Individual Relationship Therapy
Do you repeatedly end up in similar places in relationships?
You might have a sense of how you appear in relationships. We use labels such as the ‘peacekeeper’, the ‘organiser’, the ‘leader’, the ‘accommodating’ one. Your patterns may work well: some relationships flourish with the usual ups and downs, others don’t work well and might finish – it’s normal and there’s no need for therapy.
But you are reading this for a reason. And if that reason is that something feels ‘wrong’ then perhaps your relational patterns deserve your attention.
It's Not About Fixing the Other Person
At the core of relational therapy is the question ‘How is your relationship with yourself?’
Answers to this are often revealed through all of your other relationships – with your boss, employee or colleague; your friend, partner or sibling.
Individual relational therapy explores what you bring and how you react to other people and things. It aims to strengthen your sense of self through relational insight and enhance your relationship with yourself, others and the world more broadly.
We will ask other questions such as how you react to anger, frustration or disappointment in others. Or how do you give and receive love or affection? What emotions do you have trouble regulating?
And what of your relationships with other things? With emotions? Or money? Different genders?
We are not looking for faults or blame – but rather to see where patterns of relating that may once have served you well are no longer useful. Do they still fit your life or do they now cost more than they give?
You Might Recognise…
- Ending up with the same outcome, relationship after relationship
- A sense that romantic partners just aren’t good enough
- Giving until you resent it – then feeling guilty for the resentment
- Going quiet or agreeable to keep the peace
- Becoming easily angered when things are not done as you think they should be
- Being relied on by everyone else, while no one checks how you are
How I Would Work With You
In relational work I help individuals to uncover their patterns and how they play out across romantic, family and working life. Some questions we might explore:
- Where and when did your ways of relating first make sense?
- What would happen if you did it differently?
- What do you expect of yourself and others in different relationships?
- What do patterns give you and cost you?
We will explore our relationship as it develops in the therapy room, to see what this may reveal too. This is possibly one of the most useful and important parts of individual relational work.
Most important of all we explore your expectations of and relationship with yourself. The work is not an effort at simply managing others or trying harder. We want you to know yourself better, understand yourself better, see yourself better so you can decide what and how you want to be in relationship with others.
Why Work With Me?
Relationship is at the core of how I see people and the world. I don’t see you or me as fixed selves who run into difficulty with others. I see the self as something that forms and changes and reforms and changes and keeps reforming -through relationship. Or we become stuck.
It means I take your relational patterns seriously. And I take relational stuckness seriously, without treating it as a fault that needs correction. Relational patterns and stuckness are part of us that need understanding.