Relationship Issues Therapy
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The relationships we have with our peers, our friends, our relatives, and our partners can affect our mental wellbeing, and can serve as a reflection of our past experiences, and how they shaped our expectations and boundaries.
Unfortunately, those past experiences can often be negative, resulting in communication problems and argument patterns that strain our bonds with others, and doom newer relationships. Modern technology hasn’t made things easier – we often opt for long-distance calls and texts over face-to-face conversations, potentially eroding friendships, or complicating relationships through mixed signals and lack of meaningful conversation.
Recognizing and addressing relationship issues is an important part of establishing mental wellbeing. Your relationship problems can also give you a better understanding of your own mental health, and things you might want to address in therapy.
Common Relationship Issues and Mental Health
Just about every human being will experience a flawed relationship at some point in their life. For most people, flawed relationships may even become the norm.
While you shouldn’t expect yourself or anyone else in your life to think and act perfectly, it is a good idea to strive to address major relationship issues, especially if they negatively impact your life and personal health, strain your bonds with someone you care about, or contribute to problems such as low self-esteem and anxiety.
Identifying Your Relationship Problems
Healthy relationships are built on foundations of trust and mutual respect. Certain behaviors and bad habits can undermine those foundations. These include:
Communication issues:
Communication issues that contribute to eroding relationships include gaslighting, lying, deflecting criticism, becoming defensive or aggressive in response to anything negative, and isolating or running away from conversations. It can also include picking irrelevant fights or constant arguing with no healthy resolution.
Isolation or distancing:
A level of trust is required in any relationship, especially in intimate or romantic relationships. Keeping everyone at arm’s length and never displaying any level of genuine vulnerability or authenticity may “protect” you from getting hurt, but also means hurting others.
Codependency:
Codependency is a pattern of behavior and thinking in a relationship where one or both parties constantly rely on each other’s approval and validation to support their own identity. Someone in a codependent relationship may feel that they cannot exist on their own.
Lack of clear boundaries:
A lack of communication can result in a lack of clear boundaries. Establishing trust means showing vulnerability, but when that trust is taken advantage of, it can result in feelings of betrayal and hurt. Failing to establish the boundaries of a relationship means inevitably falling into the trap of violating those boundaries and destroying someone’s trust.
Unhealthy coping mechanisms:
Unhealthy coping mechanisms are ways of coping that don’t address an underlying problem, or contribute to an entirely separate problem. For example, exercise is a healthy coping mechanism for anxiety because it can help relieve feelings of anxiousness while improving your physical health. Self-medication, on the other hand, carries the risk of addiction, while often worsening symptoms of anxiety in the long-term. Unhealthy coping mechanisms can strain relationships by crushing trust through secrecy, or by hurting a friend or loved one through acts of self-destruction or self-harm.
How Mental Health Affects Relationships
It’s important to acknowledge that existing mental health problems aren’t just impacted by your past and present relationships but can also impact your relationships with others.
Depression or anxiety disorders can undermine social connections, cause irritability and anger management problems, result in giving up on conflicts to avoid them altogether rather than address them in a healthy way, contribute to desiring social isolation, or even just tank your libido, which can strain romantic relationships.
People with mental health problems may be more likely to stay in a relationship that may be manipulative or harmful to them and could be less likely to have the self-esteem needed to recognize that they deserve to be treated with mutual respect.
Seeking Help for Relationship Issues at Coastwise
Just as certain communication problems can strain relationships and result in social isolation, mental health issues can contribute to relationship problems due to low self-esteem, irrational fear and jealousy, unhealthy coping mechanisms, or a lack of intimacy due to depression.
We at Coastwise help clients work through their relationship problems and the underlying factors behind their relationship issues through individualized and group therapy sessions. We offer:
Individual Talk Therapy –
Addressing deep-seated mental health issues can help a person improve their self-esteem and begin to address the problems that plague their relationships, whether it’s isolating behaviors, lack of trust, or substance use.
Couples and Marriage Counseling –
Communication issues, mental health symptoms, and even addiction can strain and affect intimate relationships and long-term partnerships. At Coastwise, we help clients with strained relationships work through the current and past problems that affect their relationship and help them rebuild and strengthen their bonds.
Family Systems Therapy –
Familial bonds are the most formative and can affect how we treat others in adulthood. Addressing negative family dynamics or the way family relationships might affect your own boundaries and expectations within a friendship or intimate relationship can help improve your current and future relationships.
Trauma-Informed Therapy –
Neglect, abuse, or traumatic events can cause problems with trust, boundaries, vulnerability, intimacy, and emotional control. Trauma-informed care helps clients with post-traumatic mental health problems address the symptoms and factors that may be holding them back from being open with their loved ones.
Tackle Your Relationship Issues Today
Whether it's our interactions with peers, friends, relatives, or partners, relationships can serve as mirrors reflecting our past experiences and influencing our present and future social interactions. Unfortunately, negative experiences from our past can cause communication problems, argumentative patterns, and emotional distancing that strain our connections with others and jeopardize newer relationships.
Recognizing and addressing relationship issues is crucial for establishing and maintaining mental wellbeing. Furthermore, it's important to acknowledge the bidirectional relationship between mental health and relationships. Mental health problems can both result from and contribute to relationship issues, whether through social isolation, irritability, or a lack of self-esteem.
Seeking help for relationship issues, whether through individual therapy, couples counseling, or family therapy, can provide invaluable support in navigating and resolving these challenges. At Coastwise, we offer a range of therapeutic interventions tailored to address relationship issues and the underlying mental health factors contributing to them.