This page describes relationship issues as addressed within the context of individual, personal counseling. If you would prefer to attend counseling with your spouse or partner present, please visit my couples counseling page.
Do You Struggle To Maintain Close, Satisfying Relationships?
Does your relationship with your spouse, partner, friends, or other loved one(s) feel out of balance? If you tend to put other people’s needs ahead of your own, your relationships may leave you feeling used, insecure, or drained. You may also have difficulty setting boundaries or even expressing your needs, causing feelings of frustration and resentment to build.
Have you noticed that the same issues or emotions tend to turn up again and again, such as a tendency to fall into a caretaker role, or a chronic feeling of being misunderstood or invisible? Or perhaps you often feel yourself to be a victim, or have a habit of avoiding vulnerability or intimacy? You may have recurring arguments with your spouse or partner, and maybe you have even noticed troubling patterns among your past relationships.
Are you concerned that your relationships require more emotional energy than you are willing or able to give? It may be that your partner’s need for physical or emotional closeness makes you feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed. On the other hand, it may be an overbearing parent, challenging child, or demanding boss sparking your desire to improve your interpersonal connections.
You may also be looking for a better relationship with yourself, such as more self-compassion, less self-sabotaging behavior, or higher confidence, security, and self-esteem. You may notice a harsh inner critic at play, quick to assert that you’re not smart enough, interesting enough, pretty enough, or even plain not terribly lovable.
Relationships Don’t Come With Instruction Manuals
People are wired for connection. As children, we attach to and rely on others. Our earliest relationships shape our views of ourselves and expectations for the future, albeit unconsciously. If we are neglected in an early relationship, for example, we might adopt a belief that we are somehow unlovable or undeserving of affection or care. We might come to adopt this neglectful attitude toward ourselves, unable to acknowledge our own legitimate needs and respond with self-care. Alternatively, we might come to assume that others can’t be trusted or that help or care is simply unavailable and therefore, it’s safest to become fiercely self-sufficient and need no one. Yet, deep down, we long to not feel so alone.
Our early “lessons” with caregivers act as a model for our future relationships, guiding our expectations and actions. Childhood experiences with people other than caregivers can also have a significant impact on our psychology when we experience traumatic events such as molestation, bullying, or the loss of a sibling. Because these lessons typically exert their influence unconsciously, most people don’t realize that they are interpreting themselves and others today through a lens ground in their childhood. This unconscious lens contributes to relationship issues, making them difficult to resolve on one’s own. Such blind spots about our own inner workings and on how to more kindly relate to ourselves and others, not surprisingly, sets us up for disappointment:
“Most machines of any degree of complexity are offered to us with an instruction manual, a guide to how an unfamiliar technology works, what we can expect from it, how to get the best out of it and how to interpret its signals,” according to the online relationship resource The Book of Life. “Yet one area where we tend not to have manuals to read is when it comes to other people and their functioning.” Until we commit to learning more about our own inner workings, our relationships are destined to continually short-circuit and, without proper repair and maintenance, break down.
How Relationship Counseling Can Help
It's a humbling situation, but much about who we are as grownups can be traced back to things that happened to us before the age of 12. Making sense of the events of our childhood is therefore key to becoming emotionally intelligent adults, despite what cultural stigmas might have us believe about psychotherapy or mental health. We must consider how our past might color and interfere with our chances in the present, especially in the context of relationships. If you’re having trouble, it’s more than okay to seek relationship counseling—it’s wise.
Since every childhood, life experience, and past relationship is unique, it makes sense to get individualized help from an experienced therapist devoted to understanding your personal psychology. To that end, I’ll help you identify and understand your unique history and the sensitivities that might be born from it. By exploring your past experiences (whether with caregivers, siblings, friends, or romantic partners), I can help you discover how those experiences have shaped who you are in relationship to yourself and others.
For example, if a past partner cheated on you and/or a childhood caretaker abandoned you, we can explore how your understandable (and perhaps even unconscious) lack of trust may, ironically, be pushing you and your partner further apart. We might then identify what helps you feel safe as well as what triggers mistrust so that you’ll leave therapy with a helpful “instruction manual,” so to speak, of how your mind works, a resource that will be much appreciated by your partner (or even friends, colleagues, children, or parents.)
I’ll teach you effective communication techniques to help you express your needs more clearly. As you become a better communicator, those you interact with will be more likely to react to you with compassion and open-mindedness. Before you can communicate your needs, though, you must first understand them yourself. If you’ve lost touch with your needs and desires after years of compulsive caretaking, relationship therapy can help you reestablish that connection.
Relationship therapy can help you improve your communication skills and develop greater resiliency for the inevitable bumps in the road. In your romantic relationship, it can help you become more comfortable with vulnerability and to develop greater capacities for emotional and physical intimacy. It can also help you create stronger relationships in every other area of your life, including your relationship with yourself. You may come to realize you have a harsh inner critic and learn to see yourself in a more positive light. Relationship counseling can greatly improve your self-esteem and expand your capacities to both give and receive love, affection, attention, and care.
As you explore the possibility of professional relationship help, you may be wondering. . .
Shouldn’t everyone involved in the relationship be present during sessions?
Sometimes one partner is unwilling to commit to couples counseling. Speaking with a therapist one-on-one provides you with a space to explore your own feelings and can still help clarify what might be happening for each of you, even without one partner present.
For example, it’s not uncommon to misinterpret a partner’s behavior, personalize it, and/or be triggered by it. With greater accuracy of what motivates a behavior or with a new awareness of what it triggers in you, additional communication avenues become possible. You can then bring your growing understanding of the deeper sources of your relationship issues back to your partner, along with new approaches to communication.
My childhood was normal. I don’t remember much about it. Will therapy still help?
Having extensive, detailed memories of your childhood or dwelling on the past aren’t required to make progress in therapy. Though every childhood has bumps, so “normal” childhoods tend to be a myth. I find that upon further exploration in therapy, apparently benign childhoods generally prove more impactful on one’s self-esteem and relationships than first thought. Sometimes new memories actually emerge during the therapy process, or the few that you have gain a new significance.
Regardless of the past, therapy can allow you to get in deeper touch with yourself now. You’ll likely discover that there’s more happening inside than you realize, giving you new insights into how you relate to yourself and others. We may or may not make links to early childhood experiences. When such memories are available, it helps us understand why you might honestly come by certain sensitivities in relationships. But no matter, we can still help you better understand your inner workings today so that your relationships can become more satisfying.
What if my spouse/partner and I are already attending couples’ therapy ?
You might be surprised to learn that couples’ therapy actually works best when one or both partners concurrently attend individual, personal counseling. Many people feel more comfortable bringing up sensitive issues with a therapist before bringing them up with their partners. If you’re afraid you might hurt your partner’s feelings or that your partner might downplay your concerns, individual therapy can act as a safe space to explore your feelings and give you strategies for communicating with your partner.
Individual relationship counseling can be an especially productive complement to couples therapy when you use it to explore your reactions to what is being talked about in your couples counseling in greater depth. While doing both individual and couples work simultaneously is potentially most transformative, you’ll need two therapists, one for your individual work and one for your couples work. I can offer referrals to skilled clinicians if desired.
Relationship Counseling With Renée Spencer, MFT
I am a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I’ve been giving both individuals and couples the tools to develop happier, healthier relationships for more than 20 years. I employ a wide variety of strategies in order to create a customized approach based on your unique situation, challenges, and goals. Contact me today for a free, 20-minutes phone consultation to see if I might be the right person to help you build better relationships, now and into the future.
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