Harmonious relationships with others are an important source of our happiness.
In integrative psychotherapy the couple relationship is an example of a relationship that embodies the relationship of the self with others. When we talk about the relationship of the Self with others it basically highlights how a person relates to other people around him/her, how he/she enters into relationships, how he/she experiences these relationships, how permeable he/she is with others, what relational pattern he/she has, what attachment style he/she has.
In the therapeutic relationship, that means the healing relationship that is established between the client and the psychotherapist, the client will create the relationship with the therapist according to the pattern of relationship he or she already has. But this will not only happen in the therapeutic practice but also in everyday life, we tend to create relationships according to the relational pattern, that is the way we learned from our parents to relate, according to the attachment style, etc.
The English psychiatrist and psychotherapist John Bowlby drew attention to the phenomenon of attachment as early as the 1950s. Our characteristic attachment style: secure, avoidant, ambivalent or resistant, disorganised or disoriented, will influence the characteristic way we approach the other and interpret the world around us. We enter a new situation with an established set of principles that may predispose us to see things in a particular way. Through personal development and psychotherapy we will be able to discover our attachment style and how it influences our relationship.
Another perspective on how to relate comes from transactional analysis which brings to the fore the term “ego states”. (*) Ego states are the result of one’s own interpersonal history and represent ways of interacting with the world that can become fixed or rigid. Basically we internalize our relationships. “Parent” represents those internalized figures that were formed in the early years of life. Without being aware of it, we can manifest ourselves exactly like one of our parents in our relationships with others. “Child” is the state in which we regress into a mode of expression that was part of our previous experience of self, losing all sense of the current context, reliving the original experience with all its intensity in the case of a traumatic ego-child state. “Adult” is the state in which we respond to the other appropriate to the current context, respond to experiences in the “here and now”.
In order to greatly increase the chances of a healthy and happy couple relationship, it is necessary for the two lovers to bring as much as possible the state of “adult” into the relationship. This requires a broad process of awareness in which, together with the therapist or through therapeutic programmes, we can perceive the difference between these states of the self. Programmes: Programme to eliminate jealousy in a sustainable way, Super happy communication with other programme, Programme to revive attraction to other being of the opposite sex, help a lot to achieve fulfilling and very happy relationships.
(*)Gilbert, M. & Orlans, V. (2013) Integrative psychotherapy: 100 key points and techniques. Bucharest: Liber Mundi