Principle 1: Enhance Your Love Map
The more you are familiar with your partner, the more intimacy happens. This is called having a love map of your partner. This helps maintain intimacy, and better prepares one to deal with stressful evens and conflict. Life-cycle transitions (=inherent stressors), such as bringing in children into the family, are also better handled as the couple are “in touch”. Those who do not have an adequate love map experience a drop in intimacy in the couple relationship with transition to parenthood.
Tools to improve love maps
- love map questionnaire: Self-assessment to see how much the person really knows his/her partner.
- Exercises in this book:
- love-map 20 question game’ -asking the partner to think of the things important to the asking partner.
- ‘make your own love maps’: filling in info about partner’s:
- People of partner’s life -(friends, potential friends, rivals/enemies)
- Recent important events in partner’s life
- Upcoming events
- Partner’s current stresses
- Partner’s current stresses, worries
- Partner’s hopes, aspirations
‘who am I’– self-exploration exercise to allow you and your partner to build better love maps. This exercise looks at:
- My triumphs and strivings
- My injuries and healing
- My emotional world
- My mission and legacy
- Who I want to become
Nishan Foundation focuses on providing the most effective, evidence-based treatment, exceeding expectations by paying close attention to four key therapeutic principles
