Insights from Aware Counselling
Welcome to the Aware Counselling blog, your resource for thoughtful perspectives on relationships and personal growth. Here, we share insights, practical advice, and expert knowledge.
Navigating relationship stages
Relationships have a life of their own and as such they go through developmental stages just as we do as individuals. Early in my career I came across The Relationship Institute and their model: Developmental Couple Therapy and I decided to do their training. It is still a lens that I love to look through at many common issues which couples commonly struggle with.
Here is a bit about the phases of development:
In the beginning all our energies go into bonding and symbiosis, also known as the beautiful honeymoon phase, where we can feel like one soul in two bodies, want to be together as much as possible and explore our sameness. This is the place where most written love stories and movies end and we often don’t have good maps for the next stages of our love relationships.
Sooner or later, the first differences rear their heads, and we need to grapple with the beginnings of differentiation: recognizing that my partner is different from me, wants different things, reacts in ways I find difficult and so on.
This is often a make or break it phase, especially when one partner wants to stay in a symbiotic relationship, and the other partner wants to expand, have more freedom or feels restricted.
If couples stay together, eventually the relationship can become a secure base from which we can explore the world, focus on projects or have children. But even though we might have thought that we are ready, this can bring up all our attachment wounds and insecurities or lead to giving too little energy to the „we“ and too much emphasis on the individual „I“ wishes and needs. Old wounds may surface again, and we often feel increasingly disconnected from our partner.
Everyone moves at different rhythms through these phases.
In relationship counselling we identify where each partner is at or maybe feels stuck in. This helps immensely to focus on what we need to ask of our partners and of ourselves.
Finding understanding for our own struggle as much as for that of our partner and truly hearing each other is the foundation on which we can build more trust and better communication. And then we can bring in different strategies to deal with negative dynamics and transform them into a deeper bonding and intimacy.
Understanding conflict and power dynamics
Conflict is a natural part of any relationship, but how we manage it defines its health.
coming soon