- Are you hurting in love?
- Why pain in the relationship?
- Do you suffer from relationship addiction?
- Have you considered couple therapy / image therapy?
- Why do relationships and love hurt?
- Do you keep running into the same relationship problems?
- Are you happy in your relationship / marriage?
- Do you love yourself or does your happiness depend on your partner?
Happiness and unhappiness in the relationship
The love and relationship including our own psychology is an eternal source of healing and happiness as well as unhappiness, pain and trauma.
Does your happiness depend on your partner?
The relationship and marriage is an eternal source of joy and sorrow. When things go well and we get what we want and when the partner is and does what we want, we become happy and tell ourselves that we are happy.
Then we live up to society’s standards of happiness and twoness. Thereby, many put a tick on the list, think that was it and then want to live together until the end of their days.
Many people’s happiness is thus dependent on their partner and thus something that is beyond their own control. Some are also symbiotic (confluent) with the partner so that their feelings are mixed together. They find it difficult to understand what are ‘your and my’ feelings. In this way, your partner’s feelings also become your own. When your partner is happy, you are happy. But when the partner is sad, it is suddenly very difficult to be happy yourself.
It can well result in a roller-coaster relationship, where you pull each other up and down at will. In the same way, one can unconsciously come to let the accident depend on the partner. Many must thus be disappointed and recognize that the relationship and marriage is a full-time job that requires conscious and active effort. It is not only a question of the community and the relationship, but to a large extent one’s own psychology, boundaries, communication, behaviour, competences, development and change.
It is almost like a car, a house or a garden that must always be looked after and cared for. You can do most things yourself and without specialists or professionals, but once in a while you need support in the form of sparring from a couples therapist via professional couples therapy. Because if nothing else, it can be difficult to look beyond your own nose, to pull yourself up by the hair and to change your partner.
Does your unhappiness depend on the partner?
Conversely, when the partner does not see, hear and take us seriously or when we are not met, the space and the mirror as we want, we get sad and feel sadness, frustration and anger.
Many begin to project the poor self-esteem as well as the feelings, problems, reasons and blame onto the partner. Then they try to change the partner or start to consider divorce and finding someone else.
Others, for example, slip into the screens, overtime and sport or sugar, tobacco, alcohol and adultery. Often this results in sexual problems and some develop alcohol problems in the relationship, addiction or co-dependency – if they are not already the adult child of an alcoholic in a relationship.
Relationship addiction or loving too much, as Norwood would call it. So this phenomenon where it is difficult to feel oneself, one’s needs and limits, that it does not feel ok to say it out loud or to speak out, that it is difficult to take care of and love oneself – but easy to lose oneself in the love for the other as well as the other’s needs and feelings or that one allows oneself to be preoccupied with the other’s problems instead of taking care of one’s own.
Often in the psychological game between the helper role, the victim role and the abuser role, which Karpman calls the Drama Triangle. Alternatively, one can react with helplessness, anxiety and depression. Because what can be done, what is the use and will it ever be different? Should you divorce? Does the whole thing and one’s self thereby disintegrate? Do you then lose both the partner, the children, the family, the home and the base? In short, you can let the relationship explode in anger or implode in depression. But why is it so and why does love hurt so much?
Four important factors in the relationship
There are four important factors in particular that affect the relationship and which relate to unhappiness and pain we can experience in the relationship. It is the brain, the hormones, the attachment and our paradigms – the midset or blueprint.
The relationship and the brain
You probably already know that. Crisis, death, loss, failure and rejection, such as arguments and conflicts with withdrawal or cassation, as well as rejection, lies, adultery, alcohol abuse and divorce, are extremely painful.
It is not without reason at all. Because the psychological pain can be related to the same area of the brain as the physical pain. Expressions such as heartache, a broken heart or the feeling of a knife in the heart are therefore not without context.
That is part of the explanation and that is precisely why Parterapi-parterapeut.dk in Copenhagen offers grief therapy/grief treatment – to support the individual and the couple in becoming better at handling the natural pain and grief in the relationship, the couple, the family and life.
The relationship and the hormones
Crises incl. conflicts, jealousy, infidelity and divorce create emotional chaos and stress due to the structure of the brain and the hormonal system.
Partly the stress hormone cortisol is released and partly dopamine is released. Dopamine is popularly known as a love hormone. One hormone among several that can contribute to our feeling of attraction. A hormone that, paradoxically, is also triggered by rejection and can thus cause us to be attracted to, seek out or chase the person who has just rejected, violated or broken up with us.
A bizarre but well-known effect in couple therapy, which is basically just a prehistoric relic, which is about survival via the connection of the family, the couple and the group. But also that which makes it difficult to break up and that which means that you can become dependent on even a dysfunctional relationship.
The relationship and attachment
At the same time, the areas of the brain for love and anger/rage/hate are closely connected.
In psychotherapeutic terms, it is popularly said that love and hate are the same emotion – i.e. two sides of the same coin. That we cannot hate without loving and vice versa.
That and our attachment patterns often give a watery cocktail of anxiety, anger, stress, attraction and rejection – or an elastic couple relationship, as it is also called in couple therapy.
It is also not without reason that couples in trouble create drama. Because arguments, anger, anxiety, withdrawal and rejection hit right into our attachment wounds / attachment traumas and attachment problems. Big or small – we all have them to one degree or another.
Therefore, psychotherapy and couples therapy are about insight, acceptance and coping. In addition, couples therapy is about understanding and training oneself to be in a relationship where contact is by nature a rhythmic phenomenon – where you are constantly moving in and out of contact.
If you are considering couple therapy and are interested in quick insight and mapping of the state of your relationship, Parterapi-parterapeut.dk in Copenhagen offers a couples check. A couple check includes a free couple relationship test, a couples therapy consultation and a free eBook with relationship tools. The ebook contains both an overview of the factors that can predict divorce with over 90% probability as well as the factors that can prevent divorce and create a good relationship.
The relationship, parentage and hidden strategies
Another reason for the drama and dynamics of the relationship is our origin and the hidden (unconscious) strategies – mindsets and paradigms – that are formed on the basis of this. That is, the blueprint we carry with us from our childhood family. In other words, the inner image (imago and hence imagotherapy) we have of love, the relationship and the family.
It includes relationship formation and being in a relationship as well as attachment, approaches, boundaries and rejection. But our imago and thus imago therapy can also answer the question of why we look for the partner we do, what it is that we secretly want from this partner, what feelings and reactions we unconsciously create when we don’t get it and how we brace ourselves for ourselves ourselves and the closeness we so dearly desire.
In addition, imago therapy can help us find and come home to ourselves – our true selves. Peeling back the layers of the onion – the rejected me, the lost me and the false me – and getting to the core of the true me.
In this way, imago couple therapy provides important insight into oneself and the partner, while imago therapy builds self-esteem. It helps to create an authentic, sustainable and vibrant relationship and marriage. Or as Jung said – Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Psychologist, individual psychotherapy or couples therapy?
It would therefore be obvious in many cases to seek individual psychotherapy, but since Parterapi-parterapeut.dk in Copenhagen has extensive experience with both individual psychotherapy and relational psychological treatment in the form of couple therapy, there is now evidence that we develop best through the relationship and that the relationship is our teacher – and thus also the couple’s therapy.
There is now evidence from several groups that couple therapy is often more effective than individual psychotherapy. And why should you go to your own psychologist for double the price, when you can come together for couple therapy with a couples therapist for less than half the price – and achieve the necessary development and change in a joint process and through mutual support.
Psychotherapy or couples therapy, it should be up to you to choose. Parterapi-parterapeut.dk in Copenhagen offers both psychotherapy and couples therapy. But psychotherapy as couple therapy requires in all cases that one commits to the process, is ready to look at oneself and is willing to look through the mirror. Conversely – couple therapy cannot be used to get right, to blame the other or as a means of power to change the partner.
In general, psychotherapy is not about changing people, but about finding one’s authentic and true self (as above under imagotherapy) and coming home to oneself. Couples therapy is therefore about finding ways to be yourself and to regulate yourself and your needs in respect for your partner.
Can you agree with it and are you curious about how couples therapy meets the problems of the relationship, you are welcome to call and book an appointment for a consultation in couple therapy or individual psychotherapy .
Parterapi-parterapeut.dk
In every crisis there is an opportunity and a learning.
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Consultation in psychotherapy and couples therapy
You can read more about the effective concept in couple therapy.
Or book a consultation in couples therapy, image therapy or psychotherapy on tel. 61661900.
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