If you and your partner are struggling and need help to rebuild your relationship, this article will provide 3 things you might want to consider.
Relationship Therapy – Given a willingness to work on a marriage, most people can make their marriages satisfying again. No one begins as a perfect partner. Marriage depends on a number of skills, such as being able to understand yourself, understand your partner, fight well, problem solve, and negotiate differences. Sometimes patterns we learned in our families growing up aren’t effective, but are carried over to a marriage. And sometimes the stresses of life make it difficult to stay happily married.
Partly, marital therapy is about partners working to see each other as people, to understand where they are coming from, and to negotiate those differences that can be negotiated and accept those differences that cannot. If you have a marital problem, call a couple therapist and make an appointment
Finding a couple therapist is easy, but use caution. Be sure the person has specific experience in couple therapy, as marriage and family therapists do. Beginning couple therapy is not easy. For most people, it’s hard to begin to share with a person you don’t know about marital difficulties, and it’s hard not to be discouraged as you argue about these issues at first in front of a therapist. Couples with marital distress are often discouraged and have trouble believing that couple therapy can help. But couples who begin marital therapy begin to create a process for overcoming their difficulties. Sometimes the resolution of problems happens very quickly, though more typically a longer period is needed. For most, it’s hard to work on these problems at first, but ultimately that becomes easier and problems are resolved. Source: AAMFT
Be Kind with Your Speech – Sometimes it’s not what we say but, rather, how we say things. Take a moment to really consider what your partner is going through and speak to them with loving kindness. Consider a time when you were going through something similar and see how you might support your partner in a way that would have felt good for you in your own time of need. If what they are experiencing is affecting you in a negative way, you may want to contemplate what you’re feeling inclined to say to them before doing so. Run your communication through these questions in your mind prior to verbalizing it: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Do I want to be right or do I want to have peace? . Source: Chopra
Relationship as Koan – Every human being with whom we seek relatedness is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being. No technique will achieve relatedness. I am impossible to get along with; so is each one of you; all our friends are impossible; the members of our families are impossible. How then shall we get along with them? … If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. The koan is an invitation to enter into reality. In the end, to love another requires dropping all our narcissistic agendas, movies, hopes, and fears, so that we may look freshly and see “the raw other, the sacred other,” just as he or she is.
In relationship, it is two partners’ greater beings, gradually freeing themselves from the prison of conditioned patterns, that bring about this decisive defeat. And as this starts reverberating through their relationship, old expectations finally give way, old movies stop running, and a much larger acceptance than they believed possible can start opening up between them. As they become willing to face and embrace whatever stands between them—old relational wounds from the past, personal pathologies, difficulties hearing and understanding each other, different values and sensitivities—all in the name of loving and letting be, they are invited to “enter into reality.” Then it becomes possible to start encountering each other nakedly, in the open field of nowness, fresh and unfabricated, the field of love forever vibrating with unimagined possibilities. Source: LionsRoar
Use these tips above to begin building and strengthening your relationship right away. If you have any questions, contact us here.
Contact:
Gina Vanderham Psychotherapy Practice
470 Granville St #830
Vancouver, BC V6C 1V4
(604) 733-7428
