Individuals In Relationships
how to recover and create a new relationship
Individuals In Relationships
Do you feel hopeless about your relationship? Do you feel like the only one working on your relationship? Have you tried to get your partner to come into therapy with you to repair the relationship and met with resistance? Relationships often go through dormant stages where power struggles develop. The relationship can disentegrate further if nothing changes….
Individuals in relationships can change to tone of their relationship by making a few changes.
The good news is that you don’t need your partner to come into therapy with you. If that surprises you then you may not be aware of the ways that change happens. Change can happen with both people intending and working for change… or it can happen when only one person changes.
So how can one person change the relationship?
When you’re in a relationship with another person you are constantly interacting and reacting to each other. If you change what youy’re doing they will automatically change what they’re doing. In many cases this is an easier task to accomplish than to try to get someone else to change when they resist it. It happens automatically.
People don’t always have the intention to come into therapy. People are motivated by pain more often than gain. Many times I will get a phone call from a man who says his wife just left him after 15 years of marriage and he doesn’t know why. He is devastated and wants her back so he comes in to see me and we start to figure out what the problems were in the marriage. The fact that he is taking charge of his life and working on changing some things in himself makes him more attractive to her and she is curious about what therapy is so she starts working with me as well. They start to resolve some long standing issues in their marriage which have never been addressed (neither of them had been in therapy before).
This happens quite frequently. Whether or not a couple can get back together depends on many things. What therapy does provide is a way to see what you bring to relationships and helps you to change that if you want to. We are all unconscious of our own process until a neutral party points it out to us.
The truth is that you can create many relationships – with the same person, depending on where we are coming from. We change as we grow and mature and our desires and preferences change as well. As you start to take better care of yourself, starting with therapy your partner will likely start to notice some positive differences in you. This can be the first step in breaking old, outdated patterns that resulted in spiraling down into anger and withdrawal. Many of the couples that I work with come in periodically when things start feeling tense and they sense that they need to change something or that one person is having an issue that they are not discussing.
A good relationship keeps current with each partner’s current needs. When this doesn’t happen feelings of resentment and deadness start to creep into the relationship. There are some simple things you can change that will have a big impact in your relationship and make you feel different from the inside. When you are communicating from more confidence and clarity others will notice. This will reinforce your confidence even more. I have worked with hundreds of individuals who are in relationships and started coming in alone first because their partner was not ready. In more than half of those situations the partner wanted to come in eventually because they sensed changes in their partner and were curious about that.