– Relationship Counseling for Yourself

Last Updated on September 14, 2015 by Chris Roberts

USING RELATIONSHIP COUNSELING TO INTEGRATE YOUR LIFE

When people typically think of relationship counseling, they think of it in terms of having conversations with other important people in their lives.  In many ways, relationship counseling is about helping people to integrate different people into their personal life and schema.  We all have individual ways of making our own lives work, and trying to cope with and live happily with other people can cause all kinds of chaos and craziness.  Most people are well aware of this aspect of life and relationship counseling.

However, relationship counseling can also be a means to integrate all the various aspects of our individual lives.  At each age of our life, we have different ways of looking at and relating to the world.  For instance, when we are 5 years old, our parents are the central point of orientation and authority in our lives.  When we are 15 years old are parents at still an important part of our lives, but our friendships and our social circles become just as influential.  In the same way, who we are in relationship with changes as we get older and change.  Our best friend at 5 years old may not be in our life anymore when we are 15 years old.  Where we go to church, who are parents are, and what we want to become changes as we move through life.  Who we are at 22 years old is not all that makes us up.  Who we are at 22 is the combination of who we were at 5 years old, at 15 years old, and at 19 years old.  Sometimes, this is not as easy to see.

Relationship counseling can be a means to help individuals remember and reincorporate who they have been throughout their lives.  Many people are familiar with the concept of not remembering much of their life when they were in elementary school, or wanting to block out certain memories from high school.  This is normal and not necessarily a problem.  But where there are certain memories or certain periods of our lives where we don’t want to remember, it can lead to other issues.   It can sound as innocuous as, “Oh, I don’t like to think about high school, I don’t like how I was back then.”

The problem with blocking out certain periods of our life is that we lose touch with who we were back then, and we lose out on all the relationships and the ways we related to people during that part of our lives.  We can’t be 32 years old without also being 12 and 19 and 25 years old at the same time.  Our memories and our relationships make us who we are today.  Sometimes just being willing to enter back into those times of our lives is the best way to handle current issues or struggles.  Sometimes understanding how we handled situations back then can give us the best insight on how to deal with issues in the present.  Sometimes just learning how we chose to avoid those memories can give us the input for how we are handling current stressors.

Relationship counseling does not have to mean sitting across from another person and working out frustrations with them.  Relationship counseling can mean dealing with different aspects of your life that you have chosen to ignore for many years.  It can mean looking back at who you were back then and smiling at that 15 year old free spirit!

If you are looking for relationship counseling in Nashville, Tennessee please feel free to give us a call.  We would be happy to work with you, or point you in the direction of someone else in the Nashville area!