Individual Relationship Counselling
You have a hard time taking up space, finding your voice, and revealing vulnerability in relationships.
It’s hard for you to say no, ask for what you need, or risk any kind of conflict; you could get fired, rejected, disliked, judged. Instead, you only show your nice, positive, generous parts, overextend yourself, and silence your vulnerability. You end up feeling disconnected from your own authentic, whole self, and from satisfying relationships with others.
If we cut ourselves off from authentic connection with ourselves and with others, we suffer. We are wired for interdependence - where we can find a balance between our own needs and those of others. Individual Relationship Therapy can help you find your voice, set healthy boundaries, and truly belong: connect with others while staying true to yourself.
Why Choose Individual Relationship Counselling?
Individual Relationship Therapy can help you find more balance between an authentic connection with yourself and a sustainable connection with others. This often involves supporting you in reclaiming your power and voice and asserting healthy boundaries to foster more space for your true self in relationships. In addition, in therapy, you can practice safely expressing your vulnerability and receiving acceptance, compassion, and guidance.
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) for Relationship Issues
The core principle of EFT is to deeply engage with the flow of feelings in the body, fully experiencing emotional and bodily sensations to discover our deepest needs. This therapy addresses blocks to self-expression in relationships and works with inner critic parts that foster shame, anxiety, overextending, self-sacrificing, and self-silencing. By facilitating an embodied, emotion-focused encounter between conflicted parts of the self, EFT fosters wholeness, inner strength, and authentic, balanced connections with others.
Areas of Focus
-
Unhealthy Boundaries
You struggle with saying no, expressing your discontent, and advocating for what you need in relationships of all kinds. You overextend yourself in various ways, and then, understandably, grow resentful when you don’t get enough back. Healing involves learning how to set kind and assertive limits in relationships, and to cultivate your healthy anger, authentic voice, and personal power.
-
Avoiding Conflict
You avoid standing up for yourself in relationships or bringing grievances up that could risk conflict. You may fear that, if tensions arise, others will react harshly, won’t like you anymore, or you’ll lose the connection entirely. Therapy can help you brave engagement with the messiness of conflict for the promise of relationships that have more of you in them, and accordingly, more genuine connection.
-
Struggling With Vulnerability
You have a hard time opening up and revealing your full humanity in relationships; instead, you prefer to only show your strength and competence. You worry that if you show vulnerability and ask for help, others will judge you, reject you, or show overconcern, and you’ll feel worse. Or, you’ll feel you “owe” them. Therapy can involve healing past relational wounds that make you overly self-reliant, and support you in gradually risking vulnerability in safe relationships for the prize of being known and supported.
-
Difficulty Trusting Others
You struggle with trust in relationships; even when someone else has earned your trust, over time, you are still uncomfortable trusting or leaning on them. Or maybe you can be too trusting, ignore “red flags” in relationships, and then get hurt. Healing often involves a combination of working to heal past relational wounds involving broken trust, as well as cultivating more trust in yourself, and/or more trust in safe others, depending on what you need.
-
Losing Yourself in a Relationship
You have a tendency to sacrifice yourself and your needs for the sake of an important relationship. You are afraid of being abandoned or rejected, and so you engage in compulsive caretaking or codependency; you reason that the other won’t leave you if they need you. Healing often involves reconnecting with your own authentic self and power, setting boundaries in relationships that drain your life force, and investing in relationships in which you feel safe enough to claim both attachment and authenticity.
-
Lonely and Isolated
You feel that you lack satisfying connections or people that you can relate to and rely on. You feel sad and alone too much of the time; maybe even alien, cut off from others. Healing can involve working through the internal barriers to your ability to connect, so that you are better positioned, psychologically, to form and sustain meaningful connections.
20 Minute No-Cost Consult
I invite you to schedule a no-cost video consultation to further explore whether my approach is a match for your therapy goals.