Category Counselling

March 13, 2019,  Counselling, Exercise, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

I use the acronym TOUCH to remember the five ways of funding my love bank.

T is for Time

Relationships aren’t part-time arrangements. And, if your relationship is fed on left-over time (the time you have after everything else has been done), your love bank will very quickly be depleted.

Your relationship must take priority over everything else (other than yourself). You come first, your partner comes second. Your family is third, your work is next, and finally there are your extended family and other friendships beyond that.

This is not to say that you can’t work because you must always be with your family. It just means that you must always keep your family’s needs in mind if you are doing something of lower priority (like working)...

October 25, 2018,  Counselling, Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Love, Relationship, Sex  No comments

Many couples use the state of their sex life as a barometer for what is going on in the rest of their relationship. I also suggest that the converse works as well: what is going on in your relationship and in each of your personal lives can also affect your sex life.

Libido levels rise and fall with circumstances. Maybe one person is too stressed to make sex good for their partner, let alone for him or herself. Work pressures can distract couples from giving positive sexual attention to each other.

An episode of ill health can affect your sex life. It could be something that directly affects the sex organs like prostate cancer, or just stress, or your diet. Maybe you need to exercise more or you feel overweight. You might need more sleep, or even just more fun.

You should monitor all of t...

May 1, 2018,  Counselling, Games People Play, Life, Love, Relationship, Script  No comments

Many years ago, people believed that a healthy relationship looked like this: two complementary halves making a whole. Now we understand that a relationship that looks like this is far from complementary and where generally one person in the couple dominates the other.

People need first to be whole within themselves in order to be happy with another person.

If we look at this issue from a Transactional Analysis perspective, according to that theory, we all have a mixture of personalities; we don’t just have one way of being. Instead, in different places with different people, we can actually relate quite differently as well. Berne described these different personality styles as “ego states...

January 30, 2018,  Counselling, Exercise, Life, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

Some people say that forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past. Ironically, the future and the present are caused by the past, and thereby the past becomes our future and the present defines our past. And the causes and the effects mix to such a level that it is hard to even understand where it all started in the first place and where it will lead.

For me, besides gratitude, forgiveness is the single most powerful way to create lasting change for the better in relationships.

The story of a young man perfectly describes the effect of “cause and the effect” – he arrived home from work to find that his partner of ten years had left. A note on the kitchen table said that she didn’t love him anymore and she’d had enough of his abuse...

November 28, 2017,  Counselling, Family, Relationship, Relationship Tips  No comments

People often wonder whether Couples Counselling works when one partner isn’t present at the counselling session. Absolutely, yes, it works. If one of the partners change, then the other will respond to the changes. Of course, this does not guarantee positive change or that the relationship will work out, but it does start changing the situation from its current, unsatisfying state.

Breaking the zone of comfort is stepping away from a zone of a relationship that is going nowhere and achieving nothing. Staying in what seems to be the comfort zone, you may be surprised to hear, is hard to maintain as it is not comfortable at all. Holding the decisions taken to move away from what is familiar and comfortable can be even harder...