Hi, welcome to Mind Centred Counselling Services.
I love helping couples who are experiencing conflict, to stop fighting and get back to where they once were so that they can be happy again. You see, having a healthy, happy relationship means being able to express your needs openly, safely and without fear of judgement, bringing you closer together as a couple on an emotional as well as sexual level. 

Often clients ask me how they get from where they are to where they want to be. And you might be wondering that too. Very simply, I believe that during childhood as well as in later life experiences, we can find ourselves changing our behaviours to feel emotionally safe. And it works (or so we think) for a while. The problem is that we take these behaviours into our adult relationships, but what worked for us as children just doesn’t work anymore.  It constantly causes conflicts to occur or even stop them from being resolved.

It doesn’t have to be major trauma, it might be as insignificant as the child who used to go to his mum and ask for a hug and the mum would say, “Not now, I’m busy “. In a bid to feel emotionally safe the child learned to adapt their behaviour by not asking for love anymore. Or maybe as a child, you would raise your voice and have a tantrum because you felt nobody listened to you. So, you learned to raise your voice to get your needs met. Now as an adult, when you don’t feel heard or seen in a relationship, you yell and scream, but it doesn’t get you the same result or outcome. 

The ‘adaptive child’ is a version of you that changed and adapted their behaviours during childhood to try to feel emotionally safe. We all have one (though many of us may not be aware of it) and with an approach of kindness and understanding, we can learn to let go of those behaviours and replace them with ones that will get our needs met in a much healthier way.

Clients’ success story

When Gemma and John came for counselling, they told me that this was their last attempt of trying to save their marriage. According to them they were fighting about the same things over and over again and they were asking themselves the question if they actually still love each other. They said they went for counselling before and even though the psychologist taught them the necessary skills to communicate and manage their conflict, they struggled to implement these skills when they disagree.

According to John, Gemma was constantly nagging him and criticising him and when she did not get her way, she would stonewall him and according to Gemma, John became very defensive and aggressive when she was asking him to do something.  She then struggled to continue with the conversation.

After a few individual sessions with both of them, we discovered that John was constantly criticised by his dad during childhood. According to him, he could never please his dad and never do the right thing. He was a teenager when he realised that when he raised his voice and shout at his dad, his dad would stop with this criticism and nagging. He believes that we have to stand up ourselves and defend ourselves, otherwise people just walk over you. As the youngest of four children, he also felt that he was never taken seriously and that nobody ever listened to him. It was only when he threw a tantrum, he would get the necessary attention from especially his mum.

Gemma on the other hand remembers how her parents used to fight for hours. They would scream at each other all the time. She vividly remembers how she would run to her bedroom and try to block their voices out by listening to music.

It became very clear why John was getting defensive and aggressive when he felt confronted and why Gemma would stonewall him. We worked on each one taking responsibility for their maladaptive behaviours and replacing it with more well-adapted behaviours as well as healing their inner childhood wounds. Through learning how to be emotionally more intimate with each other (being vulnerable and empathetic) they got a good understanding of what was going on for each other during conflict and how to make one another feel emotionally safer. The emotional support they gave each other helped them to overcome the maladaptive behaviours from childhood.

Gemma and John now are content and happy and recently welcomed a beautiful baby daughter into the world. They still check in from time to time just to make sure that they still on the right track, but according to John they now make sure there is only one child in the house.... their precious baby girl.

This story is based on real client experiences, but names and specific details have been changed to protect privacy