Adv Dip Couns MNCPS (Accred), Dip Sup, DC Hyp (MNRAH), Lic ASK Counselling, Psychotherapy & Hypnotherapy for individuals and couples
in Farnham on the Surrey & Hampshire Border

A common aspect of my work as a relationship counsellor in Farnham and online is supporting people who have become codependent in relationships. Both partners can be codependent, or it can just be one member of the relationship. It is defined as a “specific relationship addiction characterised by preoccupation and extreme dependence - emotional, social, and sometimes physical - on another person”.

In other words, codependency is an unhealthy and unsustainable dynamic, causing a number of issues to develop in a relationship. It stems from a lack of self-esteem brought about by unstable relationships from the past, particularly childhood, and will, if left unexamined, perpetuate itself in every new relationship.

For this blog post, we will look at two main signs of codependency in a relationship, and how one can look to break the cycle.

Lack of Meaning Outside the Relationship

Someone who is codependent will lose a sense of themselves outside of the relationship. They end up sacrificing their own personal identity, interests, and values. They stop being an independent person with their own unique character, and instead only find meaning in something if it happens in the context of their relationship to a partner. This extreme dedication to one person often means that friends and family end up being neglected, along with their work life and everyday responsibilities like cleaning or keeping up with admin.

Ignoring Your Own Needs

Codependency is underpinned by a considerable lack of self-worth. Someone with low self-esteem, who relies on others for approval, is much more likely to become codependent. They will, when it comes to relationships, relentlessly prioritise someone else over themselves, and base their mood on how the other person feels and behaves. Even if the relationship is bad for them, they will stay locked into this unhealthy dynamic and actually feel guilty about thinking of themselves in relationships, becoming unable to voice their personal needs and/or desires.

What To Do About Codependency

Overcoming dependency is a gradual process. It requires small steps, and can’t be done overnight. The first thing to do is acknowledge the codependency and understand the negative role it plays in your life. Just like with addiction, which is not dissimilar to codependency, recognising that you have a problem is the first step towards solving that problem. I always encourage someone in this position to spend time with supportive family and friends, but the real work comes with looking at the low self-esteem that caused this codependency and understanding where it originally comes from, ahead of working to feel more empowered as an individual.

If you are struggling with codependency in a relationship and would like a confidential place to talk it through, give me a call or email to discuss counselling in Farnham or online.

Over the years as a bereavement counsellor in Farnham and online, I have worked with a number of parents who are battling with the pain of losing a child. Life is never quite the same after maternity loss, whether it’s during or after pregnancy, and it is normal to feel like you have lost a part of yourself forever. Dealing with something so monumental obviously takes time, but there is, I can assure you, life after the death of a child.

To help you during this difficult period, this blog post walks you through three things that I have seen to be helpful when working with clients to process maternity loss.

Have a Routine

This may seem like an obvious one, but establishing a routine is so important, and harder to do than you think. You might stop eating, or stop eating well, or no longer exercise. Perhaps you start to neglect everyday responsibilities. Not completing these tasks only makes your life more hectic and overwhelming, so establishing a good routine that you stick to is particularly crucial. It will act as an important psychological anchor. Even something small, like taking a walk every day or making sure you eat breakfast, can make a useful difference.

Accept That Your Relationship Will Change

Parents need to accept that their dynamic will inevitably change after the death of a child. Perhaps you will grow apart over time. Couples sometimes do decide to move on after such a life-changing event because the feelings and memories evinced by that partner can be too painful. Ending the relationship is, for some, the best way to move past the death of a child.

On the flipside, however, this experience creates a bond between the two people that cannot be replicated anywhere else. Only you and your partner know how that pain feels, and as a result having them close to you might feel even more important than before.

Reach Out

In such a dark time, you have to remember that you aren’t alone. Friends and family are always an option, of course, but there are also people out there who have suffered a similar experience, and speaking to them about your feelings can be particularly helpful. There may be people there further down the road of grief after a maternity loss who can offer valuable advice on how to deal with these challenging times. Either way, the thing to remember is that keeping these feelings all to yourself is never healthy or productive.

If you have recently suffered a maternity loss and would like a confidential, supportive place to speak about your emotions in any way you like, I am here to provide you with personalised bereavement counselling in Farnham or online. Don’t hesitate to get in touch to set up an initial consultation at a time that suits you.

When clients come to me for relationship counselling in Farnham or online there are two feelings that almost always crop up: shame and/or guilt. Over time they have a way of showing up in relationships even if neither partner does anything particularly wrong like having an affair or neglecting their loved one in some other way. Without proper communication, and both sides making an effort to be truly open, shame and guilt can appear.

To help you understand this area a little better, and recognise these feelings when they show up, this blog post explores a couple of ways I have seen relationships suffer at the hands of unexplored shame and/or guilt.

Reinforces Unhealthy Patterns

Guilt and shame are forms of anxiety and, as a result, they tend to govern the way we think on a daily basis particularly in the context of relationships. It gets to a point where we create self-fulfilling prophecies that ultimately reinforce the exact fear that we have. Our guilt and shame bring into existence the very things we are guilty or ashamed of.

For instance a partner who feels guilty about arriving late from work will carry that nervous energy into the home trying to compensate for missing dinner or quality time with the children even when the partner has insisted they shouldn’t worry. The guilty/ashamed partner will change the way they behave bringing feelings of stress, resentment and restlessness into the home. The other person will naturally react stiffly reinforcing the belief that they are angry and causing more shame and guilt to develop. It becomes a vicious cycle that erodes closeness in a relationship.

Prevents True Connection

More importantly, however, shame and guilt will inhibit one’s ability to connect in their relationship. If we are fearful of sharing our feelings, or exploring why we feel shame with our partner, we will naturally withdraw into ourselves and not have those important honest conversations that serve as the backbone of any successful relationship.

If we are guilty about something - whether it is a specific event like adultery or guilt over one’s overall way of being - we end up living in constant fear of the partner’s criticism and disapproval. This will mean you don’t share how you truly feel which in turn generates feelings of resentment that we keep bottled up until they breed their own kind of poison erupting in fits of anger or dissociation.

Ignoring feelings of shame or guilt never works. Working through them is the only way to maintain a happy, healthy relationship. If you would like to explore this area further with a relationship counsellor in Farnham or online, please do get in touch.

This also applies to our working environment. If we don’t feel secure, or we wake up every morning dreading going to work, it takes a considerable toll on our wellbeing. Given the impact it can have this area of our life is not scrutinised enough. And so, in this blog post, we will explore some of the relationship challenges that occur at work.

Abuse

Compared to many years ago the amount of abuse in the workplace has reduced. There is far less tolerance for bosses who practice any kind of overt abuse. Instilling fear into employees is no longer seen as the most effective way of increasing productivity which was the case not so long ago. That said subtle forms of abuse do still occur. This could involve being subjected to a series of passive aggressive, grating comments from a co-worker or manager that gradually wear you down over time.

Sexual abuse also remains a massive issue. This could, once again, simply be a comment or perhaps inappropriate touching of the shoulders and women (and sometimes men) living under these circumstances experience high levels of emotional pain. They don’t feel safe, always have to be on guard and subsequently become anxious, depressed, guilty, or angry.

Neglect

A more common problem when it comes to workplace relationships is neglect. Many people enjoy friendly, harmonious work environments but a lot of the time it can feel like these people you spend 8 hours a day with are strangers. When someone feels distant it’s hard to properly open up to them. This is often the case with managers or supervisors who are higher than you in the hierarchy and usually quite busy.

And so, if you were struggling with any issue such as anxiety or something at home, it can feel impossible to speak to your colleagues about these problems. They may not care about your mental issues and, instead, only want to ensure you get your work done without stopping to look at the wider picture. This form of neglect can be especially difficult to deal with.

Isolation

Many people, in the wake of the pandemic, have had to adjust to working from home permanently or at least a few days a week. And while this has been beneficial for parents with young children, who can now spend more time with them, there are plenty of young professionals out there who are consigned to spend inordinate amounts of time in their rooms completely alone.

In this sense the lack of any workplace relationships can be a problem. Of course, companies use platforms like Zoom, Teams, or Discord to bridge this gap but it never comes close to genuine daily in-person interactions. Not having these relationships can breed a sense of loneliness which in turn augments issues like low self-esteem, depression or anxiety.

If you are having any kind of relationship problem at your workplace I offer completely confidential relationship counselling in Farnham and online. Please do get in touch with me if you have any questions at all.

Along with supporting people going through romantic relationship issues or workplace conflicts, my work as a relationship counsellor in Farnham and online often includes supporting those experiencing family troubles of some kind. Family dynamics are usually the hardest to deal with. These relationships go so far back, and for many, expressing how one truly feels within this environment can feel impossible, which creates a number of issues.

Having spent a number of years supporting individuals through family issues, I have seen how certain themes continue to come up on a regular basis. In this blog post, I will walk through a few problems that I frequently encounter as a relationship counsellor.

Communication

As is the case in any relationship, communication is the most important aspect, and also the thing that most often goes wrong. This is especially the case in family relationships, particularly between parents and their children. There is, as I have seen, a predominance of parents who, for various reasons, never allowed themselves to express their emotions, which naturally puts up a wall between them and their children. Both sides may feel like they have important things to say, but after so long not communicating properly, it can seem impossible to bridge that gap.

Abuse

There is always some form of trauma that is passed down through the family. Usually, this trauma comes in the shape of things that should have happened not happening, like parents being emotionally and/or physically unavailable. Sometimes, however, the reverse happens: things that shouldn’t have happened that do happen. In other words: abuse.

For the most part, this abuse occurs in the form of verbal harassment, where parents take out their anger on children through chastising them or demeaning them in some way. Children are often told they are not good enough, or ‘failing’ in some way. Sometimes the abuse occurs between siblings. In rarer cases, there is physical and/or sexual abuse, which influences the way an individual perceives themselves and other people in adulthood. Only by engaging with these difficult memories can one start to move past them.

Neglect/Abandonment

Neglect and abandonment occur in a variety of ways. It could be that you lost touch with your parents, sibling, or some other family member, and no longer feel like you can reach out to them. Others have parents who, while physically present during childhood, were not emotionally attuned to their needs and made them feel unwelcome in the household.

And then there’s the situations where families, for whatever reason, are disbanded, perhaps through divorce, death, or because a parent simply decided to leave the family unit. These are all different forms of abandonment, and they lay a template for how one thinks, feels, and behaves further down the line.

To learn more about how I can support those going through family issues with personalised relationship counselling in Farnham and online, please do give me a call or fill out the contact form.

As parents we always do the best we can with our children but nonetheless we can’t help but pass on certain traits that can prove to be problematic when it comes to relationships with others - both romantic and platonic. There is a popular phrase parents like to use: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Having worked as a relationship counsellor in Farnham and online for many years, I know that this is particularly relevant for relationships. The example we set with our partner is not always perfect and, if we aren’t mindful of this fact, certain behaviours will inevitably be passed down and reproduced in the relationships our children have going forward.

In this blog post, therefore, we will explore three lessons to give your children on the subject of relationships.

The Art of Listening

When we are feeling emotional in the heat of the moment, we don’t listen to what the other person is really saying. Often we only care about getting across what we wish to say without giving regard to anything else. This tends to go both ways and, no doubt, you will have done it from time to time. It is a normal consequence of stress and not being in the present moment.

What your children should know, then, is that not listening to our partner means that we put up walls causing us to grow more distant from each other. Doing this over a prolonged period of time can have an irreversibly negative effect on the dynamic.

Be Honest

Another common way of putting up walls with our partner is through not saying how we really feel. By not speaking out we make ourselves less available. We become impossible to reach and that is the last thing we would want to do in a relationship with anyone. Holding in one’s emotions is a common inherited trait stemming from childhood trauma and can be difficult to overcome.

What anyone should know though, with both adults and teenagers alike, is that saying what one really feels is always better than keeping it in - even if what you say may be painful for the other person to hear.

Understand Consent

Talking about sex with your children is never an easy thing to do but multiple discussions around consent - not just the one ‘sex talk’ - are so important especially in this modern environment of social media and the preponderance of soliciting explicit images and/or videos from people online and distributing to others. Teenagers should know that basic consent is not enough; enthusiastic participation is what one should always expect from sex. Anything less is not enough.

Are you parents who are worrying about how best to communicate with their children about relationships? If so, my relationship counselling in Farnham and online is there for you to explore any difficulties you might be facing. Please get in touch with me to find out more.