Every relationship requires at least two parts – a subject and an object. In personal relationships, that’s a ‘me’ and a ‘you’, and in individual relationship counselling we take a deep dive into the ‘me’. What is it that you’re bringing to the relationship? What are your patterns? What’s your history? How do you deal with disagreement, conflict, criticism? Sometimes it’s too easy to see the faults in the other, but so hard to see them in ourselves. Other times, we can take all the blame on our own shoulders as criticising the other seems like too much of a risk.
In my Bournemouth practice we start by asking – “Why is that?”
Why relationships are so hard
Humans are wired for connection. It is one of our primary safety needs, refined by evolution over millennia, and it is almost impossible to feel a sense of satisfaction in life without it. We are social creatures at heart.
We are also individual, independent, expressive creatures, and in order to have successful relationships we need to honour both connection and individualism, even though these don’t always go hand in hand. Connection requires understanding and compromise. Individualism requires just me. But these competing drives have to be held in balance with each other – a relationship that is all one without the other will feel unbalanced, and even if it is stable it will be unsatisfying for at least one person in it.
And in a relationship of two people, if one of them is unsatisfied that’s a 50% dissatisfaction rate, and no system can survive that for long.
What do you bring to relationships?
We all have a history, we all have patterns of behaviour, we have all picked up strategies for getting our needs met and avoiding disconnection along the way. Individual relationship counselling is about understanding what you bring, where it originates from, and whether or not it’s still working for you. Many of our relationship patterns worked well when we were young, and so we stick with them. But as adults we have different needs, and our partners certainly need us to be more than children, is it perhaps time to update your ideas of what a relationship can and can’t handle? Is it time to get curious about your attachment style, and understand what that means for how you deal with conflict and connection? Are you bringing all that you could, or are you bringing too much of something, and is there another way of being that could strengthen your relationships?
Is this couples counselling?
No – couples counselling is a separate way of working, that involves both people and a therapist in the room at once. Individual relationship counselling is just about you – what you need, what is missing for you, and what your own history can tell you about how you do and don’t get your connection needs met. I don’t offer couples counselling as it’s a separate specialism entirely. My expertise is working with individuals to understand themselves more fully.
What Individual Relationship Counselling can help with
We work with you as an individual, to understand the impact of your previous experiences, whether that’s early years, family dynamics, divorce, abuse, trauma, or anything and everything else. Every experience we have today will impact how we experience tomorrow, even in minor ways. But these minor ways can stack up, individual responses can become patterns, and the more successful they are the more rigidly we will stick with them. So much of our emotional response to a situation is our brain trying to find a way that worked in the past, and urging us to repeat it. Individual relationship counselling asks, “But what if you didn’t – what then?”
If you find yourself in a relationship that feels unbalanced, out of control, on the rocks, that doesn’t meet your needs or doesn’t meet theirs, that has too much conflict, or too little, that things are left unsaid that need to be expressed, then individual relationship counselling can help you to understand the why and the how of making change.
My approach to Individual Relationship Counselling in Bournemouth
I work with your early years experiences, family of origin, and unconscious motivations, in order to find the root cause of your relationship patterns. It’s not just about what’s going on now, it’s also about what happened in the past – how did you develop these patterns, and do they still work for you? We may talk about your attachment style (how you maintain connection) and what happens if that is in conflict with your partner’s. We may talk about your partner – what are they bringing, and how do you respond to that?
The fundamental goal of individual relationship counselling is to help you understand what patterns you are engaging in, so that you can decide what changes you want to make. This may make the relationship stronger and more fulfilling. It may cause disruption, it may challenge or even end a relationship. Only you can decide what changes you want and need in order to feel more fully yourself, and that process starts with understanding yourself better.
If you’d like to find out more, or ask me any questions, please get in touch.