Relationship Insight: Featuring Dortch Mann
Valentine’s Day can quickly consume the month of February, therefore shifting the focus to things like gifts, and flowers, and special gestures for your partner. Don’t hear this incorrectly, these gestures are wonderful and needed in relationships! But they are also temporary. Pouring into a relationship and a partner goes beyond these things and beyond the month of February. What if this month you focused also on the quality of your relationship in combination with gifts and special gestures?
Dortch Mann, LCMHC, a couple’s therapist in the Greensboro office, has observed many couples throughout his years of practice. His work has provided him with great clinical knowledge about what makes healthy, strong relationships. He shares some of this insight below.
What is one strength you see in couples who have healthy and fulfilling relationships?
You don’t have to be a religious person to see the profound wisdom of St. Francis’ prayer.
“…grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.”
Couples who can maintain their focus on each other, valuing the other’s needs more than their own, appear to have the healthiest and most fulfilling relationships. It may seem counter- intuitive to expect that you will feel happy and fulfilled focusing on someone else getting their needs met. But Viktor Frankl has an “explanation”:
“The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
These wise people are encouraging us to trust that our true happiness and true sense of fulfillment comes as the result of focusing on our partners more than ourselves. Adopting this mindset is a couples’ superpower.
What is one thing you have learned through your work with couples?
Close, connected couples who feel fulfilled in their relationship recognize the importance of thinking like partners doing improv comedy. In improv, your responsibility isn’t to be funny; it’s to make your scene partner look good. Period.
If each partner focuses exclusively on making the other person shine, the scene will be far better than if either (or both) are focused on making themselves look good. This “improv rule” applies offstage, too. If a couple has the “look out for my partner” mindset, that providing support to the other person is more important than anything (even the outcome of their “performance”), they will be strong and resilient, able to outlast any challenges that may come along.
Yes, this way of thinking about being a partner is, for most of us, difficult to even imagine. Or might seem impossible to sustain. However, it is worth striving for. If I have ever been a good partner, it was because I deliberately reminded myself of the “improv rule”. Although I have failed it, it has never failed me.
So, while gifts and flowers and date nights are important in relationships, how can you also incorporate these ideas into your relationship this month?
If you are looking for a couple’s therapist, please call our front office at (336) 272-0855 to schedule an appointment.