Relationships
Humans are social beings and we need relationships. This is evident from the very beginning of our lives when we are dependent on our caregivers for survival and development. Relationships can bring out both the best and worst in us. When things are going well they can bring quality, meaning, and richness to our lives. When things get difficult, relationships can challenge us and sometimes require us to find new ways of being and interacting. If we are fortunate enough to do this successfully it can allow us the opportunity for even deeper and more fulfilling relationships. This is particularly true when we can find a way to grow together. This applies to all kinds of relationships including families, couples, siblings, and friendships.
Seeking counselling and psychological services can help develop depth and richness whether it’s the primary goal or the result of overcoming obstacles. Many, if not all, regular life stresses can impact our relationships. Often people wait to seek help until things have become very strained in their relationships. Others may be preemptive and seek assistance through a variety of resources when things are going well in order protect their relationships from the inevitable difficult times. The earlier people seek help the less opportunity there is for problems to accumulate. However, it is never to late to try and improve a relationship especially when people are motivate to make a change.
In developing a personalized plan, our psychologists and counsellors collect a wide variety of information from the people involved in the relationship in order to understand how each person sees the relationship and the challenges that they face. The therapists use this information to validate each person’s experience, identify areas of strength and difficulty, and develop mutually agreed upon goals and interventions that are acceptable to each person in the relationship. In order to achieve these goals and in keeping with an established timeline, progress is regularly re-assessed with the help of the clients and new goals are set when appropriate or necessary.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling of some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
– Victor E. Frankl
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
– Victor E. Frankl
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have know defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
When we love, we strive to be better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
– Paulo Coelho
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes, on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
– John Lubbock
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
– Henry David Thoreau
We will find that kindness is a way of making less effort. It is the most economic attitude there is, because it saves us much energy that we might otherwise waste in suspicion, worry, resentment, manipulation, or unnecessary defense. It is an attitude that, by eliminating the inessential, brings us back to the simplicity of being.
– Piero Ferrucci
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? … Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do… And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Marianne Williamson