|
Personal and Professional Growth and Change
Using Transactional Analysis
.
Are you looking to enrich a healthy relationship, revitalize a tired one, or rescue one gone awry? We subscribe to the philosophy that at the core of all difficulties in relationships is an attachment pattern that is sub-optimal. The front page article of the magazine Scientific Mind in the spring of 2011 headlined the styles of attachment in seeking romantic love. Dr Johnston in her book Hold Me Tight, talks of the seven conversations for a lifetime of love. The book is devoted to how couples can create healthy attachments. Three conversations to recover what is lost, a turn around conversation and 3 conversations for deepening attachment and creating an enriching relationship for each partner.
Attachment is not a new concept. Dr Bowlby first wrote of it in 1952, himself raised in an aristocratic home with nannies and nurseries without much contact with his own parents, recognized the significance of how parents respond to their children and named that responsiveness as a cornerstone for how attachment patters are laid down. In David Brooks book The Social Animal, he too subscribes to the notion that it is our unconscious that is really driving our lives, and the early attachment experiences with Mom and Dad and other primary caregivers is the template that determines success in life, health and capacities for connection. If you weren't born into a family that offered you secure attachment and confidence in your loveability and worthiness, it is never too late to develop it now.
Our brains are resilient and ever changing. With responsive people in our lives, our brains create a deeper capacity to connect with ourselves and with others. We each can learn how to be responsive to ourselves in ways that helps us recover from difficult times, and we each can learn how to be a safe haven for those we love. Partners in love have a unique capacity to do for the other, what they deserved for their parents to do for them in childhood.
Each relationship is unique, and each relationship journey is unique. What is common among us all is that we have a deep longing to be known , to be seen, to be validated, to know we are worthy of love. Couples counseling is a facilitated conversation with your partner, that gives each the space and the safety to learn to engage with each other in ways that you have not, and perhaps cannot have alone.
Love is possible.
|