Specialities - Reset Strained Relationships
To live a full and connected life in the face of difficulty and even tragedy requires the capacity to feel and make use of our emotional experience.
Diana Fosha
We are created to be in connection with others. In fact, our sense of self can only be realized in relation to others. Strained or loss of friendships, parent-child dynamics, workplace colleagues dynamics and romantic relationships can cause unbearable loneliness, shame, doubt or guilt. It can impact all areas of our lives.
Some symptoms of strained relationships in your life:
Carrying Guilt and Shame
When you may have contributed to past hurts towards another person or if you received hurtful words or action in an argument or abuse, you may feel guilty and ashamed to connect with another person.
Vicious Patterns of Mistrust and Threat
You and the other are having similar arguments over and over again and dealing with the same old issues. It may come to the point where even hearing the other person’s voice and recognizing they are in the same room that you may sense a threat and overwhelming sense of emotions. Everything that the other says seems ingenuine and hurtful even when it can be just a simple word of “okay”.
Doubting Your Needs
If you start to doubt yourself, your desires and needs for a healthy relationship to thrive, diminishing self-respect may take form.
Understanding yourself well to be better equipped to resetting strained relationships is possible
Can counselling psychotherapy help to reset strained relationships?
Sometimes, strained or broken relationships require individual counselling and couples/family counselling to heal. The benefits of individual counselling is to process our inner critics, false beliefs that cripple us from being authentic or questioning the other’s words and actions. In addition, individual counselling helps to identify our innermost needs and fears when in relational conflicts, often stemming from attachment styles we learn as a child.
With a better understanding of yourself, couples and family counselling can become more effective. In couples or family counselling, the therapist supports everyone in the relationship to become more aware of the negative emotional cycles, generate new collective perspectives and new interpersonal connections for transformative healing.
At Know Me Well, the approach to resetting strained relationship includes:
- Understanding your own needs, triggers, beliefs and attachment styles.
- Being seen, heard and understood by a loving, caring other.
- Recognizing any vicious patterns and ways to break those patterns within ourselves.