How Relationship Design Helps Your Clients Build Intentional Relationships
It’s a powerful moment in life when you realize there are things like intentional relationships. They allow you to take the reins of your relationship and move beyond all the false rules you’ve been given, enabling you to create a relationship structure that works for you.
As a relationship coach working with individuals and couples, you can bring the idea of relationship design into your practice – helping your clients become empowered and intentional around creating their relationships. Here’s why and how to embrace this specialization.
What is Relationship Design?
When people think of relationship design, they think of negotiating their relationship structure – mostly whether to be monogamous, polyamorous, open, etc. That’s definitely part of it. But at its core, relationship design is the deliberate and conscious structuring of interpersonal connections to enhance communication and intimacy. It involves intentional choices, communication strategies, and a profound understanding of each partner’s needs, fostering a purposeful and fulfilling connection.
Often though there is pressure and shame, causing people to stay inside their default relationship settings. As a coach, you can nudge your clients to leave these ideas behind, and teach them how to be truly intentional in their relationships. Much of what you learn in the Somatica Training is central to relationship design. This special skill however will give you better tools to support your clients in creating particularly meaningful and satisfying intentional relationships.
How to Build an Intentional Relationship Model
Here’s how the Somatica Certification Program prepares you to aptly steer your clients towards conscious relationship design:
- Communication Design: You will take your clients through the repair process and help them identify and shape the tactics that work best for them. Relationship repair takes challenging moments and uses them to enhance understanding, trust, and connection. Empathy and active listening are two of the most important parts of this conflict resolution process. They are constantly practiced throughout the training.
- Trust Building: Intentional relationship models build trust because people are able to talk through differences and find creative bridges and solutions. When you coach your clients to take the time up-front to design their relationships, they are more likely to be consistent, greatly increasing trust.
- Boundaries, Desires, and Intimacy: Helping your clients communicate their boundaries and desires deepens intimacy and respect. You will learn the tools to facilitate emotional closeness, vulnerability, and connection in relationships.
The Relationship Design Specialization
The Somatica Training offers you the option of different specializations in your coaching practice – chief among them is relationship design. You learn to skillfully navigate your clients through the relationship design conversation, and guide them in their relationship choices, creating space for differences.
Relationship design in itself opens up a vast realm of possibilities and a plethora of creative solutions. Crafting a roadmap for your clients allows them to broaden their perspectives, transcending societal norms and expectations in the process.
Here are a few topic examples you can cover in a relationship design conversation:
- Relationship Structure: If you are working with a single client, find out if they prefer to be single, solo poly, or solo open. If they are in a relationship, will they be most comfortable monogamous, open, poly, swinging, or monogam-ish? In the Somatica specialization, you learn what each of these structures entail, and how to talk with your clients about them.
- Children: While many cultures and families expect couples to have children, some don’t want them, and some cannot have them biologically. You can navigate your clients through the child conversation, and help them gain clarity and acceptance around what they want.
- Cohabitation: The “escalator” view of relationships – the idea that you will date, fall in love, move in/get married, have children – assumes that you will live together. But not all couples are choosing to cohabitate. In your coaching conversation, you guide your clients to understand their cohabitation preferences. Part of that are their needs for individuation, privacy, time with friends and family, etc.
- Providership and Chores: Many couples have fights around their roles in financial providership and household care. It’s a win for couples if they can clarify upfront what their desires are around these issues – and how they might handle them if the situation changes (i.e., children are added into the equation, someone loses their job or the ability to do their job).
The Next Somatica Certification Training Begins April 25, 2025!
Let pleasure be your guide to an exciting new career. Become an in-demand sex & relationship coach and watch your own life transform in the process.
Join our live online Q&A session with the Somatica Institute founders and save $400 on your tuition.
Not ready to join our live Q&A session or can’t make it? You can still save $400 by watching this recorded Q&A (discount code at the end). Or you can reach out to us with questions.
What it Means to Be Truly Intentional in a Relationship
Relationship design conversations are about more than just the basic topics. They are also about the attitudes couples needs to embrace to facilitate a truly mutually empathetic space.
To create safety for intentional relationship design, a couple must believe in the following 3 things:
- People Should Have Freedom of Choice: If your clients feel they have to follow set rules and meet the expectations of family, culture and/or religion, it will be difficult to help them consciously design a relationship. As a coach, you need to ensure they are both on the same page about how they want to incorporate these rules into their relationship.
- All People are Different: There needs to be space for differences of opinion, and an understanding that one size does not fill all. Teach your clients to really listen to and empathize with a partner’s needs – especially if those needs are scary or they don’t fit expectations.
- Attachment and Individuation are Both Valuable: If your clients are committed to supporting each other’s attachment and individuation needs, they are good candidates for conscious relationship building.
As a relationship design coach, you will help people explore their desires and relationship goals and help them create the intentional relationship that they want from monogamy to ethical non-monogamy (ENM) to poly and beyond. Let the Somatica Institute help you get the needed skills to become confident and effective in guiding relationship design conversations.
The Next Somatica Certification Training Starts April 25, 2025!
Join us and let pleasure be your guide to an exciting new career.
Become an in-demand Sex & Relationship Coach and watch your own life transform in the process.
The next online Q&A session, where you can meet the Somatica founders, is on Thursday, November 21, 2024 at 11am PT