Family love is like the wind: instinctive, raw, fragile, beautiful, at times angry, but always unstoppable. It is our last miracle. James McBride
Committed intimate relationships can be the greatest source of health, happiness, self-renewal, and a long life, and yet at times it is the place of profoundest misery.
I have spent many years providing couple’s therapy to rehabilitate relationships, to coach and train people to hold on to each other, to be kind and truthful especially during the tough times when life interrupts the dream or when love turns to contempt.
Nature doesn’t outfit us with consistent judgment nor perfect self-knowledge. No more so than in the hot house of an intimate relationship where growth and change is accelerated.
There is no intimacy without vulnerability and all of us bring specific vulnerabilities into our relationship – buttons to press. If our partners don’t find them our children certainly will. And the buttons that those people miss, life will find in her own way and keep representing it to us until we get it.
Sheer suffering does not teach. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise since everyone suffers. To suffer alone, however, is intolerable.
Taken in small steps, going slow and working collaboratively will almost always solve couple trouble with wise professional help as mid wife to the process.
Sometimes even one session can kickstart a simple life change or a small shift in perception, meaning and values, which can impact on those significant others, friends, children and even pets who are not directly engaged in the process.