Relationship and Family Issues
A note on Relationships
We attach to other humans for safety and survival. Comfort and love are part of what keeps us safe and helps us emotionally survive. When we experience stress and ruptures in relationships it can cause a huge amount of pain and wounding.
Our relationships issues can be involve two or more people, they can be sexual and nonsexual, they may involve parents, siblings or friends but underpinning all our relationships are complex systems of attachment, systems we first learned to form as babies in pre-verbal states of development. These attachment styles were created unconsciously and then reshaped by environment, childhood, parental influences, personality, DNA and ancestral lineage.
Issues that may present in any relationship:
• Mother wounds
• Father wounds
• Unprocessed trauma and impacts of previous emotional and physical abuse
• Emotional abuse
• Physical abuse
• Continuous or/and unhealthy conflict
• Emotional dysregulation
• Repeating patterns
• Disconnection and miscommunication
• Anger outbursts
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Jealousy/Insecurities
• Lack of trust
• Fear of abandonment
• People pleasing and fear of separation
• Choosing unsuitable partners for long term relationships
• Fear of betrayal
• Power struggles and competition
• Struggle with appropriate boundaries and managing relationships
• Self-harming
• Suicidal Ideation
Within family relationships:
• Infidelity
• Parenting
• Planning for a family
• Life transitions
• In-laws
• Divorce/remarriage/step-parenting
• Infertility
• Adoption and surrogacy
• Chronic illness/being a carer
• Conflict in wider family
• Cultural issues
• Domestic abuse
• Coercive control
Within work relationships:
• Bullying
• Sexual harassment
• Unfair dismissal
• Whistleblowing
• Power abuses
The Role of Psychotherapy in Relationships & Family issues
Even when we can choose the relationships we want in our life and have the freedom to move in and out of them, we will encounter difficulty. This is the nature of human relationships. More often than that we find ourselves in relationships which feel triggering and are harder to move away from.
Through a blend of psychological theories I will work with you to explore the roots of entanglement which hold you within these relationships and how to make better choices that reflect the life you want to live. Emotional blindspots are the most potent in these specific and close relationships and can take a huge toll on our physical and emotional health. Relationships are as fundamental to the way we live as they are debilitating in the way we hurt as they are, with the help of psychotherapy, illuminating in the way we grow.
Ray Ceasar – Vampyr 2017. Used with permission.