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Relationship Advice – How to Communicate Without Arguing
What do you think your partner is hiding from you?
Are there challenges in your relationship that you’re afraid to discuss with her?
And are you spending more time complaining than discussing what you want directly with her?
Today my wife, Alyson Lanier returns to the show. She has over 20 years of professional experience helping individuals and couples through relationship challenges. In this discussion we talk about some of the tough conversations we’ve faced with each other, why so many couples are making things way harder than they need to be, and we even explore what we can learn from watching women pleasure themselves.
In this interview:
- When couples aren’t on the same page about sex, money, parenting, or living together
- Being roommates vs lovers
- Couples who “photoshop” their lives: They look great from the outside but privately struggle
- Tolerating a draining, flat, or adversarial relationship
- Feeling trapped because “We can’t talk about anything without it going off the rails”
Plus:
- Are you allies or adversaries?
- Playing the victim
- Complaining and blaming vs making a request
- The cost of burying our head in the sand
- How assumptions are killing our relationship
- What happens when we can’t get over ourselves
- Practical tips for clearing things up
Click here to learn more about Alyson Schwabe Lanier.
About Alyson Schwabe Lanier
Alyson Lanier is a guide, coach, mentor, asskicker, counselor, teacher, mother, and wife. She received her BA, MA, and LPC in psychology, and has extensive training and certification in Gestalt therapy, transpersonal psychology, and Shambhala Buddhism. Her experience includes more than 50,000 hours of therapeutic work with individuals, couples, families, children, and adolescents in clinical and private settings. Alyson moved fully into private practice and workshop facilitation in 2002 to focus on helping people heal their relationships and create the amazing lives they truly desire. In order to better serve her clients and the larger world, Alyson broadened her professional toolbox with a certification in somatic sex education, advanced training in energy work and consciousness development, and has most recently become a practitioner of Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Medicine work, a lineage healing approach to repair personal, family, and cultural burdens.
Adding alternative and spiritual practices to her therapeutic offerings made sense for Alyson because her experience with animist traditions and supernatural encounters began at a very young age, and set the foundation for her life’s study and practice. Her encounters with other-than-human beings, Old World traditions, Shambhala Buddhist practice, and subtle energy work over the years have given her a unique and layered perspective that plants her feet firmly in seemingly antithetical worlds: clinical and transpersonal psychology; Eastern and Western philosophy; clinical diagnosis and energetic and spiritual traditions of healing. Alyson has learned to fully embrace this duality, and to use it to understand the lenses her clients are seeing through, how they’re metabolizing what’s coming through for them, and to lovingly stir shit up to help them level-up.
Alyson delights in supporting her clients as they navigate their growth processes on psychological, physical, energetic, and spiritual levels. Her knowledge of psychology, development, and integral, energetic, and somatic studies give her a centered gravity, and her formative experiences and practices give her a rare wisdom. Her passion and humor spring from a desire to make the sacred profane and the profane sacred. Alyson approaches her transformative work with creative and dynamic interventions, serving her clients and groups as if the world depends on the fulfillment they are seeking, because it most assuredly does.
Alyson’s background includes leadership positions with Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute, Naropa University, The Integral Center, and Authentic World. She’s been published in Women’s Health Magazine, Natural Health Magazine, North Denver News, Longmont Health magazine, the Daily Times Call, and Natural Solutions Magazine. Alyson has appeared multiple times on The New Man Podcast and has been a featured guest on Smart Couples Podcast, The Consciously Parenting Project’s Heart of Healing Conference, and Marc David’s Institute for the Psychology of Eating’s Conscious Sexuality + Relationship Conference.
For over a decade, Alyson has been married to Tripp Lanier (who is also a coach and the host of The New Man Podcast which has been downloaded millions of times by men and women all around the world). Together they have a daughter and live on the coast of North Carolina.
