Relationships are the heart of life. We are born into them, grow up in them, and find love and meaning in them. Yet it is not unusual to be challenged within and by relationships in ordinary yet persistent and stressful ways. When relational patterns grow to feel unsustainable, it can be the opportunity to get support to look at it.
Therapy for adults and adolescents
Attention and Care for Relationships
Things that limit connecting
- Avoidance of Conflict
- Being overly apologetic or appeasing
- Physical or Emotional Withdrawal or Isolation
- Difficulties setting personal limits, or accepting others’ limits
- Communication breakdowns in co-parenting or family roles
- Difficulty expressing personal needs, preferences, wishes
- Frequently feeling misunderstood
- Difficulty responding to other’s feelings
- Fear of saying “wrong” things and being embarrassed
- Unsure or confused about ones feelings
- Child/Adolescent difficulties connecting with peers
Change than happens one conversation at a time
Finding words to speak is part of what helps us feel better. Adults and children can increase their skills managing their distressed feelings and thoughts in verbal or play conversation. While a younger child tends to express emotion through play, adolescents and adults may also express emotions in unspoken ways and therapy offers support for what is not said as much as what is.
Understand, resolve and grow
For most people, distress is not a good feeling. For one, it makes it hard to think, and two, it can tax one’s patience. Therapy is a time, where we are permitted, to cultivate a sense of childhood wonder about things, opening the possibility to finding new ways of seeing.
There are many different therapy goals that may be pursued. Many goals people have relate to where we find ourselves in life as grown adult, an emerging teen or a young child. Whatever the goals we have, the object tends to be the same, that is, to clear the path forward so personal development may resume.