Bring The Spark Back To Your Relationship

If you’re looking to bring the spark back into your relationship, is therapy really the answer? Is that spontaneous spark of excitement that entices us into relationships something that can be cultivated? If our relationship is worthwhile, should we even have to?

In reality, relationships are not the spontaneous, romantic, but often completely unachievable experience that is sold to us in the stories we love. It takes effort to find love, and even more to maintain it. But if we put the effort in, we can find and keep the type of love that they wrote those stories about in the first place.

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung

Lauren Mishkin is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in St. Petersburg who is an expert in helping clients find and maintain healthy relationships with others. Relationships can be a complicated emotional environment, but counselors like Lauren are here to guide you no matter where you are on your journey.

How Can I Reconnect With My Partner?

“If you’ve lost your spark in the relationship it may be because there are unresolved issues lurking under the surface creating energetic walls between you and your partner. As a culture we don’t necessarily view communication as a daily practice like we do fitness or spirituality. Yet, communication is foundational to all areas in our lives, especially our romantic partnerships. If there are words left unsaid, hurt feelings left unacknowledged, and irritations left to fester, not only ourselves; but our partners feel that. We have mirroring neurons making us more sensitive to other’s energies than we might even know or acknowledge. It can be incredibly dysregulating if our partner’s words don’t match their nervous systems and vice versa. This can lead to withdrawal of effort, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, anger, or a plethora of other responses depending on attachment wounding. What we may believe is a lost spark is actually a lost connection. If you don’t feel connected to your partner it’s much harder to feel attracted to them.” – Lauren Mishkin, MS, LMHC

•  Grow Your Emotional Intimacy. Often, we neglect the intimacy in our relationships without realizing it. Like a flower wilting without water, our relationships suffer when we don’t share and accept intimacy. Therapy can help you build your emotional intelligence so that you learn how to be emotionally intimate in a way that is authentic to you.
•  Therapy Can Teach Us Active Listening. If we aren’t listening to one another, then how are we going to hear what’s really important? Therapy can help us see beyond the lens of self, and deeply empathize with the people we care for.
•  A Therapist Can Help You Love Yourself Too! Without self-love, our relationships with others are always going to be challenged. No amount of external validation can fill the hole that a lack of self-love digs in our hearts. Therapy can help you support and love yourself the way you need and deserve by helping you shed light on limiting beliefs that might not be true.

How Does A Therapist Help Me Communicate?

“Start prioritizing the practice of communication in your romantic relationships. Try setting up times to communicate to foster the practice of communication. Start off with once a week where you both just bring up small things that have happened that you were too busy to talk about. Then gradually increase it to twice a week or once a day. Just taking a few minutes to practice communication for the sake of communicating can make monumental shifts in your relationship.” – Lauren Mishkin, MS, LMHC

• Therapy Can Help You Ask The Right Questions. If we are in crisis, we often spend so much time tending to ourselves that our partners wind up suffering. Asking questions is a great way to open up a line of dialogue with your partner, even when your communication has been strained. With the help of a therapist, you can ask the right questions and get to know your partner as they are now.
•  Learn How & When To Forgive. If we are very lucky, our relationships survive to the point where we need to learn forgiveness. No one is perfect, and as a result, even the people who care most for us will sometimes let us down in one way or another. A therapist can help you forgive when you are upset, and be forgiven when you are imperfect.
• Heal Intimacy Avoidance. Intimacy avoidance is more than just avoiding physical contact, and it’s actually more pervasive than you may realize. Sometimes intimacy avoidance presents itself as constant bids for physical intimacy, but the end result is the same even so: a lack of connection with others. No matter which end of the spectrum you or your partner might be at, a therapist can help you access your sense of intimacy in a way that is comfortable, authentic and sustainable.

How Can Therapy Help My Relationship Recover From Past Trauma?

“Make sure to stay in a relaxed muscle body, notice if you are becoming dysregulated, and if so try to regulate. If that isn’t possible- practice communicating that you are becoming dysregulated and need a second to breathe, stretch, and/or compose your thoughts. See how it feels to share part of your inner landscape with your partner. Offer them the space to do the same. Try mirroring techniques, active listening, and “I-statements” when boundaries need to be set. Most importantly, go into the practice of communication with open ears, an open mind, and an open heart. Frame it as a practice, an experiment, and try to use humor when appropriate to keep it light. This is a practice in communication, not a session to solve all your relationship problems in one sitting. See if the spark slowly returns once you’ve let down some of those energetic walls of things left unsaid.” – Lauren Mishkin, MS, LMHC

• Establish Healthy Boundaries. If you have experienced trauma in your past, boundary setting can be a difficult skill to master. We often ride the swinging pendulum to its extreme in either direction, either putting up unnecessary emotional walls between us and our loved ones, or never establishing boundaries at all out of fear of being disrespected, rejected, and hurt like we were in the past. A therapist like Lauren can help you learn all about healthy boundary-setting from an expert.
• Understand Your Attachment Style. We all experience attachment differently, but it’s harder for some of us than it is for others. We learn how to attach in early childhood, and if we didn’t receive the attention we needed, it can be hard to learn that lesson in adulthood. A therapist like Lauren is an experienced  teacher who can help you unpack how you learned to attach in childhood and how you can best connect with others as an adult.
• EMDR Can Help You Heal From Trauma. EMDR Therapy can work miracles for patients with trauma, especially those with suppressed traumatic memories. With  EMDR, your therapist targets a powerful memory from your past and uses a combination of specific eye movement and talk therapy to unlock the trauma left by those events in your mind and body. 

St. Petersburg Therapists Fostering Connection and Wellness.

If you are feeling disconnected from your relationship with yourself and others, the therapists at Integrative Counsel can help you. You can fill out the form on our website and schedule a consultation with our intake specialist, Alli, who will answer your questions, assess your goals and needs, check your insurance benefits, and match you up with a right-fit therapist. We are passionate about connecting you with the best fit therapist that we can, so if it is not someone on our team, we will guide you towards the right fit.

Click here to fill out our form and schedule your consultation. 

You can also reach out to Alli directly by calling or texting 727-342-0054 or emailing hello@integrativecounsel.com.

Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.