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Relationships
Your relationship with yourself is the most important one you will
ever have. Dysfunction
in your early, primary relationships causes rifts in this relationship.
You need to heal these wounds in order to sustain satisfying relationships
in the present – with yourself and others.
Psychotherapy – How it Works
In my Psychotherapy practice in Bath, UK, I have worked on the principle
that dependency causes compromise,
resentment and self-alienation. To comply, and to protect your authentic
self, you create a false self. You use other people to 'be' for you,
to live your life through. They let you down. You are acting out unresolved
childhood issues in your current relationships. This causes struggle
and conflict. You may avoid relationships, isolate and struggle with
yourself. You need to complete your growing
up.
By taking responsibility for your own life you can
confront, forgive and forget the past and, through the resulting
freedom to make your own choices and decisions, gain true independence.
Having reclaimed your authentic self, you can express that self without guilt or fear. You have meaning and purpose in your life. Then you can safely inter-depend with others – openly
and honestly. You can see yourself in
a wider social context, within which you can play a useful part.
Without meaning and purpose you feel incomplete.
Your potential lies dormant. You may feel satisfied, but not fulfilled.
Lack of purpose causes dis-ease and depression. You seek compulsive
behaviours, unhealthy relationships, codependency
and addictive substances and behaviours to fill the emptiness and
kill the pain you feel.
The psychotherapeutic relationship helps you to heal the relationships in your past. In
doing this you heal your relationship with yourself; and with others
around you. You spread love because you love yourself; fulfilling
your own needs and desires by doing what you want to do most. You
are happy because you are functioning from the centre of your being,
filling yourself from your own resources. Anxiety diminishes.
My aim in psychotherapy has been to
guide you from dependence through independence to inter-dependence;
from where you can make your unique contribution to the world around
you, and your own decisions for your life.
Couple Therapy – How It Works
You bring into your relationships the patterns
of your pasts, the people who have influenced you in your upbringing
and the behaviour you have learned from them.
In relationships you are consciously attracted to what you believe
will improve you and your life; but unconsciously you attract partners
who have similar uncompleted childhood issues. This is your psyche’s
attempt to heal the past. If you have no other models, you continue
to use self-defeating behaviour, which prevents healing and causes
conflict and blaming. You lack the tools
for managing this conflict.
I recognise your relationship as an entity
to be listened to for what it, as well as you, the partners, wants. There is an interaction between you in which the voices from your
pasts are still influencing you, which is not your
present reality; this is what you need to work with.
Heart to heart communication,
preferably within a safe environment, enables you to separate from your pasts
and to identify and satisfy your needs in the present, together
with the needs, and purpose, of your relationship. There are tools you can develop
for allowing differences, finding meeting points,
and deepening love, trust and intimacy; for achieving independence
and promoting interdependence.
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Healing Relationships
with Self and Others
Cutting Through 
the Confusion
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