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Touchstone Life Coaching
Each person has a soul. Each soul yearns, often, underneath the everyday lives that
we lead to be much more fully known, felt, and expressed. Our lives have connection and meaning to the universe.
Each life holds sacred purpose. It is in this universal garden of life that life truly is full of new
beginnings. Each new beginning is a further conscious awakening on the journey that is living an examined life.
Relationships - Issues, Negative patterns/Abuse
A relationship can be defined as any particular type of connection existing between two people related to or having dealings with each other. A relationship might denote the fact that you are related to someone. And, of course, a relationship may well mean that two people are romantically and sexually involved to some measure or other of intimacy. Intimacy involves not only sexual intimacy but also emotional intimacy as well. One does not have to be in a sexually intimate relationship to desire the sharing or emotional intimacy.
To say that relationships are often complicated and complex not only is an understatement of sorts but is also is stating the rather obvious. The degree to which human relationships are healthy or not often depends upon the kind of relational patterns learned in childhood. How our families function or how much they fail to function, or dysfunction, often will set the stage for the state of relationships in adulthood.
Relationships aside from their obvious value and purpose are also very much a vehicle through which we have wonderful opportunities to learn more about ourselves and as many professionals indicate also have the opportunity to resolve previously unresolved issues that are left over from relating to a parent or parents.
In Object Relations Theory one's mother is described as one's first love object. How that attachment and bonding experience is with mother can make the difference between healthier happier inter-connected stable relationships or more intense, unstable, and often emotionally chaotic, codependent and painful types of relationships.
As most areas of our lives become increasingly more stressful and difficult for a wide variety of reasons, the same is true for our relationships. Negative and/or unhealthy relational patterns are much more commonplace now than ever before. There are a great number of people locked into, over-invested in and suffering abuse in relationships that, to them, seems to be the definition of what a relationship is. This, for many, stems from the fact that relationships in childhood often were abusive or had elements of abuse in them. Patterns of relating are developed in childhood. The degree to which there is a healthy foundation or an unhealthy foundation in one's relationships in childhood will be the measure of what is experienced in adult relationships. Abuse is increasingly not only more and more a part of people's relational experience but it is also something that has come, for many, to be all to familiar. Familiar to the extent that it is what many come to believe is typical and a somewhat 'normal' part of being in a relationship. This, of course, is not true. Abuse is a part of a dysfunctional unhealthy relationship and not a part of a more functional and reasonably healthy relationship.
Many clients I deal with are in the process of coming to terms with the choices they have made in terms of their relationships and the need for change. It can be a difficult process to create the change necessary to meet the goal of getting out of negative (and/or abusive) relational patterns and learning new, healthier and more balanced ways of relating that are based upon mutuality, respect, and healthier foundations.
A great number of clients that I work with in life coaching have found themselves in relationship with personality-disordered people. These relationships are extremely painful and unhealthy and often abusive. Life coaching can help you to identify what you may well need and want to change to end these types of relational patterns, whether you are the one being abused or the one doing the abusing.
It is also important to realize that how we relate to others, especially in significant other relationships can often be a reflection of the state of our own relationship to self. It is important in the life coaching process to become more aware of any internalized negativity that one may relate from inside of one's self. Often, accepting, or allowing someone else to continue to abuse you in any way in a relationship happens because you do not have a healthy, balanced, and positive regard - self-esteem and worth, inside of yourself. When we aren't well connected in a healthy way to self - to the authentic self then we can easily end up in relationship patterns that are not healthy for us.
© A.J. Mahari 2008 - All rights reserved.
As a life coach I provide a caring, compassionate, safe, confidential, non judgemental, validating and supportive relationship within which clients can feel empowered to explore their present-day needs. I essentially act as a human mirror for my clients. I share with my clients an outside and unbiased perspective as to what I observe in listening to their feelings, experiences, and concerns.
Personal Coaching is not counseling or therapy or a substitute for either.
If you would like to get more information about my life coaching sevices on the above listed issues or an issue in your life that isn't listed above please email me at: touchstonecoaching@rogers.com
as of June 15, 2004
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