Frances Verrinder | SF Psychotherapy Associates

Cultivating Romantic Intelligence

Frances Verrinder — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 22:55:00 +0000

What is Romantic Intelligence?

We think of romantic intelligence as a series of complex but decipherable emotional and social skills which relatively securely attached people are able to develop from their earliest interactions with their emotionally safe caretakers and families. It involves being able to trust other people – to feel safe being and staying close to them. It also involves exploration of the world, maintaining one’s sense of self with others, and emotionally connected sex. Romantic love also involves expanding into a new and expanded sense of oneself. Integrating a partner into one’s life leads to new and amplified possibilities for both people.

The focus of our workshops is learning to feel safer being close to others, making it easier to develop intimate long-term romantic relationships, as well as deepening other relationships.

In our five-day Cultivating Romantic Intelligence workshops, you will gather information and learn skills to assess where you are in your journey towards loving relationship.

It’s both helpful and challenging to identify where you are on the attachment spectrum. It is useful to know whether and how you avoid relationships or how you rush headlong into them to manage your anxiety.

Using Expressive Arts, we explore the reasons we avoid intimacy and closeness. Many of us have suffered from emotional disruptions in early parent-child relationships that make it difficult to develop adult long-term romantic partnerships. Some people come from cultures with arranged marriages and may not have experienced a well-functioning romantic partnership between their parents.

Using experiential exercises, we look at the ways we stay safe, avoiding closeness and connection. We also identify body language that sends non-verbal “stay-away messages” and develop awareness of how we unconsciously prevent ourselves from approaching others.

Body-Centered Approaches

Working with body-centered approaches, in these workshops we begin the process of developing assertiveness and flexible boundaries. Assertiveness and likeability are important to regaining a strong sense of self, vital to the experience of being a loving and lovable person. Resilience and the ability to manage disappointment are fundamental to expanding into new relational experiences.

This is a journey of recovery. And as in all forms of recovery, whether emotional, relational or physical, taking charge and committing to your own life and your emotional, physical and spiritual growth is crucial.

Our Philosophy

Frances Verrinder — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 22:49:26 +0000

Our therapeutic work is based on four fundamental principles:

Collaboration and non-violence
We believe that the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client must be based on kindness, collaboration, empathy, and open-heartedness.
The body is the primary source of experience and aliveness
When we are hurt or frightened, we protect ourselves by organizing defensive patterns, constricting our breath, our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes and our dreams.

These survival strategies protect us as we grow up but restrict our authentic, spontaneous, pleasurable life as adults.

Including the body as the central vehicle for the therapeutic process facilitates and deepens growth, creativity, and transformation. Our bodies directly experience life as it happens, with all its richness and difficulty, with all its joys, wounds, and conflicts. With a greater understanding of these issues, it is possible to develop new psychological and physical resources to support clients opening to new and more creative options.

We all have innate healing potential

Painful childhood experiences and emotional injuries compromise our natural development toward health, maturity, and relatedness. Somatic psychotherapy focuses on unblocking our physical and emotional defenses thus supporting the normal human tendency towards health, wholeness, and integration — the fully experienced, alive self.

We all have the right to more pleasurable relationships with others, the world and ourselves

Because somatic psychotherapy works directly with embodied experience, it offers the possibility of recovering from past hurts, restoring our emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing by helping to change physical patterns that obstruct our natural capacity for pleasure, fulfillment and loving relationships.

Therapy for individual Adults, Children & Teens

Frances Verrinder — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 23:58:57 +0000

We have many years’ experience working with clients seeking counseling and psychotherapy for a variety of emotional, psychological and spiritual concerns.

Individual adults

We offer psychotherapy to individuals adults of all ages and lifestyle orientations. We have worked with children as young as three and adults as old as 84. Anxiety, depression and relationship issues are the main reasons people seek therapy.

However, we also offer individual work for a host of other conditions from addictions, eating disorders, personality difficulties, recovery from abuse and trauma to stress management for life transitions, career, and work, as well as self-esteem, personal growth and spirituality.

Michael Griffith specializes in men’s issues, particularly in the areas of identity, sexuality, intimacy, relationship, and parenting. He also works with chronic pain and illness. A cross- specialization from his dental practice is the treatment of dental anxiety, phobia, and TMD.

Frances Verrinder enjoys working with women in their 30s who are professionally successful and unhappily single. She also works with infertility, pregnancy loss, parenting and stepmothering, women’s mid-life issues, aging, and grief. A significant percentage of her practice is men in their 40s.

Children and teenagers

We prefer to see children and teenagers with their families. However when appropriate we work with them individually. With kids up to the age of 12, we do artwork and play therapy, which facilitates identifying problems and expressing feelings. We also offer teenagers a helpful and independent connection with a caring and supportive adult to discuss life issues outside the family. When we see children and teenagers by themselves, we also see parents for a session once every 4 – 6 weeks.

All our offices are equipped with play therapy equipment – toys, sand trays and art materials.

Working with Couples

Frances Verrinder — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:32:38 +0000

“It is a union possessing all the traits of a good friendship: concern for the good of the other, reciprocity, intimacy, warmth, stability and the resemblance born of a shared life.” Amoris Laetitia 2016.
Pope Francis

In Western culture, the capacity for intimacy — the ability to be myself fully with the other person and them with me — has become the ideal of the healthy couple. Yet we have no useful cultural narratives about how to achieve this in the twenty-first century.

The Honeymoon Phase

Instead, the basis for marriage is the honeymoon phase, the thrilling experience of falling in love, bonding, and delicious feelings of uniqueness and specialness. It usually involves magical moments, long intimate talks, and hot sex. In the process of attaching to each other, the couple’s differences, disagreements and potential conflicts are generally suppressed. Excitement and anxiety are high; partners idealize each other, present their best selves, are off balance and overly focused on the other.

The honeymoon phase can last anywhere from six months to a couple of years until the couple is deeply bonded and invested in the relationship. At this point, the differences and disagreements emerge. The couple moves into the power struggle phase and begins to fight, which can feel painfully threatening and can lead to frustration, disillusionment, alienation, loneliness and despair. One partner may stop feeling close and back off; the other may pursue and provoke repetitive arguments. Blame, hostile attacks and shaming are common. Another scenario, less common nowadays since couples are more likely to be equal partners than in the past, is that one partner, usually the woman, capitulates and goes along with the partner. This may also lead to a diminished sense of self, alienation and resentment.

Working through the Power Struggle

Paradoxically, when skillfully handled, the power struggle phase offers couples the opportunity to love more deeply, mature emotionally and expand their interpersonal skills. Creating the experience of empathy and safety, where both partners can feel understood and respected, we work with couples to move from the power struggle into more effective ways of connecting with each other. We help couples deal with their very real differences, difficulties and disagreements by learning conflict management and fair fighting skills. When each person in the couple is willing to take responsibility for changing, the couple’s sense of mutual goodwill and usually increases exponentially. We also teach couples ways of expanding their loving connection by using affectionate language (“sweet talk”) and physical closeness in everyday life.

Other important concerns that we address during couples therapy are unresolved family of origin issues that impact the couple in unexpected ways. An intimate relationship seems to promise us the possibility of having a devoted person there who will love us unconditionally and make up for family hurts. Part of the disappointment and hurt of the power struggle phase is the realization that this will not happen. Couples therapy offers the possibility of rediscovering and working through unfinished childhood difficulties with abandoning, abusive, and otherwise unsatisfactory parents and siblings. This helps both partners understand themselves and each other more deeply.

Ultimately, Teamwork Develops

As the couple’s experience of love, mutual understanding and acceptance develops, they move into the teamwork phase. In this stage, the couple feels settled into a loving, ongoing, and committed relationship that provides them with a secure base from which to negotiate the next phases of their lives together. They understand each other deeply, appreciate each other, are familiar and supportive with each other’s ongoing issues, and have the skills to work through new issues as they arise. They can then undertake the teamwork necessary for a pleasurable and fulfilling life together: raising children, pursuing careers, and contributing to the community.

In the past five years, I have been studying with Stan Tatkin PsyD, originator of PACT, a Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy. This is an attachment based approach to couples therapy which has deepened my work with couples, especially in the teamwork phase.

Frances Verrinder and Michael Griffith developed this material as part of their couples therapy course for the Somatic Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco California. All rights reserved.