Noel Bell offers couples counselling in London. Are you encountering problems with your primary relationship and undergoing stress?
Couples are increasingly seeking counselling services given the increased stresses and demands of the modern world, busy careers, childcare responsibilities and the consequential impact on personal relationships.
See my articles on overcoming fear of abandonment and when sex stops happening in your relationship.
See also my interview with Laura Heck discussing the application of the Gottman Institute method couples therapy.
A useful map for understanding the stages of love is to view iterations comprising the following; lust, romantic and attachment love. The most challenging stage can be attachment love, when the real work of emotional intimacy starts and when the connection deepens. This is when the real dance of your relationship emerges. Each person needs to be helped to be able to see their own affect dysregulation and how this causes conflict in the relationship. In fight/flight activation people lose their their emotional skills. If we can understand another person’s emotions and attachments, their behaviours can seem more understandable.
There are many different initiations in relationships. Relationships can be harmonious until you discover a bad habit in your partner when the ideal gives way to reality. No relationship gives us a safe haven feeling all the time. This can be the point when the work begins to address what is really happening. In practice, what often happens is that you stop communicating with each other. The key in couples counselling is to start talking to each other again and to repair bonds.
How many times have we heard people say You are not the person I feel in love with? In a relationship you are being challenged to engage in unconditional love and the challenge is to open the communication channels once again and to address historical resentments.
We need the basic elements of a relationship to comprise of (emotional) accessibility, responsiveness and emotional engagement. When our partner is not listening to us when we are trying to get heard, has their eyes focused on their phones or in a book, those elements are triggered. They are not accessible, not being responsive and are not emotionally engaged in that moment. Every relationship, no matter how high functioning, has such moments of disconnection. That’s not a problem if there’s a way back and people can move into repair mode with each other. Walt Whitman said “we were together, I forget the rest“, and this nicely encapsulates that resilience. The capacity to reach another person emotionally is the most precious resource we can have.
Noel Bell is an integrative psychotherapist and is registered and accredited as a psychotherapist with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). The UKCP is the UK’s professional body for the education, training and accreditation of psychotherapists. Call Noel now on 07852407140
See also