best mature part of me is now showing up with the best mature part of you and our reactive brains are calming down. So when does our reactive brain calm down? When we feel safe. It lights up when there’s danger, but when we feel safe, it can relax. We want to be able to be partners in our relaxed state, in the part of our brains, where we can begin to talk about our problems and solve them with empathy rather than protecting ourselves against the other. So that eye gaze is very, very powerful. I think there was a performance artist in New York. You may have seen this on YouTube or somewhere where she just set up a chair and people in a New York museum just came and sat across from her. There were no words exchanged, but just this, all these people came and lined up and took turns just looking into her eyes and all of them described this incredible piece that came over them. Or there was an experiment by some sociologist where she took, I think she wrote 20 or 30 questions and any two random people would come and they’d sit across from each other and they’d these questions kind of a get to know you sort of questionnaire. Then they would spend four minutes in I gaze. A pretty high percentage of them fell in love. These were strangers. I think she herself, the researcher ended up marrying someone that she met doing a four-minute I gaze. So there is, and the way they came up with 18 inches, I believe is that it’s the distance between a parent’s eyes and a baby’s eyes when you’re holding them to feed them, like if you’re breastfeeding or even bottle feeding. When you look into your baby’s eyes when they’re in the crook of your arm, the way we hold babies when we feed them, that’s about an 18 inch distance. We know that we literally construct the baby’s brain through that eye gaze. So when you have children who’ve been neglected who haven’t received the eye gaze of an adult, they have failure to thrive. You can give them food and shelter and all kinds of things, but babies need to be looked at. And you know when you go into a supermarket or something and there’s a baby in a stroller, what do they do? They seek your eyes. They try to get you to look at them. It’s just this biological process that we need to be seen. We develop our own brains in relation to somebody else’s brain. So the brain I’ve been told is the only organ in the human body that doesn’t self-regulate, it actually needs another brain for regulation. So this eye gaze is a very important biological concept. It’s the biology of connection, if you will. When couples are 18 inches apart facing each other to do their work, they also are close enough to hold hands. That flush to flesh contact releases oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone. They’re able to sync up their breathing, which we also focus on to relax their bodies and to come into sync. So there’s a lot to do with the biology of connection before we even begin the psychology of connection, if that makes sense to you. [LISA] Yes, it does make sense. Yes, it’s that’s beautiful. I was thinking about a workshop that I did. I was part of a training and one of the exercises was to, you have a partner and you stood facing each other and it must have been, I don’t know if, it seems like it must have been like five minutes was the exercise time [MARY KAY] Which probably felt like forever, right? [LISA] Yes. It was looking in each other’s eyes and then when it felt right, one would be the lead person, one would just mirror what the person said and the lead person would say I see you and the person would mirror back I see you. Then each time, I remember each time I said it, I just felt deeper and deeper and I just felt like the person was just like looking in through my heart and could see everything about me. It was first very, felt a little bit intimidating, maybe a little bit too much, but then that melted away and then the connection was so strong, felt, seen, like you said. I just felt so loved and embraced by the other person. Then of course the tears come up and it’s just, and then you realize this isn’t not about the other person seeing this is my stuff and then what it really means to be really seen [MARY KAY] Exactly, exactly. That’s a beautiful example. Sounds like somebody knew about the power of connection in getting you to do that exercise. There’s a reason why we say the eyes or the windows of the soul. So you touch soul to soul. Heidi calls that the encounter, that when we honor the space between us, that space that’s a co-creation where our relationship lives, when we honor that space and we cross over a metaphorical bridge to really be fully present with the other person on the other side of that bridge, we create a soul to soul encounter. And that encounter is the transformation. Now, do you remember Avatar? Did you ever see that movie? [LISA] Yes, I did. [MARY KAY] Do you remember the way they greeted each other? [LISA] No, I don’t. [MARY KAY] They don’t say hello. They say, I see you. When I saw that movie, I wept. I was like, oh, if only we could have a world where instead of saying hi, we said, I see you and how much we all long to be seen, because most of us were not fully seen as children. You can have very good functional parents and they still cannot be 100% attuned to their children, 24/7. So we all have a little bit of wounding and some of us have a lot of wounding around not being seen as kids, which brings me to another thing I wanted to ask you about actually being an expert and a highly sensitive person. I have the idea that highly sensitive people might experience early childhood trauma differently. I’m wondering if possibly they’re even more prone to develop trauma, because it only makes sense to me that if someone is highly sensitive as a child and gets overloaded with sensory stimuli, that things could feel more painful than to someone who wasn’t particularly sensitive. So does that ring true for, and then if it is true how then do we address that early trauma for highly sensitive people in a way that might be different? Or maybe we just need to do more of what we normally do given that we’ve all got some trauma? [LISA] I don’t know if there’s anything that you have to do differently. It’s just, I think really tending to that wound that happened and help to heal that wound. What I would say is a highly sensitive person, like you said, tends to feel more. So I feel like it may take a little bit more time and am I having have to slow down the process even more because there’s so much emotion there that maybe wasn’t able to express itself because it wasn’t safe, whether that’s crying, whether that’s anger. And that part, I work with body mind connection too and I feel like we all have traumas and they’re like frozen time conglomerates inside of ourselves. Then when we go into that space that maybe’s closed off or blocked for a good reason, and then when we are able to heal that part of ourselves that wound starts to open and let in fresh air and kind of air it out, that there might be a lot of emotion in there that needs just to be expressed and just to have another person, a safe person just to hold that space and allow that to be seen that the part that wasn’t seen as a child. [MARY KAY] Boy, that really makes sense to me. That is why the process is slow. Maybe you’re saying just you need to be very careful with that expression of emotion, allowing that safe space for that to happen. So that’s an important thing for the partner to know, that however slow their partner needs it to be is how slow it needs to be. Because sometimes people get impatient with their partner, “Well, I’m over it. Why do you keep bringing this up?” That particularly happens in a fair recovery. I see where one person is still highly wounded and still having a lot of triggers and a lot of pain and sadness. And of course the person who’s had the affair is really interested in that healing quickly and getting beyond it because it’s painful to continuously be reminded that they hurt their partner. So I see that a lot in a fair recovery. I think it’s always just about, some of it’s about education, about really allowing the partner to understand the other and going into the childhood stories almost always helps that because sometimes for the first time they’re seeing their partner in a different light. [LISA] Yes. I’m wondering, highly sensitive persons, they can tend to hold resentments. So I’m wondering how you would work with that in a couple. [MARY KAY] Well, I always feel like resentment, not to oversimplify this, but I really do think about resentment as unexpressed anger. when, when the anger doesn’t get resolved, when perhaps your partner can’t see or deal with how angry you are about something and there’s nowhere else for that anger to go, it gets pushed down. And over time, all that anger that gets pushed down, pushed down, pushed down, becomes a seething resentment. So good communication can usually do wonders for resentment because as you begin to you really express in a safe environment, those things that you’ve been angry about, that anger that you were holding onto that had nowhere else to go, it can become healed. if your partner can hear and understand and have some empathy for how you got so angry and even better, if they can make some amends, some apologies from a really deep place, then the resentment sort of dissipates. Again, it’s a slow process. [LISA] There it is that it’s that melting away again and using those communication tools that you mentioned. [MARY KAY] Yes. I don’t think we can heal anything without good communication. When I say good communication, I think you’re getting the point that good communication is about deep listening and non-judgment and no criticism and lots of curiosity to understand. My three favorite words working with couples is tell me more. Tell me more, because it signals to your partner that there’s an openness of your heart and your mind to be with them in this place that they’re bringing you in that moment. Tell me more says, I am deeply curious about you. I can accept whatever you say to me. So couples need a lot of coaching to get to that place because sometimes they’re dealing with their own anger and resentment and hurt. So it’s hard to get them into that deep listening place, but once we’ve gone there, and the structure helps couples get there pretty quickly actually, but once they’re there, then there’s a safety being built. And I always think what we all want is joy and passion with our partner but we start at the base of the pyramid in safety. So we create a lot of structured communication, which feels safe. Then when we’re safe, we can release all that energy we’ve been using to keep ourselves safe and it can go into the connection. When we’re connected, we’re less anxious, we’re more relaxed and from that, we can begin experiencing some true, joyful relaxation with one another, that kind that comes from just knowing you can be yourself and you don’t have to protect your yourself in any way and that you’re accepted and you’re loved, and you’re honored and respected and then the passion for one another, whether it’s sexual passion or just life passion, like the kind that goes, “Woohoo, it’s you. I get to spend the day with you. Yay.” That kind of passion. So I think of it as a pyramid, so safety at the base that leads to connection that leads to joy. [LISA] I love that. And just going up the hierarchy of needs to that celebration. [MARY KAY] Yes. We start at the bottom and work up. If you ask couples why they’ve come to see you, they rarely say because we need more safety. They don’t usually say that. No, they might say we need better communication. Then if you ask them why you’ll find out that their communication has not felt safe. But most of them come in and say, we want to get the love back. We want to feel more joyful. We want to have sex more. We want to have more passion. That’s a good goal, but you just can’t start there. You got to go down deeper and build from the bottom up. [LISA] I love that. You sure do yes. As much as you want to go to the top right away, it doesn’t work that way. You have to start at the bottom there and work your way up. [MARY KAY] And having said that couples therapy, I mean, it’s not that I’ve never seen a couple for more than a year, but mostly I think a couple’s therapy as being if couples really work diligently for three to six months, they’re going to receive a lot of relief. They’re going to get some tools that they can continue using without the therapist. It shifts pretty quickly once it shifts. And like I was saying in the weekend, couple’s retreats can shift in a weekend. Once you unlock those neural pathways in the brain that are keeping you stuck, they’re unlocked. They’re not coming back unless you do something terrible again. But mostly people shift and then they are able to put the good practices in place and stay open. So I think it’s different than individual therapy in that way. Individual therapy can take many, many years. And then the therapist is in a very supportive role as the person goes through their life. I think couples need and want that less. They want to just go live their lives and they want to know they’ve got the right tools to live happily. So I just want to say to anybody listening not to think because I keep talking about how slow it is that you’re going to be in therapy for years and years, because each session is slow, but the work itself actually goes pretty quickly. [LISA] Thank you so much, Mary Kay. [MARY KAY] You’re welcome. Lisa. It was a pleasure to speak with you today. [LISA] It was a pleasure interviewing you and providing us all your expertise on how you work with couples and telling us about the brain, how it works and relationship issues that may come up, how to resolve them. I want to ask you before we sign off, how can listeners get in touch with you? [MARY KAY COCHARO] I think the best way is through the website. I kind of laugh when I hear myself say that because 30 years ago when I started, there was no website and there was no internet, but what there was business cards. But I do have a website. It’s pretty robust in the sense that there is a lot of information for couples on it. There are videos and podcasts such as this one, and there are articles and blogs and all kinds of information. So I think the best thing is to go to www.m, As in Mary Kay, my last name Cocharo, C-O-C-H-A-R-O.com (mcocharo.com). You can contact me through the website once you’ve gone through the information there. If it looks interesting and it looks like I could help you with something, I’d be happy to hear from you. Oh, of course, there’s also a telephone number on the website, if you’re old fashioned and will want to just pick up a phone. [LISA] Great. Thank you. I have checked out your website and it is very robust and it has great resources. So yes, check it out. [MARY KAY] Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that [LISA] This episode concludes the last four weeks of episodes geared toward couples therapy, looking through the lens of a highly sensitive couple. As I reflect about the different modalities that we explored, relational therapy, emotionally focused therapy, Gottman method, and Imago relationship therapy, my take on it as a licensed therapist who specializes in working with HSPs is set the process a couple’s therapy needs to be slowed down even more so with HSPs because of their subtleties to detail, depth of processing and overstimulation. Not that that is a bad thing. It’s just the way it is and we want to do this, slow down the process so that the HSP can be seen, can feel heard and felt just like their non-HSP partner. And remember, as an HSP sometimes when attention is focused on us, we think it becomes about us and that’s not true. Our goal as a couple is to be able to be ourselves and to be unconditionally loved by our partner. Put the time and effort in to make your relationship the way that you and your partner want to make it. It is well worth the effort and time. Thank you my, for tuning in today. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about highly sensitive persons, please visit my website at www.amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. Feel free to email me about what topics you would like to have on the show. Email me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time. Take care. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.