Relating

How are you getting on with the people in your life?

Sometimes clients tell me they think that having counselling, or another type of help, is selfish because 'it's all about me!' I think therapy can be profoundly generous to others as developing our sense of wellbeing and wholeness may help us engage more skilfully and with greater wisdom in our relationships.

If you can acknowledge and work through your own issues with kindness, patience and honesty, your increased awareness and inner resources could help you face and work through relationship issues with a more constructive and healing energy. Everyone potentially benefits. Let's explore this idea in more detail below...

How are you getting on with you?

Quality relationships with others make everyone's lives better. An obvious statement to make, but it's also backed up by research like this. Let's keep digging!

• So, what leads to healthy relationships? Stable, as opposed to anxious/avoidant attachments seem to be a key factor, as this DOAC video on healthy/toxic relationships explores.

• How do we develop stable relationships with others? Many psychotherapies and wisdom traditions say we first need to develop a healthy relationship with ourselves. As we get better as doing this, it'll be more likely we can develop and maintain good relationships with others -  both people who get on well with, and those who struggle to relate positively to, themselves.

• And we develop a better, more stable relationship with ourselves by...? My current understanding is that it's by parenting our own inner world with as much skill, wisdom and compassion that we can muster.

Many things can help us become benign inner parents. Meditation practices, psychotherapy and being surrounded by caring people who value calm stability sound like good places to start. And just as parenting children takes lots of time and patience, we need to bring these same qualities to...

• Repeatedly attend to the needs of

• Gradually develop better relationships with and

• Bring emotional healing when required to...

our own inner childlike elements.

Breaking free from adaptation patterns

The video below by Clinical Psychologist Nicole LePera explores six relational patterns that can have a deep and pervasive impact on us. While she focuses on family of origins experiences of being parented, my experience is that these patterns are pervasive in our society e.g. Denier of Reality = Toxic Positivity, Emotionally Absent = Impersonal power dynamics in some work cultures, Appearance-focused = A powerful influence on buying habits.

• Denier of Reality: Dismissing a child's emotions or perceptions, leading to self-doubt.

• Emotionally Absent: Fails to see or hear the child, leads to a sense of invisibility.

• Moulding/Vicarious: Expecting the child to perform makes love feel conditional.

• Boundary-less: By using the child for emotional support, this can undermine how the child develops their own boundaries.

• Appearance-focused: By valuing surface-level presentation over emotional connection, this chains the child's worth to their looks.

• Unregulated: An erratic or explosive parent forces the child to live in a state of constant alert.

Nurturing secure attachment

This video with Psychiatrist Amir Levine explores, amongst other things, his CARRP approach to building secure attachment in more of our relationships:

• Consistent: Stable sense of identity.

• Available: Being genuine and emotionally congruent. 

• Reliable: Doing what we say we'll do. 

• Responsive: Caring how each other feels.

• Predictable: How we generally respond to life.