Relationships are hard. Even the smoothest relationships take a lot of work. The reason? To relate effectively with those around us we have to be fully aware of our patterns of relating (good and bad).
Clients often come to me because they are finding relationships hard, whether with their partner, family members, work colleagues, kids, or maybe it has all gone wrong and they need support through the process of a relationship ending. It can be really helpful at this time to sit down and really face, however painful, what’s been going on. In my opinion it is impossible to understand ourselves and how we relate now without looking at what shaped who we are and how we act in relationship with others.
This can be a process we’d rather not do, but returning to and understanding our early childhood relationships with our key care givers can give us valuable insight. It can often be a joke people make about therapy- how long did it take for your therapist to ask you about your childhood? And while I’m all for not getting stuck in the past, it is incredibly important to recognise that those early formative experiences told our developing brain (now we know forming up until our mid 20s) everything we had to know about people, the safety (or lack of it) they represent, what those people tell us (or make us feel) about ourselves and how to behave (or talk) when things go well and when they don’t go well.
Once we fully consider and use this insight we can then make more informed choices in the present. We can either take responsibility for and challenge ourselves to do better in our relating, or we can realise relationships are not helpful to us and we can stop engaging in unhealthy patterns. This is a messy, tangled process, full of complexities that can often be hard to unravel on our own. That is where I come in, we will sit together, teasing apart those knots; the good, the bad and the, at times, very ugly and help you make sense of what you need to feel happier in relation to those around you.