Why Relationships Matter

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Most people want to change. They stay stuck because one of three equations hasn't lined up yet.

When curiosity outweighs certainty, you put a question mark where you've been living with an exclamation mark.

You don't change when you're in pain. You change when the pain finally outweighs the familiar.

When love is greater than fear, you stay on the path long enough for second-order change to happen.

Co-authored by Galit Romanelli

A lot of the people we work with are stuck. Stuck in their relationships, stuck in a role, stuck in a story about who they are. They are in pain, and still they don't move. For a long time we assumed the problem was that they didn't want something else badly enough. That was wrong. People want to change. They stay stuck because a part of the math hasn't lined up yet.

We have been helping couples and partners change for a long time. As a systemic therapist, I have written before about how long-lasting change actually works. Together, we built on it with the relational hero's journey. Now we are learning to extrapolate it and simplify it into what we call relational math. We ve previously published the relational math of sex. This time, we take it further to the relational math of change.

We are all complex, different creatures. But human change has a general blueprint. Joseph Campbell called it the monomyth, the hero with a thousand faces. Underneath every story we tell about how a........

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