RELATIONSHIPS.

RELATIONSHIPS

Do you find yourself struggling in your relationship to others? It could be in your relationship with a friend, a co-worker, a boss or in an intimate relationship with a romantic partner. Do you feel like something isn’t quite right and you wonder how you keep attracting or choosing people who you end up feeling hurt by or who leave you feeling depleted or unsatisfied? Do you find yourself caught up in a lot of conflict with someone and find yourself longing for THEM to change?! Or maybe you feel like it’s you and feel deeply ashamed and pained, confused even, by your relationship choices? 

While our personal relationships may be a source of much pain and conflict, we do come by these relationships HONESTLY. And while it is easy to blame the other or ourselves for causing our felt conflicts, the truth often lies in the reality that our relationships are a mirror into the depths of our psyches- into our traumas, our sense of self worth, our attachment styles, and our family of origin issues. Relationship dynamics often defy gender and logic, burrowed deep in the limbic part of the brain and felt in the nervous system via anxiety, panic, or deep pain and longing. How we come together, how we separate, and how we trust another human (or not!) can often be relived in our present day relationships. 

The good news is that we can shift our relationship dynamics through changing and growing ourselves via therapy. Therapy can be very useful in helping us gain insight into how we recreate a variety of old dynamics that may be repeating themselves in very challenging ways in our present lives. Building self awareness and introspection into these dynamics can be liberating and offer a chance at renewal, growth, and healing. Oftentimes, some of that practice happens in the safety of the therapeutic relationship to one’s therapist. This is truly empowering and exciting work- for when we heal wounded parts of ourselves, we grow. When we grow, we start to attract and create healthier relationships, improve our relationships to love ones, and break old familial patterning in the name of creating something stronger and better and more loving for ourselves and in relationship to the ones we love.