Relationship/Marriage Counseling
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Amazing changes are possible in relationships when both people are willing to open their minds and hearts to what needs to be done for the changes they seek. The first, most important step is to be willing to see things differently. To expand and explore one’s own past and present perceptions and assumptions. Individual self-awareness and insight is critical in healing a wounded relationship. No matter how lost you think the relationship is, or how broken, hurt or ‘hopeless’ you feel, experiencing the process of Transformative Counseling helps your ability to be strong and confident and able to deal with whatever is necessary in your personal relationship in ways you never thought possible.

There are many causes and influences involved in the struggles of a relationship and it can seem at times almost impossible to imagine being able to successfully heal the wounds, resolve the issues and come to a place where there is understanding, support and respect. However, with the right tools, focus and commitment, extraordinary changes can happen. You don’t have to give up what can be so real for both of you.

When both partners are open and willing, partnerships can heal and change in extraordinary ways. Imagine being able to communicate with confidence and clarity.  Imagine believing in your ability to handle anything you need to in your relationship. Imagine a comfort, security and closeness that supports and protects an experience of warmth and deep intimacy in all areas of your relationship. Imagine finally knowing you are being truly heard.  Develop a relationship where what you feel, what you need, whatever holds importance to you, will also hold great value in the relationship and be respected by your partner. Learn how to understand your own feelings and the experience from the other’s point of view. Understand your partner, what they are feeling and trying to say. Learn to work in a positive way with each other through all of your issues. Resolve conflicts and successfully achieve solutions. Work on Communication, trust, truth, emotional and physical abuse, sexual issues, financial issues, independence and sharing, remaining individual and whole, creating health and fulfillment.

The process of healing a relationship is very unique because each person brings their own unresolved emotions, unique perceptions, self doubts and fear from their own past into the relationship. Our partner can be a mirror for us, showing us our deepest fears about ourselves. Issues of self worth, self image and self-confidence often surface. If personal issues are not identified and looked at independent of the relationship, the issues will begin to spill into the relationship. We must be healthy, strong and able to take care of ourselves before we can expect to be able to be healthy and strong for someone else. When we keep a healthy, loving, honest connection with ourselves, we can then bring that to others with great success. I offer extremely powerful and effective methods to help each person in a relationship empower their personal ability to bring the healthiest, most balanced, strong and clearly defined person forward into the partnership.

*When it’s time to “let go”                                                                                                                                                                                          

An important aspect of relationships is the moment when it is time to “let go”. I can help guide you through those times when relationships end, or must change significantly. I help you find your own abilities to understand clearly what is best for you. Leaving a relationship can be one of the most painful and frightening experiences and the discomfort that can follow can be extremely difficult to bear. Learn what to do during these times and gain the confidence to know you can and will get through to the other side of a relationship that has or is ending. Learn what you can do to be able to follow through with choices in a relationship. Finding out what works and what doesn’t work is critical to continued positive development of any situation. You want to know you are moving consistently towards your goal rather than experiencing the cycles many relationships continue to repeat over and over. How you end a relationship is as important as how you build one. Learn how to let go with compassion, self-care, confidence and trust. It is not an ending – it is a transition and transitions always expand our view of ourselves and life. The lessons and gifts gained from what is ending ignites new experiences that take you closer to that which represents your alive, awake, true and authentic self filled with your desires, passions and dreams.

 

Specific Marriage and Relationship Issues
                                             
Communication

Communication is essential for the health and strength of any relationship. It is not only critical for building and protecting a solid, clear, open, workable connection but it also stimulates a deeper intimacy and awareness of one another. Learn the words and approaches that open the door of communication rather than shut them. Learn how changing simple wording completely changes one’s ability to communicate with your partner. Learn what helps you to be truly heard and learn how to listen. When each person knows they have been heard as well as have the ability to know when we have heard our partner, transformations in the relationship can be amazing. Imagine being able to discuss anything together and to successfully find needed resolutions. Learn how to accurately and clearly communicate what you think, feel and need. It is rarely a positive outcome to leave the other person to ‘fill in the blanks’.  When one partner comes to their own conclusions about the other’s thoughts, intentions, needs, the result is influenced tremendously by their own fear, doubt, anxiety and need. Defining our own thoughts, feelings and needs clearly and honestly to our partner is critical for a successful and healthy relationship. Just as critical is our ability to ‘hear’ the true thoughts and feelings of the other. Communication gives power to a relationship. Without communication, the ability for other areas of a relationship to function is greatly inhibited.    

Co-Dependency

It is common to take on Co-Dependent patterns of thought and behavior in our relationships. Remaining strong in one’s own identity and personal responsibility in a relationship can be challenging. Finding where we are showing co-dependent behavior and thinking is very important in healing and strengthening a relationship as well as becoming healthy individuals. Co-dependency refers to the way in which a person in a relationship identifies with the other person’s needs, feelings, their situations and experiences in their life. Their sense of self and what is going on around them identifies more with the other person than with themselves. Often the person feels complete only through thinking about, fixing, fulfilling the other person’s needs. They feel powerful from having power in the other person’s life, decisions, thoughts, self-perception, etc. The co-dependent person develops a complex and organized framework where they build their sense of self based on and depending on the other person’s needs and feelings. Co-dependent people in a partnership identify with and are fulfilled through their partner and they become extremely invested in the other person’s experience. Co-dependents are happy if the other person is happy – in pain if the other person is in pain. Co-dependency is a process of fixing, focusing on, fulfilling, making the other person OK. Making sure the other person is OK is the primary focus and sacrificing one’s own needs and well-being in order to do so becomes the most acceptable and preferable choice. They give up their time, energy, needs and desires in order to fulfill those of their partners. When someone with co-dependent behavior does attempt to fulfill their own needs, the choices ultimately revolve around the other person and are careful not to effect them.

Co-dependency establishes a measure by which the co-dependent person gages the level of their own success, their power, their inner peace, their happiness, their safety, their achievement or failure.

Co-dependency is very attached to one’s own doubts about themselves and questioning if they are doing ‘enough’ or being ‘enough’ for the other person. They feel a great deal of anxiety about hurting the other person, failing them, disappointing them. Codependent people often feel an underlying sense of guilt, intense self-judgment and high self-expectations. They have a fear of looking at what they need to see within themselves and in their own lives and it becomes easier to fix the other person than to heal one’s own wounds. Codependency is often a perfect distraction from their own unresolved issues.

Transformative Counseling addresses these patterns of thinking and behavior and guides each person to their own self-awareness process. Having a clearly defined sense of self and personal identity is extremely critical to a healthy, strong relationship. A Peaceful Way offers individual and couple counseling for the development of this healing and development process.

Healthy Boundaries

Boundaries represent our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual space. Healthy boundaries are ones that define our own, not the other person’s. Being clearly defined on all of these levels and being able to communicate as well as respect and stand by them reflects a healthy sense of one’s autonomy and personal identity. We create healthy boundaries when we reflect our own needs, guidelines, feelings, beliefs and values and we are empowered by them rather than limited by another’s comfort, belief in or approval of them. It is essential to be fully aware of what our own boundaries are. We cannot ask another person to respect what we are not absolutely clear of for ourselves. Transformative Relationship Counseling helps each person discover how to define their own, individual sense of themselves including their values, their timing, their physical boundaries, their sense of honor and respect, what feels threatening, dangerous, offensive, as well as how and when they define physical and emotional closeness. Boundaries are a critical component in any relationship and must be strongly rooted in the foundation upon which each person, as individuals, and as part of the essence of the relationship, develop, expand and express.

Power Struggles

In any relationship, each person wants to be heard, be effective and have an influence in what happens. Each person wants to feel they have an important role and that what they think and feel matters. They each want to be respected for their needs and desires. They want a sense of power in the relationship to fulfill their goals for the relationship, the home, the family and themselves. Power Struggles will occur in relationships. They are the “struggle’ to take a stand, to have an impact, to fulfill their own need and to have their feelings recognized and represented. These are natural experiences with partnerships and can be resolved positively with the right attitudes and approaches. However, power struggles develop into problems when the need to “win” ignites - when there is a ‘winner’ or ‘loser’, when someone is ‘right’ and someone ‘wrong’, when someone’s thoughts or feelings are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - when the issue becomes a push/pull with the fear of not getting enough, not being important or losing something about oneself. There are many reasons for power struggles, but what is consistent when they do occur is the immediate disconnection between each person, halting any movement towards resolution. A fight to ‘win’ instantly immobilizes productivity on any level and destroys the strength that comes from the union of two people and the positivity and creative force available through an open channel. Power struggles are a result of triggering each person’s fears, self-doubts, resentment, unresolved anger, hurt, self-judgment, guilt and self hatred – the exposure of the more fragile areas of our ego.  I work with relationships to help each person understand what is being triggered for them personally, where it is coming from, what it represents and how to responsibly deal with the emotions triggered.

Power struggles stimulate each person’s ‘fight’ to get what they think is right, however, in the ‘fight’ the one thing that provides true power – communication – is shut down.  Without communication, the ability to understand, listen, negotiate or resolve the issue is also shut down. Power gained through a struggle for power ‘over’ will never truly empower and will never serve a relationship in a positive way. True power is a power “with”, not a power ‘over’. I work with each person to understand their own emotions that surface and how to handle what they stimulate for them individually. I work with couples to communicate in a responsible way and to negotiate productively and positively so each person comes out a winner!

Intimacy and Sexual Issues

Each person has their own unique experience of, and feelings about intimacy – what they need in order to feel open, safe and receptive as well as what stimulates their passion, closeness and desire is personal and individual to them. There can be great confusion and loss of understanding about sex and intimacy within a relationship. Even when couples attempt to discuss the difficulties, they can both find themselves more confused and mystified than ever.  I help couples understand their own feelings and needs and help each to communicate them to their partner. I help them begin to open and strengthen their connection with one another, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It is important to explore what is blocking sexual openness and comfort. Sexual issues can often be composed of thoughts and feelings connected to many other areas of the relationship and unless they are identified, discussed, respected and resolved, any long lasting connection on a deep, joyful and fulfilling level will be greatly affected.

It is so important for men and women to be able to communicate their thoughts and feelings about sexual intimacy without projecting their own perceptions and needs onto their partner. Sexual health and fulfillment can develop from a true acceptance and compassion for the other person’s experience and being willing to integrate the truth, needs, desires and reality of the two individuals in the creation of a combined experience. Transformative Counseling explores the roots of any difficulty in connecting in an intimate way and helps to create powerful healing necessary for a most amazing, passionate and fulfilling connection of deep and joyful intimacy.

Trust

When you have attained trust, there is nothing more precious, powerful and influential.  When trust is damaged, it is devastating. Nothing is more destructive to a relationship. Once fractured, re-building trust can be immensely difficult and complicated. The process involves time and consistency and much healing. Destruction of trust has an extremely large ‘wake’, the force of which extends into most all other areas of the relationship. A relationship attempting to work through and heal trust issues needs absolute awareness by each person of what has happened and what has been affected. I provide the couple with the most powerful, direct and effective ways to work through and heal trust issues. I help couples build and protect a strong foundation of trust.

Financial Issues                                                                                                                                       

 When a person talks about money with their partner, they are communicating beyond the subject of money, they are actually communicating about their needs, desires, dreams, fear, guilt, trust and security issues, power issues, identity issues, their view of their personal success and value.  When all of this is underlying the discussion of money, it is easy to see why so much emotion, anger and frustration can surface when trying to work through financial issues with one another. Money can be a very sensitive subject and should be handled with the understanding of this. Often when a person discusses money matters, it stimulates something very personal and each person needs to learn how to separate their own triggers regarding money and be responsible for what they are all about. If that doesn’t happen, money can become the forum upon which many other relationship and personal issues are addressed on. With Transformative Counseling, you can develop the ability to deal with financial issues with your partner easily and smoothly. Financial issues in relationships can develop into strong connections of commitment and creativity that can stimulate new inspirations and goals as individuals and as a couple. 

Addictive Relationships 

An addictive relationship is characterized by patterns of thinking and behavior similar to what is found with a variety of other addictions including chemical addictions. The addiction takes on a form acted out through an intense attachment and focus on the other person in the relationship. Just like any drug, a relationship provides the fulfillment of a deep need that is identified with the other person in the relationship. The person addicted will need to satisfy themselves through certain thoughts and behavior relating to the person they are attaching this addictive thinking to. A drug provides a coping mechanism and is used to separate oneself from what is really going on, what the person really needs to look at and deal with. The relationship serves to fulfill these needs as well. The person needs the other person to fulfill what they have come to believe they need. As with any other addiction, there are many core issues including self worth, control, emptiness and fear, trauma and a strong loss of a sense of self.

The relationship is used as a means to endlessly attempt to resolve their deeper unresolved issues. The other person is used to fix what the ‘addicted’ person believes is not OK with themselves often caused from unresolved wounds from earlier in life. The ending of an addictive relationship is most often followed by another, similar relationship – in attempts to resolve what was not resolved in the previous relationship. It is a never-ending cycle until the issues underlying the attachments to certain relationships are understood. Transformative counseling will explore the dynamic of the relationship and help you discover how your “addictive cycle” expresses itself, what the deeper issues are and how to heal them.

Abusive Relationships

Abuse can happen in any relationship and it can manifest as physical and/or mental abuse and is ‘violence’ regardless. The destruction to ones spirit is extensive and grows more as abuse continues. If you are presently in an abusive relationship, and you have not been able to leave, it is not about your intelligence or your courage or your value. I have counseled many extremely intelligent and powerful women who had found themselves in abusive relationships. As time goes on the entanglement becomes more and more extensive and the strongest self identities can become enmeshed within a complicated, multilayered maze of emotional manipulation and devastation. Relationship abuse follows common cycles that continue to reinforce the sense of powerlessness and self-judgment, ‘hope’ and loss. When in an abusive relationship, no matter the perceived ‘level’ of violence, it is critical for the abused to reach out for emotional support and guidance. Abusive relationships are so full with carefully designed illusions as the abuser invents and persistently fortifies the false realities he/she needs to create, it becomes extremely difficult for the abused to remain aware of what is real and what isn’t. There is carefully structured isolation and constant fear generated perception of the abused environment and experiences.

My years of extensive experience working with domestic and relationship violence allows me to help guide anyone in an emotionally, mentally and/or physically abusive relationship through the process of healing and change. Transformative Counseling is gentle and promotes inner strength and clarity. You also learn specific ways to deal with the circumstances of the relationship. You find direction and answers and the strength and means to make the choices that are best for you and your future.

 

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