Relationships and Families

Everybody, from time to time, may experience difficulties in their relationships.  However, many people are now recognising that it can help to talk through these problems with a trained professional.  Gaining clarity on a situation helps to equip us with more tools in which to identify blocks and make new, more apt, personal choices.

Some of the things people achieve through relationship counselling include:-

• Better communication

• More satisfying relationships with more meaning and fulfilment

• A more stable family life

• More co-operative relationships between parents/carers and their children

• Self-discovery

• Improved sexual relationship

• Greater awareness of your own and a partner's needs

• Reduced jealousy or envy of others

• Increased confidence and self-esteem

• Identification of goals and direction

• Ability to challenge tendencies to repeat unhelpful patterns of relating or behaviour

Individual Counselling can help you explore your own personal story, the nature of any difficulties and what impact these personal difficulties may have on you and your relationships. Counselling can help clarify the history of how difficulties arose and what changes you would like to make.

Couples Counselling is often very helpful for providing a space in which couples can experience listening and checking out what they and their partner are saying and feeling. Within a relationship so many emotions may leave us assuming; miss-hearing or miss-understanding conversations/ highly charged discussions. Three common themes to consider are:

Lump it as for some reason change does not seem possible but, you decide there is enough good stuff worth staying together for. However, some changes usually take place anyway, just because the situation has been spoken about openly.

Change it because you decide to work together at making your relationship stronger and develop ways to be more in-tune with one another.

Leave it as you or your partner, do not wish to change and you decide to split up. Couples Counselling can help here too, as it can be just as hard to split up as stay together.  Counselling here would seek to help each couple address how they may approach the splitting up in the best way possible for them.

Family Therapy aims to help each member as an individual, understand what they would like to communicate and have understood by the other members of the family. Greater communication between family members is often a small but vital step in developing a more co-operative family life for all.

The questions, Who am I? and Who are we?, formed the basis of much of Carl Jung's (Swiss Psychologist) work. He also recognised the limitations we all have in understanding and accepting certain issues and problems in our lives and in finding the answers to these dilemmas. His core belief was that the unconscious holds far more than personal and repressed base instincts and desires.

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung, "On the Psychology of the Unconsciousness", 1917