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19th March 2024 

MARRIAGE, COUPLE & RELATIONSHIP COUNSELLING


In our yearning for love and connection, we find that when we have it, we want our own space again; when we have our space, we cannot bear to be alone. Negotiating the closeness and distance with a partner can be a great challenge. As exciting and blissful as it can be sometimes, the process of intimacy can at times be terrifying and unbearable.

We can cling on to the hope of meeting the perfect soul mate as we go through a succession of relationships in a world where things are easily replaced, upgraded and traded for the latest model. The dream, the hope and the potential of marriage often turns to disappointment as the reality never quite matches the fantasy. We start taking each other for granted, become less attentive and less appreciative of each other. We might think we are with the wrong person and are incompatible. We may have affairs and look outside to find what we have lost and have been missing with our partner.

We may want to have children as the fruit of our love and then feel trapped by demands on our time and energy. Sometimes they can be disabled; sometimes we lose them and sometimes we are unable to conceive and go through IVF, then adoption or decide not to have children and live with any regret that haunts us when the biological clock grinds to a halt.

Marriage is a big commitment. The wedding is expensive and it is big business; unfortunately, so is divorce.

Many of us know the pain of heart break. It can feel like losing a limb or having actual pain in the heart itself. We can feel torn apart and destroyed through the often brutal process of separation and divorce, leaving us feeling lost, lonely and desperate and messing up our children with our mess.

We may get to a place of wondering why we seem to keep repeating similar relationship patterns with other people as if they are the same person. We may notice that we are repeating certain themes from our parents’ relationship in ours.
This is often failure to realise that this threshold we reach can lead to a deeper and richer connection with our existing partner if we can stay with the process of getting to know each other, it is possible discover the real person we are with the real person that we are and who we are to each other.

It can be very difficult to this when we are enmeshed in arguments, feeling guilty, resentful frightened, angry, hurt and unable to see the wood for the trees. At this point, the daunting, exposing and courageous step of seeing a couple counsellor can help us navigate through the obstacles we keep coming up against, the quagmires of entrenched patterns we get stuck in, not to mention how our children’s lives start to reflect our relationship conflicts as we see them acting out.

My hope is that I can help you find a way to nurture and regenerate your relationship, taking it to a new level where falling in love with your partner can happen again and again; the difficulties that emerge can be attended to and worked through in a mutually supportive way. A deeper level of trust, communication and commitment becomes possible. Marriage and partnership can be a spiritual and profoundly soulful experience.