COUPLES & RELATIONSHIP THERAPY
Healthy intimacy is when you allow people to know you truthfully, whilst maintaining a respectful sense of yourself so you don’t betray your own values or lose yourself as a result of letting someone close.
Many relationship problems stem from issues around intimacy and your experience of feeling vulnerable and not in control. They can show up as rows, increasing levels of resentment, feelings of being misunderstood or of being taken for granted, coercion and patterns of withdrawal.
If you are interested in couples or relationship therapy and would like us to make a recommendation, please complete our enquiry form or call us on 020 7323 4970.
RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS
With couples and relationship therapy at Charter we look at relationship difficulties through two simple perspectives at the same time. The first is to explore how you treat and feel about yourself as this will influence how you allow others to treat you. Having a better understanding of your relationship with yourself and learning how to better take care of your own needs will set you up to have a more satisfying relationship with someone else. The second perspective is to explore the level of respect and the effectiveness of your communication with one another.
Relationships can be made or broken by these two crucial dimensions of intimacy – communication and (self) respect – and almost always, where there are relationship difficulties, there are problems around ineffective communication, usually fuelled by poor self-esteem. This often evolves out of childhood experience and sometimes manifests as infidelity or a betrayal of trust, as inequality in the relationship or as an extreme form of control. Usually, once we have supported you to communicate more effectively and with better self-esteem, you will find that these issues can be more easily and calmly resolved.
Whether your difficulty in relationship is with a partner or a sibling, whether it’s a parent/child conflict or trouble in the step-family, whether you have fallen out with a friend, or are struggling with a work colleague, you can do something about it. Although its best to work with all those involved, its not always necessary : after all, it only takes one person to change a dance.
MARRIAGE, SEPARATION & DIVORCE
Breaking up doesn’t have to mean breaking down.
Mandy and her dedicated team of experienced therapists specialise in working with couples and families in the face of difficulty or communication breakdown. Many of the referrals are via law firms where initial advice has been sought and its helpful to work through resentments prior to undertaking the legal process of divorce.
With couples and relationship therapy here at Charter, we assess each of you separately and then together so that we have listened to your individual difficulties, giving us a sense of the dynamic between all parties and understanding what your goals might be. We then outline a plan of therapy, either for individual therapy or in a group or a workshop – we will always advocate for the support that we believe will help you the most.
Many families and couples come to us looking for help in repairing a rift when communication, trust and mutual respect have broken down, or when an addiction is present. We work with each individual involved, looking at how they can best represent themselves, and within the resulting relationship. We examine how resentments may have built up and at how normal boundaries and expectations may have given way to life’s sometimes daunting demands.
There’s no perfect formula for a ‘happy family’ or relationship but learning to communicate with an open mind and good self-esteem can vastly improve a family dynamic.
MARRIAGE & COUPLES WORK
Our marriage and couples work is based on the belief that we choose who we fall in love with, often unconsciously repeating patterns from our childhoods. A fascinating take on attraction and social interaction that encourages self-awareness and curiosity in relationship, and powerfully diffuses blame. We can explore the impact of the couple on the resulting family dynamic and unravel arguments and disagreements that may seem obvious or might be displaced so that another family member becomes scapegoated as ‘difficult’. When nothing seems to have worked to resolve the apparent problem, it might be that you haven’t yet found the real ‘problem’.
Our approach to couples and relationship therapy depends very much on the issues being presented, working in whatever format is most useful – as a family, a couple or individually.
SEPARATION & DIVORCE
A broken marriage is usually extremely painful for both parties. People often forget that the person initiating the separation can be as upset as the rejected partner, and each deserves the support that allows them to properly process the experience so that they can let go. Where children are involved it gets more complicated. Children are often the genuine victims as they are wide open to soaking up the various tensions and pain that are always an intense part of any separation or divorce, even if it doesn’t seem so, or if the intention is to protect them.
But separation and divorce don’t have to cause lasting harm, or emotional disturbance to your children if it is handled responsibly. This means communicating effectively and as adults when in all probability communication has long since broken down and resentment taken its place. It takes self-discipline and intent to achieve this and Charter can help. An experienced therapist will work with you both together and if necessary separately to ensure you feel heard and are able to properly trust the space. This allows you to begin a process of unravelling your mutual histories so that with as little blame or resentment as possible, you can both let go and move on. At this point we need to work closely with you to ensure that the loss you feel is effectively managed and you both feel supported.
Boundaries are extremely important at this point too, and the ability to hold them in the face of children asking questions is challenging. It is too easy to deliver an answer in an emotional moment, that goes on to backfire on you or on them. When either or both parents confide in their children inadvertently or otherwise, it can cause long-term damage to the child or children’s emotional and social development, and their capacity to trust and form committed and rewarding personal relationships. Thus, managing your emotions, engaging in patterns of good self-care, having boundaries and focused contact with the separating partner and having a place to talk are all useful ways to minimise the impact on children.
At Charter we can provide individual and couples sessions to work through difficult areas of communication and negotiation to enable a more harmonious break up; we can also provide support to your children through referral to one of our child/adolescent practitioners.