Relationships are at the heart of all that happens in our lives and can bring so much happpiness, love and support

The most important factor in determining how happy our relationships are is the nature of your relationship with yourself and the nature of the other person's relationship with him / herself

The nature of your relationship with yourself is influenced by your experience of relationships in childhood.

How were feelings dealt with in your family?

How safe was it to be authentic as a child?

Who really saw you as an individual and who took the time to get to know you when you were little?

Was there anyone to go to when you were upset or worried and was there anyone who listened to you?

lDid anyone let you know that you mattered and that you were loved not for what you did but for just being you?

Did you have to meet conditions to get love eg. be well behaved, be good at school, don't say what you feel, be tidy.

How you were treated as a child will directly effect how you treat yourself now and what you expect or tolerate in your realtionships.

Challenges in Relationships

For example :Birth of a child, illness, death of a parent, work related issues, moving house.

Most relationships experience challenges that can lead to stressful feelngs and trigger old memories of feelings of hurt from childhood. This can lead us to feel and behave in ways we don't fully understand.

In Relationship counselling you are free to talk about what's happening both within your relationship with your partner and within yourself. The aim is to make sense of what is going on, to become conscious of why each of you feel as you feel and to begin to understand what the real issues are beneath the poor communication, arguing, affairs, lack of support, always being at work, use of alchol and drugs and lack of intimacy etc.

We each get up every morning planning to do our best but stuff and people get in the way and how we respond to that stuff with be strongly influenced by how the adults in our childhood responeded to others and to us. if you want to become aware of why this or that person's behaviour upsets you that's great because then you can release the feeling associated with it and at last it no longer upsets you .

All our past experiences have helped wire the neuro circuits in our brain and mean that we can automatically go into defense and feel threatened by behaviours that wewish didnt upset us and which logically dont make sene You respond or react to otherpeoples behaviours based on whether you peprceive them as safe or as threatening, in this sense all behviour has wisdom.

When we get distressd as children and our parents are regularly not in a place to releive our distress, the feeling is too much for us to handle alone and so we disconnect from it in order to survive. In doing this we find a way to not feel the pain but we also loose connection with our authentic sef. Consequently as adults we are not always conscious of what is going on within us so we project out our feelings onto another in the hope that someone mature will notice our distress and helps us make sense of it.

When you become conscious of who you really are, you feel full rather than empty and life feels different.Your relationships become easy becasue youre at ease with yourself. All the parts of yourself that you hid away begin to emerge e.g. your passion, your voice, your assertiveness, your courage, your motivation, your ability to relax, your belief in yourself, your intelligence in all areas and you begin to realsie that the things you find attractive in another were within you all along.

Counselling and Psychotherapy