Relationships Are a Dance

This past week I attended a continuing education conference on Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy — the approach developed by Dr. Sue Johnson in the 1980s. Something struck me during that conference. Not a new idea, exactly, but one I’ve been wrestling with for years and coming to understand more deeply, both in the work I do and in how I think about what genuinely loving, caring relationships actually look like.

Here it is in a sentence: good, kind, loving, secure human relationships are a dance.

Dance is a universal phenomenon in human culture. It reflects the values of a culture, and I’ve come to believe it can even reveal the emotional texture of how people in that culture relate to one another. I’ve noticed this across many of the cultures I’ve encountered — here in Los Angeles and in interactions with people around the world. There seems to be a way in which people naturally carry a kind of music within them. An EFT therapist would call that their “emotional life.” And out of that music, they dance — in their relationship with themselves, with other people, and at Kainos, we would say, with God.

This matters enormously for understanding how relationships change.

For lasting change and genuine improvement to take root in a relationship, the internal music a person carries has to shift over time. In my experience as a clinician, that shift is inevitable — it always happens. What’s never guaranteed is the direction. The music can deepen and warm, or it can grow more discordant and cold. My job as a therapist is to tune into the music and the dance each client brings into the room, help them begin to hear it themselves, and work together to reshape it.

I think of one client who came to therapy deeply suspicious — of me, of his own capacity to change, and of a world he experienced as constantly judging and looking down on him. He felt marginalized and emasculated. Early in our work together, he told me directly, more than once, that he didn’t think I cared about him, that I seemed distracted during our sessions. I received those observations with curiosity rather than defensiveness. The fact that he could say those things to me told me he already had enough safety to be honest — and I was grateful for that.

I tuned into that “music” of suspicion and anxiety. I helped him slow it down, take it apart, and begin to name his insecurities out loud — to me, and eventually to others. What he discovered was that when he expressed his deepest fears, he wasn’t met with more distrust or dismissal. He was met with calm, curiosity, kindness, and compassion. That new music — the experience of being received differently than he expected — gave him room to trace his old music back to its source: early experiences with his parents, where he had felt unseen and marginalized.

As he grieved what he had missed, and continued to experience being met with care, something shifted. He began to dance differently with other people. His friendships expanded. Eventually he opened himself to the possibility of marriage.

This is one example of dozens I could give.

What it illustrates is something I believe deeply: lasting change doesn’t come primarily from new information. When we focus only on the didactic — teaching better thoughts, installing better logic — we tend to see short-term, brittle changes that over time can actually increase anxiety and discouragement, grinding progress to a halt or reversing it altogether. What produces lasting change is a shift in the emotional music itself — a new experience of being met, seen, and held — repeated over time, not delivered in a single moment of insight.

This, I believe, is simply a reflection of the God we meet in Scripture. In both the Old and New Testaments, God is a passionate, loving, compassionate Father who engages his creation not from a distance, but through relationship — dancing with his children in wisdom, truth, and love, constantly at work to shape and care for and restore what he has made.

When we pay attention to the music and the dance of the people around us and meet them there with kindness and care, we are reflecting his nature.