Building Strong Relationships

Relationships provide the potential for deep satisfaction and pleasure, and when they are going well, will contribute to a person's overall sense of well-being and ease. Relationships also carry the potential for substantial pain and distress.
When an important relationship is suffering, depression and anxiety may often result. Therefore, learning effective skills for negotiating relationships is very important. The family is our first training ground in how to have relationships.
The family provides the template when we are learning how to communicate, resolve conflict, cope with difficult feelings, get and give support, and express nurturance and affection.

We model from caretakers, and practice with siblings or other children. If we were lucky, we had good teachers. However, very often people do not have good role models who demonstrate these important skills.
The strategies they learned may have worked well within their family or when they were children, but don't work when applied to a different relationship and at a different age.
Then when you have two people in a relationship each applying his or her own idiosyncratic methods of negotiating relationships, it's easy to see why there can be so much misunderstanding and frustration.

In my experience providing couple therapy, I usually find that problems between partners are caused either by a lack of information about the skills needed to have healthy relationships, or by a misapplication of strategies learned in the past to a current situation where they are not effective.
There are many important skills which are needed to maintain a close, satisfying relationship, including asking for what you want, negotiating a solution, listening with empathy and caring, or resolving past pain in the relationship.
It is common that people have never learned how to perform these kinds of skills. Others may have given up trying because past attempts in these areas were met with frustration and disappointment. However, if we want to truly be close in our relationships, it may be necessary to learn and use these skills.

When I begin working with a couple, I assess what the individuals need to learn in order to achieve or maintain intimacy in the relationship and teach them those skills. Some of the skills I teach include:

• how to listen to your partner without becoming defensive
• how to build trust in the relationship
• how to resolve old experiences of hurt and pain
• how to express anger and pain in a healthy and safe manner
• how to resolve differences and stop having the same fight over and over
• how to develop good habits (and break bad ones) to keep relationships healthy