Some psychological concepts are saying that the relationship is a transaction (exchange of costs and benefits), others that it is our biological heritage in the form of drive. I agree, but there is something more, which we call love, and I’m not talking about falling in love phase, but this warm feeling in the heart when you’re with someone really close, when we open ourselves to each other and our “true self” contact with “true self” of another human being. We talk so much about love, everyone needs it but what does it mean to really love, can we love when our hearts are wounded, when we live in a state of anxiety, when we do not accept ourselves, not to mention the acceptance of another person? How to draw the line between taking care of ourselves, maintaining our own identity, satisfying our own needs and giving to other people without abusing ourselves? To all these questions there will be different answers for each of us. There is no single recipe for love and successful relationship, but what we can do is to heal our wounded soul, the heart, and make it a “management centre” instead of the head. We can learn, what we haven’t been taught in school, neither form our parents, how to communicate with another person.
During therapy sessions aimed at improving the relationship, we deal with such topics as:
• Becoming aware of feelings and beliefs that block our heart, healing the wounds of the past, unlocking emotions.
• Projections-matrices of the past and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Loving ourselves, self-esteem, self-acceptance, working with the inner critic.
• Understanding another person, empathy, forgiveness.
• Jealousy. What causes it and how to deal with it.
• What is freedom and how to give it ourselves to each other? Separateness, individuality, while living together.
• Ways to constructive communication, identifying feelings, needs and their expression.
• Appreciation of others and respect toward ourselves and to others, instead of complaining, criticizing and claims, appreciation of what we have and what we receive.
• Ways to solve everyday problems.
Therapeutic relationship-oriented sessions can include the following methods:
• Roleplaying.
• Working on cognitive scripts and beliefs.
• Deep bodywork in the form of meditation or breathing exercises.
• Philosophical and existential discussions.
• Exercises in communication.
• Behavioural techniques.
Authentic therapeutic relationship.
We work in a real experience of the relationship between therapist and client. We are trying to create experimentally a relationship which is a real encounter between two people who can hear and see each other. Not only physically, but who can see deeper, see the feelings, intentions, all that is between the words. When we manage to create such a relationship with another person, we realize that others also can see and often have something important to say that is beautiful, different from us, but very interesting. It is even more interesting when together with another person we begin to create something that we both agree on, what we want, and our life suddenly has a meaning in a touch, a word or in one look in the eyes.
