Inner Relationship Focusing & Relationships

Inner Relationship Focusing can improve your relationship with yourself (and others, too!).

Most research around what leads to a happy life shows that relationships with others are extremely important. But relationships can trigger all sorts of uncomfortable feelings.

While an evening of laughter with good friends or a loved one feels wonderful, a lack of those connections can feel isolating. A stern glance from a coworker during a meeting can create a wave of shame or anxiety. Watching your mother-in-law reload the dishwasher after you finished cleaning the kitchen might throw you into an overwhelming fit of anger.

Perhaps surprisingly, exploring your reactions to other people can expand your ability to be yourself, in all kinds of ways. You can be more creative, more curious, more open, more resilient.

When you learn Inner Relationship Focusing, you learn to love and accept yourself. As a result, other people aren’t so triggering anymore. And you’ll learn to listen to people in new ways that will improve your relationships.

What I’ve learned is that other people are our mirrors – they show us ourselves, including the parts of us we find hard to see. Even our most difficult relationships can become our teachers. Not only our intimate partnerships but also parents, children, friends, employers and employees, clients and colleagues – all can be sources of discovery, growth, and transformation. Amazingly, as we change, so do the relationships and so do the other people.

– Ann Weiser Cornell

Courses to Help With Relationships

Getting Started with Healthy Boundaries

If you say yes when you’d rather say no or if it’s hard to even know what you really want to say yes to, we can help!

With this free mini-course, you’ll:

  • Learn how to tell if your needs are getting pushed aside (which often happens when you say yes but mean no)
  • Discover what a healthy boundary looks like and how simple they can be (something you probably didn’t learn growing up)
  • Understand what you’re saying yes to when you say no (and why this 180-degree flip in how you perceive your “no” helps you communicate better with the people in your life)

No matter how challenging healthy boundaries might feel today, you can get practical help that brings immediate relief.

Get immediate access to our free mini-course:

Finding the Gift in Anger without Losing Your Head

90-Minute On-Demand Seminar

Learn how to use Focusing when your anger flares up or despair knocks you down. Shift from powerlessness to empowerment, and from inner suffering to inner strength.

$29.00 $14.50
21 Days to Healthier Boundaries

21 Days to Healthier Boundaries

21 Days of Online Video Trainings + Online Community

Is it hard to put your own needs first sometimes? With this course, you’ll receive practical support and guidance to help you finally set boundaries you can feel good about.

$97.00 $48.50
Learn More and Register Here
Healing Trauma Course

Healing Trauma: Moving Beyond the Hurt of the Past

6-Module On-Demand Video Course + Online Community

This course will help you gently transform painful cycles like: overreacting to events because they trigger past hurts, repeating painful patterns in your relationships, or sometimes feeling like a small, hurt child is living your life.

Join us to experience how self-compassion can release past hurts so you can live more fully.

$247.00 $123.50

Payment Plan Available

Your Path to Lasting Change

Your Path to Lasting Change

9 – 18 week Live, Online Inner Relationship Focusing Training Program

Are you looking for a long-term solution that really works to bring greater happiness, clarity, and self-acceptance? With this program, you’ll come away with a self-directed process to support you in any part of your life: your relationships, your career, your community, and beyond.

After this course, you’ll be eligible for our advanced trainings, including our Certification program and Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin’s groundbreaking Untangling® work.

$947.00$1,997.00

Payment Plans and Scholarship Opportunities Available


Articles, Tips, and Videos About Inner Relationship Focusing + Relationships

Thriving Relationships
When Your Family is Toxic
When You Judge Others

Tips to help your relationships

It's ok to take a moment in a stressful situation with someone.

A Relationship-Positive Way To Take A Break And Regroup When Tempers Flare

If you’ve found yourself in the middle of an argument and want a process to help you forward, we’ve got just the thing.

Click here for a helpful post.

Our criticisms of others can be a deep well of self-understanding and change. Especially in our close relationships.

What Might Really Be Happening When You’re Frustrated With Someone Else

Ann’s story about a time she ran into trouble with her partner, plus an exercise for you when you run into a similar situation.

Click here to read the post.

Finding An Empowered Response to a Difficult Situation

If you think the only way a situation can change is to either acknowledge your feelings OR take action, know there’s another way…

Click here to read the post.

“I find conversations with my family of origin tend to be very one-sided...”

Focusing Tip #835 – “I am the only one in my family who listens…”

What if the people in your family don’t show any interest in you or your feelings? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip

“Is this Focusing style of understanding something that can be applied to relationships with others?”

Focusing Tip #823 – Using Focusing skills with other people in relationship

Can Focusing skills be applied to how we treat other people? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

"the connection I am longing for with my mother is not available"

Focusing Tip #770 – Inner Relationship Focusing with longing for connection

How do you get a felt sense of something you wish you could feel? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

imposter syndrome

How to Be a Perfect Imposter

Or, How to Be Perfectly Imperfect (and embrace who you truly are).

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

Are you lonely

Focusing Tip #596 – “When everyone is talking about love it can awaken something in us that feels deeply alone… and that can be painful.”

When you turn with compassion toward your painful feelings of loneliness, and allow them to be as they are, two things can happen…

Find Out More in Ann’s Tip.

Low self esteem

“There is Something Terribly Wrong with Me, and When You Find Out, You’re Going to Hate Me”

What do you do when you long to be yourself… but you don’t trust that anyone will like you as you are? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

what does “inner relationship” actually refer to?

Focusing Tip #736 – “What does ‘inner relationship’ actually refer to?”

Why is inner relationship so important? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

Focusing to shift social anxiety

Focusing Tip #563 – What do you do when you long to just be yourself but you don’t trust that anyone will like you?

Ann Weiser Cornell’s story about her shift away from anxious and self-doubting to relaxed and present in her interactions with others. Includes a video.

Click here for Ann’s story.

“There is this huge wanting to not have hurt someone, even if it was unintentional....”

Focusing Tip #829 – When you regret how you couldn’t show up in the past

Are you filled with regret about how you behaved in the past? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.