Learn How To Improve The Quality Of Your Relationships
• Do you find it hard to establish a sense of belonging?
• Are you having difficulty finding and maintaining meaningful, authentic, reciprocal, and fulfilling relationships?
• Does it feel as though the only way to meet new people these days is online?
• Have you found it difficult to set boundaries or assert your needs within existing relationships?
Relational counseling may be a good fit for you if the questions above struck a chord. Whether you are a professional with a demanding work life or struggling to foster connections, relationships can be difficult to balance and even more difficult to prioritize. Speaking with a therapist can be helpful to improve communication, process any roadblocks, and refocus on your goals.
There are many reasons why individuals struggle to feel included. If you are in a leadership positions, you may feel disconnected with your colleagues or struggle with navigating boundaries. Maybe you are single and living alone. Social media and pop culture puts signifiant pressure on us all. This can make people feel isolated and steps behind everyone else who seems to have a partner, family, or group of friends you expected for yourself at this age. Your relationship concerns may even stem from your family itself. Families can create toxic dynamics that have a long-lasting impact on how we attach to others.
Asserting yourself and meeting new people may have come easily for you in high school and college. However, now that you lack such social structures, you might feel at a loss for how to make meaningful connections. You may rely on excessive use of drugs or alcohol to ease social anxiety. Or it could be that you’ve resorted to over-exercising and under-eating so that you can feel more attractive to others.
Your concerns about how you appear to the outside world may have resulted in symptoms of anxiety and depression, such as poor sleep, disinterestedness, and feelings of loneliness and isolation. A need to please others may have landed you in the role of a caretaker, causing you to feel that your needs have gone unnoticed and that it’s impossible to say no.
When you are repeatedly disappointed within your relationships, it can cause you to withdraw and miss out on potentially nurturing connections. However, with relationship therapy, you can develop the tools and confidence to feel accepted by and connected to others as your true, authentic self.
Relationship therapy is separate from couples counseling. We explain more on that below. For now, we want to share that each partner in a relationship dynamic brings their past experiences into their current experiences. Psychotherapy can provide an unbiased perspective allowing for each partner to more clearly see the needs of the other. Whatever your reason, we are excited to take the first step in a healing journey.
Your first session may feel intimidating, especially if you have never met with a therapist before. In your first few meetings, be prepared to provide some historical information and establish some goals for working together. Take a deep breath! Therapy is a safe space. We hope to create an environment where you can be honest with yourself and explore your vulnerabilities. You set the speed and we will work with you at your pace. Keep reading for more information on the importance of relationships and the value of therapy.
Our Relationships With Others Shape Who We Are As Individuals
All humans have a need for relationships. Everybody experiences setbacks and disconnects with their partners, friends, and family members at one time or another. Unfortunately, we are oftentimes not conditioned to have a strong understanding of secure and healthy attachments making it impossible to grasp what it takes to create a safe connection with others.
There are also gender dynamics at play when it comes to our role in relationships. For example, women are often characterized as overly “needy”. When we internalize this stereotype, we can over-correct to the point where we are unable to assert our needs and fulfill the role as a giver (and never a taker). Although or society has progressed, there is still quite a bit of shame associated with the single woman in her 30s or 40s who is not yet married with children. This shame is perpetuated by a society that signals to us as early as childhood that a woman’s worth is directly related to her fitness as a wife and mother.
On the other hand, our society has also masculinized men to the point that they are expected to be tough, aloof, and emotionally unavailable. This messaging damages men’s relationship to their feelings, setting the stage for problems to arise in their friendships, partnerships, and familial relationships later on.
Attachment injuries in childhood—often related to these damaging cultural factors—can cause us to feel unlovable or unworthy of safe, healthy relationships. Yet many of us worry that therapy will vilify our parents or show us that some part of us is irreparably broken.
However, at bareWell, our therapists are not interested in placing blame or finding faults. Rather, we are invested in helping you to understand your experiences so that you can improve your relationships.
Therapy Allows You To Examine, Understand, And Repair Your Relationships
At bareWell, we operate from the premise that healthy relationships are the cornerstone of well-being. The model for healthy relationships begins in therapy. We hope you can work closely with one of our clinicians who is invested in helping you identify harmful patterns, explore emotional vulnerabilities, and build your confidence so you can learn to establish healthy, safe, and supportive relationships.
Beginning with a history of your attachments (or early bonds), we will tailor relationship therapy sessions to help you understand cycles of behavior and teach the skills needed to cultivate meaningful connections. Because the therapeutic relationship is the foundation for all of our treatment approaches at bareWell, we are committed to instilling a sense of authenticity, acceptance, and emotional congruence in each and every session.
Working from this framework of Interpersonal Therapy (IPT), wherein trust between client and clinician is essential, we aim to reflect healthy relational patterns throughout sessions so that you can have a working model for cultivating your relationships outside of therapy.
We also use tenets of Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT), developed by Sue Johnson, which is a therapeutic approach that explores past and current relationships with the goal of helping people come to terms with past traumas and current fears and begin to have “corrective emotional experiences,” through the safe and secure therapeutic relationship.
When you can identify and regulate your emotions while learning to safely communicate them, you’ll know how to break unhealthy patterns and express yourself without fear of rejection or abandonment. In addition, you will learn the value of boundary-setting and fostering mutual respect in your relationships so that you can strike a meaningful inner balance. Soon, it will become natural to communicate your needs in such a way that you will also feel empowered to meet the needs of those around you.
And at the foundation of our relationship therapy is the creator of attachment theory himself, John Bowlby, who promoted the world-changing idea that relationships—familial, platonic, and intimate—are at the core of many mental health issues. By exploring early attachment injuries, you’ll have a better understanding of where you may have become stuck in long-held maladaptive patterns that you have mimicked in various relationships throughout your life.
The potential for love exists in all kinds of relationships, and therapy can help you develop the confidence to seek out and feel worthy of that love. It is possible to foster healthy, safe, fun, exciting, and supportive relationships in all areas of your life, and we look forward to showing you how at bareWell.
Perhaps you’re considering seeing a relationship therapist, but you still have some concerns…
With all this talk of attachment, I’m worried that relationship therapy will lead me to believe that my parents were somehow unhealthy or that my childhood was bad.
At bareWell, we have no intention of blaming your parents for mental health issues or implying that your childhood was bad. Instead, we want to help you understand how early relationship patterns shaped who you are today so that you can form the strongest and healthiest connections possible.
As was so perfectly stated by therapist Lori Gottlieb, who wrote the popular 2019 book, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone: “The purpose of inquiring about people’s parents isn’t to join them in blaming, judging, or criticizing their parents. In fact, it’s not about their parents at all. It’s solely about understanding how their early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits).”
Can I attend relationship therapy with my partner?
Relationship counseling is meant to be individual, whereas couples therapy would be more appropriate for you and your partner. While we do offer couples counseling services, it’s important to keep in mind that understanding your attachments in individual sessions is not about just about fixing your intimate relationship—it’s about improving all of your relationships. We aim to tailor relationship therapy sessions to you and you alone, and that would make it difficult to accommodate the needs of both you and your partner in session. If during our work together we determine that couples therapy is recommended, we will provide you with the resources and referrals you need.
My intimate partnership is really strong, but there are other relationships in my life that need work—do you think I could still benefit from counseling?
Absolutely. All of us have relationships outside of our romantic partnerships that impact the way we live and think. Relationship therapy gives you a chance to explore the long-term effects of your early attachments and connections with family and friends.
Learn To Reconnect With Yourself So That You Can Better Connect With Others
If you have a relationship in your life that you need to explore and/or resolve, therapy at bareWell can help you understand your attachments. To schedule a free, 15-minute consultation or learn more about our services, please fill out our contact form.
