Showing a relationship

What stops closeness?

  • Commitment Fears
  • Communication breakdowns
  • Distrust
  • Unspoken grievances
  • Neglect of Relationship
  • Fears
  • Anger
  • Lack of Mutuality

When good times fade

To be an alive person means experiencing both the pleasures and the pains of life. But then, as if oneself is not enough to handle, you add a close, romantic, committed, partner to your life, and things get more complex and challenging. Maybe not in all areas but in terms of working out difficulties, annoyances, or complaints. How to talk about the hard stuff is naturally important. It’s the cooperative talking people can have, that supports the solving of problems.

How To Improve Relationships

Talking about problems we in our most important relationships can cause stress. And that stress can mean feeling tense, anxious, or becoming detached or distant.  The stress of talking about the hard things is something that can be lessened and understood in talk therapy

Work Out Difficulties

Get experienced and professional help to improve your relationships. Understand more about what goes on in your important relationships. Gain greater self awareness and capacities to navigate the struggles, fears and problems that create distance and pain in your relationships.

Example of relationship therapy: The man who got out of his own way.

Please Note: The following is a fictitious creation to show how underlying ideas contribute to current problems that can be re-worked.

A well-liked, hard-working man, began feeling anxious and depressed. He couldn’t see what was causing it or how to fix it.  At night he said, he could lie awake worrying or wake up with a sense impending doom. It was made harder for him that he couldn’t understand it. Yet, he then remembered how he was anxious too, about his work performance being subpar despite being praised and awarded with advancement in a recent review.

His state of mind was starting to have an impact on his personal life as well.  When he pursued an interest he would start having anxious ideas about what could happen. In his romantic life, he felt hindered by feelings of discomfort when things went well. When he did like someone, he would unintentionally do something that would end up pushing the person he’d liked, away.

He was usually a fit and healthy person, but lately he’d become aware of a strange intermittent twitch in his leg. Yet, when he had a medical check-up, there was nothing of organic origin wrong with him.

One of the prominent life events that emerged in his therapy had to do with an early relationship to an older sibling. His older brother was someone this man loved and admired. Yet, he remembered how his brother had been quite cruel and belittling to him. Although he didn’t appreciate the cruel treatment his brother inflicted, he weathered it as if it didn’t bother or pain him. But, somewhere underneath he was angry at his brother and harbored ill towards him. Then, when this man was a young adolescent, his brother had a bad car accident which left him partially paralyzed in one leg.

Although, this intelligent young man knew rationally that his brother’s accident wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help feeling that it was.  This feeling of responsibility for his brother’s injury contributed to his anxiety in different ways. On a deep level, he felt tremendous guilt for his brother’s misfortune and it haunted him.  His guilt became a burden on his inner resources, acting like a weight he had to carry, threatening to defeat him. His anxiety and depression were part of a cycle that allowed him to find a kind of inner atonement for his guilt. In therapy he was able to re-work his feelings about his brother which had been one obstacle blocking his free engagement to life.