Category Counselling

February 27, 2024,  Counselling, Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

The first stage of a relationship is a time of exclusive attachment. It creates such a strong connection that it seems that the couple cannot survive separately. The honey bee has the same attachment to a flower where both the bee and the flower benefit. For the bee it’s pollen to make honey and for the flower it’s a way of being pollinated by another as the bee hops from flower to flower.

Now you’re not a honey bee but the relationship between two people when they first meet can be similar in that they become so close that all their attention is focused on each other, often to the exclusion of everyone, and everything else.

The first time in your life when you should have experienced this was in your relationship with your mother when you were first born...

January 30, 2024,  Counselling, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

This is why rebound relationships generally do not work. When a relationship ends, you need time to grieve. Even if you were the one who decided to separate, you still need time to heal and to learn your lessons. The lessons are not just about relationships, either, but about yourself. You don’t want to duplicate the mistakes you made that shattered the previous relationship.

I also repeatedly hear stories of couples separating because one partner or the other has “found someone else.” That the new relationship could possibly work out is a fantasy. First, the new relationship is created within a context where one of the former partners (and most often, the new third party as well) is still in a relationship...

December 19, 2023,  Counselling, Family, Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

🙶 Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathless, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being ‘in love’ which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.🙷

Louis d...

January 23, 2023,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Relationship, Script  No comments

The answer may be not just in what Vanessa and Mark observed in their families of origin but also in how they were treated. Once we began working together what came to light was two very important points. For Vanessa being shielded from arguments, as well as criticism of any type, in her family also meant that she had not learnt any skills for managing conflicts now as an adult in her most important relationships. Consequently, any raised voices or criticism was felt as a personal insult leaving Vanessa feeling constantly bruised and battered.

For Mark, on the other hand, his unrelenting exposure to conflict in his family also left him feeling bruised and battered as he was constantly made the victim of his parents and siblings’ tirades...

March 28, 2022,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

Let’s say Aaron, a two year old out shopping with his dad, wanders off in the shopping center. Dad needs Aaron to learn that this is unsafe, so Aaron is told that he or she shouldn’t do it.

Very often, children like Aaron will not understand the information itself, but will grasp something from the parent’s tone of voice, and from the fact that he is made to sit down and listen, that something is wrong.

If Aaron is sufficiently alarmed by his dad’s response, he may get the idea of the message and not reoffend though this may be out of fear of a further reprimand. Alternatively, he may retaliate as a way of testing the limits of permitted behavior.

Whatever the response, i.e...

February 17, 2022,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

There are a couple of other considerations regarding script development that should not be overlooked.

First, I use the word “decision” broadly to describe decisions made both in or outside of conscious awareness, including those made by every child even when too young to put what they are deciding into words.

In fact, despite their preverbal nature, the decisions made during a child’s first years of life are the most persuasive and potentially the most long-lasting decisions of all. This also makes them the most resistant to change.

Nevertheless, all of these decisions can be reviewed and changed as life is lived, though resistance to change is powerful because we usually seek to reconfirm what we already hold to be true. The alternative for many is too uncomfortable...

March 19, 2021,  Counselling, Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

So, if Dad got mad when something went wrong, you might get mad and respond in the same way he did. Or, maybe your mother got sad when something went wrong, and depending on your personality and your closeness to each of your parents, you might respond that way instead.

It could be worth noting here that your personality is already there at your birth. This phenomenon subsequently influences how you respond to events in your later life, and it also influences which parent, if any, you are most likely to imitate in your behaviors, thoughts, and feelings when confronted with a particular situation.

The way you choose to respond to circumstances could be the topic for a whole other book, but suffice it to say here that your personality, your gender, the environment you grew up in, ...

February 24, 2020,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Love, Relationship  No comments

I would like to say something about the title of my book Love, Lies, and the Games Couples Play. Put simply, love, and all that it embodies for us, is what each of us seeks in life above all else. It is the main reason we enter into relationships in the first place because it gives us a place to belong and to feel connected to others.

The “lies” in the title refers to the mistaken attitudes and beliefs that we hold about ourselves and about others. These are most likely based on someone else’s thinking which in the first instance were probably our parent’s. And as these beliefs were presented to us at a time when we were not able to make well-considered decisions for ourselves, they are not necessarily reflective of our current subjective truth.

Those beliefs, and the w...

December 23, 2019,  Counselling, Exercise, Family, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Love – A Never-Ending Story

While I ended this story with “She lived happily ever after,” in truth, the “ever after” has not come to be yet.

The story is really never ending. Every day offers my partner and me new lessons to learn about ourselves and each other and new challenges, which, as we open ourselves to each other in love, provides us with even greater possibilities for ourselves and our relationship into the future.

This is not to say that we never have arguments or disagreements, but because we love and care deeply for each other, we attempt to find a resolution in a way that demonstrates that love and care and which is good for both of us.

Nor does this mean that disagreements are always solved there and then...

September 26, 2019,  Counselling, Family, Games People Play, Life, Script  No comments

Berne, like many others studying human behaviour at the time, suggests that a childlike stance is more likely to occur in a person’s third or fourth decade of life, after the skills to ensure survival have been fully developed.

By then, you have learned from experience that your subconscious mind will take care of many operations: practicing social niceties are now a matter of habit and you know you’re socially safe. You can now enjoy special moments in life without inhibition or fear.

To maintain the autonomous state, however, requires constant vigilance as you move away from the programmed script that influenced your past behaviour patterns.

If we lived in Utopia, we wouldn’t have to learn social survival skills, but we don’t...