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More Joy for Relationships

The roads on which we travel can be rich and they can also be rocky. Our interactions, whether in passing with someone at the grocery store or within intimate or long-term family relationships, are a source of joy or despair. Relationships are built on patterns that we often don’t see. They involve our very bodies, energy, and nervous systems. We now understand how the formation of our nervous systems and their interactions with the outer world and other people form the basis of our relationships. We are a collection of neural cells firing in some unique ways, yet each one of us is also much greater than just a collection of cells. We are beings that both incorporate and transcend our physiology. We form systems with each other. Our paths run together and they cross.

Relationship counseling is creative, dynamic teamwork. Together, we uncover distressful patterns. I help you repair your nervous system with somatic and psychotherapeutic interventions. As hurtful communication is transformed to compassionate communication, trust is deepened. Researcher, professor and popular author, Deborah Tannen, describes relationship work this way: “Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.”

In therapy, appreciation for the individual within the bonds of the relationship is developed. We explore shared and individual values. When emotions emerge, they can lead us to rewarding insights. Humor and laughter help to heal old wounds. Throughout life, our relationships shape our journeys. Psychotherapy is one of the places to create the joy now and for the long term. Therapy itself provides a positive relationship, that is, as the poet Hugh Ogden wrote: “as quick and lasting as a human heart upon my heart”.
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Now I understand that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. - Willa Cather — Now I understand that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
– Willa Cather

All intimate relationships require some degree of magic, because magic, not reason and will, accomplishes what the soul needs. - Thomas Moore — All intimate relationships require some degree of magic, because magic, not reason and will, accomplishes what the soul needs.
– Thomas Moore

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“Ubunto” is the essence of being human. A person is a person through other persons. You can’t be human in isolation. You are human only in relationships. - Archbishop Desmond Tutu — “Ubunto” is the essence of being human. A person is a person through other persons. You can’t be human in isolation. You are human only in relationships.
– Archbishop Desmond Tutu

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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. - Carl Jung — The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
– Carl Jung

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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. - Thomas Merton — The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
– Thomas Merton

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