Relationships
People seek relationship support for a variety of reasons, most typically to navigate communication interruptions, betrayal, intimacy matters, or to navigate life’s meanings. Counseling can also support the complexities of financial pressure, parenting dissimilarities, absence of emotional sustenance, and the intricacies of blended families.
You may be in a relationship, but it does not seem as nurturing as you anticipated. You may struggle, and your mind is occupied with thoughts questioning if your partner sincerely loves you, and why you do not feel confident in your relationship. You find yourself scrutinizing what your partner does or says, as you try to figure out how they truly feel about you.
Affection within relationships is an all-purpose way to explain numerous analogous things: How steadily you connect with others, the level of closeness you feel with others, and how you translate or recognize others’ regard towards you. The fidelity to which you feel comfortable being vulnerable with others is controlled by attachment.
Attachment styles are the pattern of attributes or behaviors that you have developed that reveal themselves when interacting with people — especially those with whom we share a profound emotional connection. These attachments styles are not accidental – they are the outcome of years and years of connecting to others and the natural progressions of relationships.
While it is called “attachment styles”, they are essentially more like “attachment states” - meaning we cannot alter them solely based upon how we feel. A person’s attachment style will endure, possibly for the balance of their life, unless they vigorously work on changing it.
The four primary attachment styles:
1. Secure attachment.
2. Anxious attachment.
3. Avoidant-insecure attachment.
4. Disorganized attachment.
Trauma
Perhaps you keep trying to ignore what happened to you, or possibly you’ve realized how effects from your life are currently affecting you. Maybe you feel tense and bothered by something potentially negative happening to you. Perhaps you fault yourself for what occurred or you feel nothing, as though your own feelings are not accessible.
Trauma is considered any experience that overwhelms us, and produces negative, ongoing effects on our lives. When we’re challenged by an overpowering experience, our body goes into fight or flight mode as a system of safeguarding ourselves. After the threat has completed, our body gets “stuck” and may not understand how to return to the state it was in previous to the traumatic event occurring.
Often it is not just one experience, but a sequence of events that can produce trauma. It is not so much what you go through, but how it affects you. Due to this, everyone uniquely experiences trauma; therefore, trauma care is exclusive to each person.
Anxiety
You may feel unconnected from your body, continually afraid of upsetting people in your life. Daily life feels cumbersome, and you don’t feel content or peaceful. You might separate yourself from others because those interactions feel triggering or create images of unpleasant scenarios.
Anxiety is an absolutely normal, human experience. Primarily, anxiety helps us effectively respond to threats and to accomplish deeper feelings of safety. With support, we can reclaim control how our body’s use anxiety, because it is not realistic or useful to decrease our anxiety to zero.
• You avoid opportunities that could be beneficial.
• You frequently worry about being a burden but are not certain how to express your needs.
• You do not want to frustrate anyone, so you “push through” the worry and evade relaxation.
• You second guess social interactions and avoid friends, family, and partners as well as interacting with new people.
Depression
Nothing feels good in your mind or body, and the worse you feel, the more you retract from others. Often, other people see the “physical” you and cannot tell how unhappy you feel on the inside.
There is a genetic component to depression. Those of us who have a history of depression in one’s family have a higher chance of developing depression. Environmental factors can also be a cause, such as illness, injury, financial difficulties, the loss of a loved one, or the postpartum period.
The pressure to be a happy person at all times can create and increase depression symptoms or make us feel we must be doing something wrong. Everyone goes through phases of unhappiness, and a certain level of sadness is healthy. However, sustained episodes of sadness may suggest depression.
Together we will work to discover the thinking patterns that subsidize feelings of hopelessness in order to make room for realistic thoughts that underscore your strengths and promote self-acceptance.