Relationships that are bad for you

Many people are heard to say ‘I am in a personal relationship with someone who I love but I know they are bad for me.  I keep trying to get out but keep coming back.  Nothing changes and yet I can’t seem to let go’.

This happens in intimate sexual relationships but also with friends, acquaintances or family members.  Intimate relationships  are the ones which often cause the most distress, since we hold so many myths of what we ’should’, ‘must’ or ‘ought’ to have in terms of romance or where we should be believe we should be  ‘going’ in our lives.

Logically, you may know that a certain relationship is not good for you. Emotionally, you just can’t seem to break away – and if you do, the pain is too great to stay away.  This yo-yo-ing only lowers your self-esteem and results in you lowering your standards of how you wish and know you want to be treated.  Identifying and removing the emotional blocks that keep you in this pattern can not only be liberating but open your path to create relationships with people that are truly nurturing for you.

What can you expect from relationship counselling?

Relationship Counselling can be enormously helpful to couples or between family members who struggle to resolve issues on their own. When emotions are high, opinions differ and the stakes are high, it becomes more difficult to address difficult issues. This can come as a surprise to people in long-term relationships; they wonder if indeed their relationship can mend if they are unable to work through this alone. The reality is that a skilled facilitator can assist you with relationship advice to look at both the ‘content’ of the problem, but most importantly the ‘process’.

The content of the problem is the issue you are facing. It might be an event, conversation, action or behaviour that has violated the rules (explicit and implicit) of the relationship. Most couples get caught in the trap of going over the issue repeatedly in order to seek understanding, apologies or assuaging the fear that things are ruined. The challenging fact for couples is that the real thing to be examined – especially if they want to stay together – is the process i.e. how they communicate, and the dynamics of the relationship. This is where a skilled facilitator in the form of a relationship counsellor can help. They will encourage you to talk to each other, examine how each of you feels when your partner says or acts in a certain way and encourage each of you to overcome your discomfort and say what needs to be said. It can be enormously valuable to couples – or other family members – to have this intervention. It avoids members walking out in frustration and repeating patterns that are detrimental to resolving differences.

Relationship Troubles – Where do you start?

Relationship troubles often leave a couple floundering for ways to work through the inevitable mis-communication that results once troubles begin. Sometimes it is obvious to both partners what the problems are – an event may have happened which becomes the reason for the tension; other times a pattern has developed which triggers responses in either or both partners, resulting in conflict.

When communication is at an all time low, where do you start? Firstly, become clear in your own mind what your feelings and thoughts are about the situation. What has happened that has caused you or your partner to react negatively? Examine what you think your part is in causing or exacerbating the issue. Approach your partner with a request to find way to tackle the problem – at this stage, avoid blaming or getting into the problem. Agreement about how you will tackle the issue is helpful in ‘taking the heat’ out of a potential impasse. Blaming or criticism always results in defensiveness; getting agreement about wanting to resolve the problem, together with ways to approach it, are constructive and reinforce the commitment both of you need to have to examine the inevitable challenges before you.