Secure Within, Secure Together:

Creating Intimacy through Self-Discovery

An 8-Week Online Course

While love creates deep bonds, it can also leave us feeling torn between being true to ourselves and maintaining our connection with partners. When differences arise, we can find ourselves defaulting to unconscious patterns of relating, where we compromise our needs to keep the peace or react in ways that generate conflict. This 8-week course will focus on how self-knowledge and intimacy with one’s own needs create the foundation for building and maintaining secure connections. It provides the grounds for deep mutuality and intimacy.

As this course focuses on the self in relationships, it is designed to support a range of participants. Whether you are single, dating, healing from a break up, partnered, in monogamous or open relationships, you will learn to cultivate a deep sense of security within that enables connection with others. As Jessica Benjamin writes, like a seashore that opens out to a wide horizon, a grounded sense of self with secure boundaries opens boundless possibilities for intimacy.

Have you compromised your needs or lost yourself in relationships?

This course will help you return to love in an empowered way, by starting with you.

Course Details

  • Ground yourself in how you want to experience yourself in intimate connections and partnerships. Learn how to build an inner container to cultivate self-intimacy and expand your sense of self.

  • Uncover your core relationship needs. Within all of us is a blueprint of core needs and desires that we seek to find in love. The needs that bring us safety and closeness and the ones that spark attraction often differ. Map out these needs and understand the trajectory you have been on in seeking them.

  • Learn to listen deeply to your body and to the signals it gives you, as a part of cultivating self-knowledge. Grow your capacity to tune into your internal experience as you navigate the moment-to-moment experiences of being with another.

  • Discover when you feel triggered and identify patterns of relating that repeat across relationships. Explore your attachment histories and how these triggers emerged, so that you can navigate them with care when they come up.

  • Based on what you learned about your core needs and triggers, learn to set boundaries for yourself in relationships as an act of care for yourself and your partners. Learn the distinction between boundaries that separate and boundaries that deepen connection.

  • Our relational histories often leave us with the sense that there are some needs that are hard to meet and even harder to ask for. Identify what your forbidden needs are and learn to make requests and ask for the things you most want.

  • Learn to own your pleasure. Desire, sensuality, and eroticism often feel edgy. Many of us question whether we are wanted, if we can satisfy our partners, and if our experiences of pleasure is enough. Reframe stories of inadequacy by orienting towards your own experience of pleasure and regain your agency. Tap into it. Claim it. Grow it.

  • By tuning into your needs, your embodied feelings, and the loving boundaries you set, build intimate connections with others. When differences arise, learn to build bridges towards each other’s needs and foster a sense of security by anchoring yourselves in a process of attunement.

The course will bring together a supportive community of people with whom you can explore these topics and practice skills of deep listening. Each session will include a mix of guided activities, journaling prompts, and and skill building exercises.

Dates: TBD

Watch Nethra’s interview with Amy Whicker about the course