Can Individual Therapy Help You Build Happier Relationships?

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The Main Relationship Problems

You’re afraid to be hurt again. You hesitate to be vulnerable in front of your partner because you just don’t want to be rejected again. You find yourself guarded and defensive when your partner asks you questions about previous relationships. You don’t understand why you’re so uncomfortable. Three major factors make you feel that way: fear of emotional intimacy, past trauma, and failures of past relationships. Individual therapy will help you understand, heal, and make new choices, which will empower you to develop a great relationship.

Emotional Intimacy Issues

Emotional intimacy is essential for a happy relationship, yet you find yourself squirming at the thought of sharing deep feelings. You find yourself working long hours to avoid your significant other, which leads to emotional distance. You talk about other people’s and current events in excess. You might even confuse physical intimacy with emotional.

How Therapy Helps Restore Emotional Intimacy

Therapy, in a warm and safe environment, will help you explore your insecurities and doubts, with curiosity and kindness, and without judgment. The therapeutic process will help you develop emotional intimacy with yourself, and that’s the first step in developing it with someone else.

How Psychological Trauma Impedes Relationships

Emotional, physical, and sexual trauma impacts your view of yourself and the people in your life. The mental and physical ‘freeze’ following traumatic events colors the lens through which you see life. It alters your perception of your relationships with yourself, parents, siblings, friends, and significant others. You may be experiencing general heightened anxiety, panic attacks, depression, momentary disconnection from your routine, and various, medically-unexplainable aches and pains.

Recovery from Trauma with Therapy

Releasing the trauma from the body through cutting edge methods such as EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Brainspotting is more effective than talk therapy alone. Talk therapy complements these trauma-healing methods by helping you understand the trauma you went through, how it impacts your life’s choices, and helping you heal from it in a safe environment in which you can set new, achievable goals.

Problems with Failed Relationships

Your last relationship was a disappointment—yet another piece of luggage tossed on your growing heap of emotional baggage. Once again you were misunderstood, unappreciated, and taken for granted. You’re afraid to try again, because you believe you just have bad luck in relationships. You always try so hard to make it work, and end up feeling frustrated, drained and confused.

Therapy Breaks the Pattern Behind Your Relationship Failures

In individual therapy you learn what to look for in a mate, how to identify ‘red flags,’ and how to both listen to and honor your gut feelings. Identifying patterns of relationships you are repeating helps you stop getting the same results time and time again. You’ll explore your contribution to the relationship, grieve the loss, and move on with a renewed feeling of hope and a sense of empowerment that comes from healing and inner strength.

Conclusion: Individual Therapy Helps you Build Happier Relationships

Relationships can be very challenging, but they’re equally rewarding. Difficulties in establishing emotional intimacy, psychological traumas, and failed relationships casts a shadow of doubt upon your ability to a loving relationship. Individual therapy helps you explore and overcome major barriers to building, maintaining, and enjoying a successful relationship, and helps you find and get the love you want and deserve.

Therapy: What’s Luck Got to Do with It?

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Luck is the ability to open yourself to new opportunities (Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor). Sounds easy, right? Sure, once you get past some hurdles. Many of them. Significant ones.

What separates the lucky from the frustrated? Is our fate in our hands, or is it just the luck of the draw?

Characteristics of “lucky” people

  • They create self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations and goals
  • Calm and positive disposition
  • Listen to their intuition
  • Think outside of the box
  • Resilient to in the face of bad luck
  • They make lemonade when life gives them lemons

Obstacles to good luck

  • High anxiety
  • Depression
  • Negative thinking
  • Self doubt
  • Victim mentality
  • Negative people, be they associates, companions, family members…

Therapy helps achieve good luck

Anxiety and depression are debilitating. Both slow your personal and professional functioning. When you’re highly anxious, your ability to see the unexpected is highly impaired. Therapy provides you with a safe, warm environment, which is essential to exploring the beliefs fueling your sabotaging behaviors. In therapy you will learn how to:

  • Identify the causes of your discomfort: e.g., anxiety, depression, or trauma
  • Heal through self-regulating techniques addressing your body and your feelings
  • Listen to your body, thoughts, and feelings
  • Honor your healthy needs
  • Self soothe
  • Develop resilience
  • Bounce back from negative life experiences
  • Develop a positive, achievable vision for your life

Self-help tips for creating luck

  • Develop a positive support system. Renew contact with people you like who you lost touch with
  • Experiment with new things regularly. E.g., volunteer, get a new hobby, take a class, play, etc.
  • Track your progress in a journal
  • Reward yourself when accomplishing each step in your plan
  • Decide that you can proactively create your ‘luck’
  • Get into therapy. It’ll help you heal and perfect your plan

The Takeaway

You have the power to improve your luck by getting more proactively involved in designing and living the life you want. There will be obstacles along the way, however, your approach to removing the barriers determines your outcome. Finding the positive in negative situations, and deciding to move forward, rather than staying stuck, will do wonders for your quality of life.

Good Luck!