Relationship Struggles
The ‘rules’ that get drawn up in our earliest family relationships make the patterns for all our adult friendships, partnerships and marriages.
Struggles in current relationships can be overcome by Therapy.
Typical relationship issues:
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Are you unsure about committing to someone or are they struggling to commit to you?
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Do you feel your partner doesn’t or couldn’t love you?
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Do you feel you will get hurt? “I’m not going to care about them in case they dump me”
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Do you worry you will be a ‘bad’ partner?
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Is there a destructive part of your relationship that’s getting worse?
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Do you find it hard to trust your partner?
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Are you being “unfaithful” to your partner?
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Do you like to bring other people into the relationship too?
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Do you want different things but not know how to make yourself heard?
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Are you afraid to be honest with your partner?
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Do you feel too ‘needy’ or is your partner ‘clingy?’
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Do you feel suffocated or trapped?
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Perhaps your partner feels hard to reach and aloof?
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Do you find yourself being attracted to other people?
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You may feel like you’ve married your father or mother
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Are you stuck in a similar pattern to your parents?
Where Relationship Issues come from
Our own short-comings…
Often we ‘use’ partners to provide something for us that we don’t feel we can do ourselves. We fall ‘in love’ with someone because they can ‘complete us’.
By exploring our sense of our own short-comings we can better understand what our expectations of our relationships are and what our desires are.
Can we love and be loved?
Where a person did not feel deeply loved by parents it can be hard to feel loved by a new partner or by anyone.
It can be hard to love and open up to others too for fear of being hurt or taken over.
Familiar Patterns…
Often we choose partners because of a deep familiarity with something. We choose people that ‘fit’ into our understanding of ‘family’.
This can be a good thing, but can also carry a burden of what went before. Perhaps we feel deeply unresolved about our parents’ relationship and we try to use our new relationship to fix something from before, or to ‘do it better this time round’.
We can even consciously attempt to ‘do the opposite to our parents’ but this still carries the burden of what came before and what was once normal can be a tough master.
How Therapy can Help
Once we take a deeper look at who we are within ourselves and our relationships, based on what went before and what’s going on now, we can learn to be authentic in ourselves and to make choices about partners based on what really suits us.
By being true to ourselves we can find happiness with others.
Learning to trust that we are loveable, no matter what went before, is the important work of Therapy.
Need to talk?
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