Healthy Apart and Together
It often becomes a very important part of couples work for each individual to get their own act together, to become healthier, to become healthier apart from the partner (become differentiated) and to become healthier in being with the partner (to grow intimacy and vulnerability in relationship with the partner). Both are required for making things go well with a couple, being healthier apart from your partner and being healthier with your partner.
Healthy Apart & Together in Couples Therapy
Back and Forth, In Couples Therapy and Life
It seems like the work of couples therapy is to always be going back and forth between how each partner is slipping up in terms of being too much into the partner (talking about the partner, focused on the partner’s problems and issues, expecting the change to come in the partner, not seeing one’s own issues and problems) and then not really letting out who they really are (not being intimate, not explaining their hurt, not opening up more fully). But this is the way of life, this is the way of humans, this is the way of partnerships. We want to be connected but we so often actually avoid deeper intimacy. We want change but we blame it on the other and look to them to do the changing.
It Has to Be You
You are the one that needs to change for the change you want to happen. Also, you are the one that needs to change for anything much to happen in couples therapy. You are the one that needs to become healthier apart from your partner, that needs to see what you are doing, to see what you need to change, to see how you need to understand better your own feelings that are activated by your partner’s feelings, the one that needs to become healthier together with your partner. When you begin to understand that your own feelings in response to your partner’s feelings are what needs to change, what you need to control, what you can work on, and eventually what you can share, then you begin to make the real change that will make the difference in your relationship.
Couples Omaha – Dr. Robert G. Kraft – Licensed Psychologist in Omaha, NE
Dr. Robert G. Kraft is a career psychologist in Omaha, NE. He earned his doctorate, as well as his bachelors and masters before that, from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and has practiced in Nebraska ever since.
As well as maintaining his practice, Dr. Kraft is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, where he teaches residents about psychotherapy.
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