The framework for the 9 life domains used in this article comes from Your Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt. His work offers a holistic approach to goal setting that honors the complexity of real life which is something I see reflected daily in the therapy room. When people think about goal setting, they usually picture weight loss, finances, or career growth. Rarely do they think about intimacy, emotional connection, or relationship health, yet these areas quietly shape everything else. I often see that couples who feel disconnected aren’t failing at love, they’re simply living inside a system that never taught them how to build intimacy intentionally and sustainably.
What Are the 9 Life Domains?
The 9 life domains provide a holistic structure for personal growth goals:
Spiritual
Intellectual
Physical
Marital / Relationship
Parental / Family
Social
Vocational / Career
Financial
Hobbies / Fun
When even one of these areas is neglected, stress spills into the others. Many couples come to therapy focused on conflict, when the deeper issue is that their relationship domain has been left unattended for years.
Why Relationship Goals Matter More Than You Think
Most couples don’t lack love—they lack systems for connection.
Intimacy erodes not because people stop caring, but because work, parenting, mental load, and burnout slowly replace emotional presence. Over time, partners become logistical teammates instead of romantic allies.
This is why relationship goal setting is essential. Not as pressure, but as devotion.
Achievement Goals vs Habit Goals in Relationships
The most powerful change happens when couples use both achievement goals and habit goals.
Achievement Goals (Milestones)
• Attend a couples retreat
• Read one relationship book together
• Take a 3-day getaway without kids
• Complete six months of relationship check-ins
• Repair a long-standing conflict with the support of a therapist
Habit Goals (Daily Practices)
• 10 minutes of uninterrupted connection nightly
• One daily expression of appreciation
• Weekly “State of the Union” relationship meeting
Neuroscience shows that relationships heal through repetition of safety, not dramatic conversations. Every time a partner listens without fixing, or reaches for connection instead of withdrawing, the nervous system learns that intimacy is safe again.
The Cost of Ignoring the Relationship Domain
• Loss of sexual desire
• Emotional numbness
• Increased conflict
• Feeling unseen or misunderstood
• Growing parallel lives aka becoming roommates
Bringing the 9 Life Domains Into Your Year
Ask yourself:
Which life domain feels the most depleted right now?
What would devotion, not perfection, look like here?
At Ivey Counseling Center, I help couples build goals that don’t add pressure, but instead create containers for intimacy, safety, and growth. Your relationship does not need another hard conversation. It needs a system for turning toward each other again.
The 9 life domains framework referenced in this post is adapted fromYour Best Year Everby Michael Hyatt, a resource I recommend for clients who want a practical, whole-life approach to goal setting.
Woman writing down goals to improve relationship; relationship counseling
I remember believing that breastfeeding was the most natural thing in the world, something my body would instinctively know how to do. I took the breastfeeding class at the hospital, just like the birthing class, because my doctor recommended it and every first-time parent around me seemed to do the same. I fully expected childbirth to require support and preparation. But breastfeeding? A class or two should be enough. How hard could something so “natural” really be?
Looking back, I don’t think anyone ever told me it would be easy. I had simply seen a few friends do it without visible struggle and assumed that meant it was straightforward.
As it turns out, it wasn’t. With my firstborn, breastfeeding was incredibly difficult. I can’t prove their personality played a role, but nearly a decade later I can say that child has challenged every assumption I’ve had about anything. The real point is that breastfeeding did not come naturally. I needed weekly breastfeeding groups, a lactation consultant, and a very good therapist to land in a healthy emotional place with a breastfeeding and formula hybrid that worked for us.
This brings me to the heart of this post. How many of us grew up believing that sex is also “natural” and therefore should be easy? How many of us never questioned that assumption until things didn’t go as smoothly as we expected?
Many of us carry beliefs like:
If I follow my religion or values, my sex life will be “blessed” and easy
If I get experience with multiple partners, I will automatically become great at sex
If I am with the right person, sex will be effortless to talk about
I will know what I need when the moment comes
Sex naturally gets better with time
If sex was great with a past partner, there is no reason to believe it will not be great with the person I care about now
Some of these may feel true at times; however, for many people, they do not hold up consistently. And just like breastfeeding, when sex does not come easily, we often feel shame because we think something natural should not require help.
This is what I want to normalize, support around sex and intimacy. If breastfeeding support groups can be so widely accepted, why can’t seeking help for our sexual wellbeing carry the same dignity and compassion? Sex is deeply vulnerable, and whether we are single or partnered, it matters. It matters a great deal.
If you are wanting more connection, pleasure, or confidence, there are excellent resources available. Today I want to highlight one, the book Sex Talks by Vanessa Marin. You may know her Instagram account with her husband Xander, which has over a million followers, where they talk candidly and humorously about relationships and intimacy. The book, endorsed by the infamous John Gottman, breaks down five conversations that can transform your sex life. The first is Acknowledgment. As Marin says, “sex is a thing, and we have it.” It is simple, and yet surprisingly hard for many couples to say out loud.
Some people will find that books, podcasts, and social media are enough to spark change. Many of us, however, need more. This is where sex therapy or coaching becomes profoundly powerful. It is one thing to read or practice new tools; it is another to have someone trained to notice the subtle moments you look away, tear up, get defensive, or swallow your words without realizing why. Those micro-moments we gloss over are often the exact places that need attention. They are the sore spots that, when tended to, allow healing and pleasure to expand.
I have seen couples who have been together for 10, 20, or even 30 years finally talk about something that has been hurting since year one, and things get better. Truly better.
If you pick up this month’s recommended resource, wonderful. It might be exactly what you need. If you still find these conversations difficult, that does not mean you are broken or behind. It may simply mean you deserve support, the same way I did with breastfeeding.
Because as natural as sex is, it does not always come naturally, and there is no shame in getting the help that makes everything better.
A serene moment of bliss: a confident woman enjoys the scent of a vibrant bouquet against a warm orange backdrop.
Earlier this year, I had a client return for some maintenance sessions after taking a pause from therapy. In her email explaining the reason for her break, she wrote courageously about her exhaustion from the constant cycle of self-improvement, from always trying to be better, or even just enough.
She described how becoming a new mother shifted something profound in her. She had discovered a newfound gratitude and a deep sense of love, and realized that simply being a mom made her enough. Her baby didn’t need to do anything to earn worthiness; he just was. And for the first time, she could see herself the same way.
I celebrated this revelation with her. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about her question between the lines; how had therapy itself contributed to the belief that she wasn’t enough? How had the very practice I so deeply believe in, a profession meant to affirm worth, somehow reinforced the opposite?
In our following sessions, we set the shared intention that therapy would not be a space to fix her, but to strengthen what was already whole: her intuition, gifts, and inherent value as a woman, mother, partner, and friend.
(I received permission from this client to share her story)
How History Taught Women to Doubt Their Own Value
There’s a quiet story that lives beneath women’s lives; a story that says something about them is lacking.
That their bodies are flawed. Their desire is dangerous. Their intuition is irrational.
This story didn’t begin in the modern era. It’s woven through centuries of philosophy, theology, and medicine, a worldview often called the deficit model.
At its core, it’s the idea that women are incomplete versions of men: weaker, less rational, less capable, and even less human in their full expression.
The Ancient Roots of the Deficit Model
In ancient Greek philosophy, thinkers like Aristotle and Galen described women as biologically inferior, a “mutilated male,” in Aristotle’s words. He claimed women’s reproductive systems were internal because their bodies were too weak to produce semen, the supposed “life force.” Galen later echoed this idea, suggesting that women were essentially men “turned inside out.”
This wasn’t just bad science, it was a worldview that defined womanhood as deficiency. Men were seen as the standard, and women, a deviation. The ripple effects of that framing have echoed for millennia.
From phrenology to the BMI to the pathologizing of poverty, those in power have long defined what race, class, and gender represent the “ideal” and anyone who deviates from that ideal is seen as deficient.
The Deficit Model and Women’s Sexuality
For centuries, perhaps forever, women’s sexuality has been filtered through a deficit lens, as though something essential is missing, broken, or inherently flawed.
Across moral teachings, media messages, and even medical narratives, women have been cast as the ones who need fixing, balancing, or approval before they can experience pleasure.
This framing doesn’t just misrepresent women’s bodies, it disconnects them from their own birthright to pleasure, intimacy, and wholeness.
The Moral Deficit: Sin, Virtue, and the Control of Desire
When religious institutions gained influence, moral frameworks absorbed and amplified these ancient ideas. The early Christian church often portrayed women as the gateways to sin: Eve as the origin of downfall, Mary as the unreachable ideal of purity. The body became a battleground: desire was something to restrain, mistrust, or suppress. Pleasure was tolerated only within narrow confines… for procreation, not for joy. Women’s pleasure, in particular, was suspect. It was either evidence of temptation or proof of immorality. Even when religion claimed to “protect” women’s virtue, it simultaneously stripped them of bodily agency. The message endured: to be a good woman meant to resist your own desire, and to never tempt a man (who, it was implied, couldn’t help himself).
When women internalize this message, what often follows is disconnection:
Desire shuts down, and women think something is “wrong” with them.
They feel guilty for wanting intimacy, or ashamed for not wanting it enough.
They learn to apologize for their pleasure, or stop seeking it altogether.
The Medicalization of Deficiency
The deficit model is also deeply embedded in the history of medicine and mental health. In the 18th and 19th centuries, physicians began to view women’s reproductive systems as the root of nearly every physical or emotional symptom. “Hysteria”, from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus, became a catch-all diagnosis for anxiety, depression, restlessness, and sexual dissatisfaction. The underlying message was clear: when women expressed emotion, it was because of their biology, not their environment or circumstances. Medical treatments ranged from bed rest to surgical removal of the clitoris, to the “pelvic massages” that later evolved into the invention of the vibrator, not as a tool of pleasure, but as a “cure” for women’s irritability and desire. These interventions weren’t about healing; they were about suppression.
Even in modern times, medical literature centers male sexuality; arousal, performance, and function, while women’s sexual health is often studied primarily in terms of fertility or dysfunction. Women have not been understood as pleasure-bearing beings, but as reproductive bodies.
To oversimplify: men are prescribed Viagra; women are told, “it’s just menopause.”
The Media Mirror: Performing Desire Instead of Feeling It
In our modern era, media continues the deficit story in subtler, but powerful ways.
Now the message isn’t that women shouldn’t enjoy sex, it’s that they’re failing at it if they don’t look or act a certain way. Women’s sexual worth becomes tied to external validation: beauty, youth, desirability. Pleasure becomes performance. The internal question shifts from “What feels good to me?” to “How do I look while doing this?” This version of the deficit model doesn’t overtly call women defective, but it keeps them endlessly distracted, comparing, and trying to fix what was never broken.
What Now: Reclaiming Wholeness and Pleasure
It’s worth pausing to recognize that strong external cultural forces are at play any time a woman feels unworthy. As therapists, healers, and helpers, we have to be vigilant. Our work must affirm, not fix; reflect, not judge. We must create spaces where women can remember what has always been true: You are worthy, valued, whole, and important, not because of what you do, but because of who you are. When it comes to sexuality, there’s one profound biological truth I return to again and again:
There exists a body part that only women have, one that serves no reproductive function whatsoever. Its sole purpose is pleasure.
Whether you see that as God’s divine design or evolutionary brilliance, it is evidence that women’s bodies were made for delight, tenderness, time, and connection. Why would something exist purely for pleasure if pleasure weren’t meant to matter? If you’re unsure what body part I’m talking about, I’ll gently recommend the book Becoming Cliterate by Dr. Laurie Mintz.
Further Reading
There are many essential books that explore these topics in greater depth. Here are a few I recommend:
In future posts, I may explore each of these “deficit” models more deeply. But for now, I hope this serves as a reminder that you were never the distortion. You were always the design.
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