Relationships
Keeping our most important relationships working well requires effort, we can't just sit back and assume that they will always go smoothly. They won't. We often begin a relationship by being eager to please the other person and look after and support each other in lots of ways. During the early days relationships generally flourish but this contentment doesn't always last for ever. Pressures from outside - life events and life changes both inside and outside our control - can damage our most important relationships.

Our relationships with others also affect the way we feel about ourselves. If important relationships at work or at home are going well, we feel good, able to cope with difficulties, able to enjoy life. However, if our relationships either at home or at work come under stress, we become moody, difficult, and have no space in our lives to help others. Sometimes we displace our feelings about someone on to our partner (e.g. we feel angry at the way our boss is treating us but instead of taking it directly to him/her, we take it out on our partner). This puts our relationship under stress and makes our lives more complex and more difficult to manage in a satisfying and fulfilling way.

Relationships can come under stress because a life change (e.g. promotion at work) has happened for one partner but not the other and the partner who’s left behind struggles with the changes that this involves. They are unwilling or unable to share their distress with the other person because they don't want to worry them. They can’t discuss how they feel and carry on as normal, pretending that nothing is wrong. This has a double effect, the other person isn’t approached for help or support when it’s needed and they can also feel shut out and unvalued. When this happens, each person gets locked into their own feelings, unable to help the other and the relationship suffers.

My counselling clients have often contacted me because a significant relationship in their lives has gone wrong and they feel trapped and unable to do anything about it. When we work together I help them to get their thoughts and feelings out of their heads and into writing. The writing helps them to free up more thinking space and together we explore what has happened, trying to understand how things have deteriorated and what has happened to cause this. Because I don’t offer any judgment of the situation, my neutral stance encourages the client to be honest and open about the situation. Once we are satisfied that we understand what has happened and its causes, we work out how to change the deteriorating pattern and find strategies to avoid it happening in the future.

If you would like to work on a problem by writing about it to me, please email me using this link:

top of page

Site last updated 08.01.10