Museum Tour of Past Joys and Pleasures
A journaling or confiding exercise to relive joyful, happy memories.
Couple Skills to Create and Sustain Intimacy
- Confide in one another regularly with emotional openness and empathic listening.
- Complain to one another regularly (without attacking) including requests for change. Can listen to complaints without defensiveness.
- Resolve differences and conflicts by seeking to learn rather than to prevail. Use fair fighting that involves confiding, empathic listening, complaining with requests/recommendations for change, and contracting, effective win-win solutions, all without manipulation or dirty fighting.
- Agree upon areas of autonomy, areas of consultation, and areas of mutually shared ownership and decision-making.
- Clarify hidden assumptions and unspoken expectations to minimize misperceptions and misunderstanding.
- Help one another heal pains and disappointments, resolve emotional allergies, and clarify hidden assumptions. Conjointly heal and resolve emotional allergy infinity loops.
- Meet basic needs for sensuality, appropriate sexuality, physical closeness, bonding, and intellectual and emotional sharing with one another.
- Follow clear, equal, negotiated boundaries regarding what is private and not shared with others outside the relationship.
- Initiate change when the status quo (division of roles, responsibilities, and privileges) is not satisfactory. Follow through on negotiated changes.
Strengthen Goodwill
Strengthen Goodwill
Improve Communication
Improve Communication
No More Assumptions
No More Assumptions
Better Problem Solving
Better Problem Solving
We Can't Bond By Ourselves
We Can't Bond By Ourselves
Bonding (the combination of emotional and physical closeness with another person) is the only biologically-based need we can not meet by ourselves. That means meeting each other's bonding needs becomes the work of a relationship.
Download the Worksheet
Download the Worksheet
Prefer to practice or share your Daily Temperature Reading in writing? Although it's not the same as being together, sometimes it's the only option. Download this worksheet
to get started.
Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir
The original version of the Daily Temperature Reading was created by Virginia Satir.
PAIRS has evolved the exercise and shared it with thousands worldwide on behalf of a safer, saner, more loving world.
Virginia Satir was an American author and therapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her pioneering work in the field of family reconstruction therapy. She is widely regarded as the "Mother of Family Therapy." She was the founding, honorary chairwoman of PAIRS Foundation.
