Interpersonal Difficulties
Relationships, Interpersonal Difficulties & Domestic Violence
About Interpersonal Difficulties
As humans we are social. We create relationships, struggle with relationships, grow in relationships and even grow within ourselves because of relationships.
It is common to experience problems with interpersonal relationships. Everyone experiences conflict or misunderstandings in communication with others. However, if you find you are continually experiencing this with your friendships and relationships keep breaking down, then you may need additional help understanding what is going wrong.
Benefits of Therapy for Interpersonal Difficulties
- Increase our sense of connectedness: When we have difficulties with relationships and interpersonal skills we can feel disconnected from other people and this can have a large impact on our sense of self, our self worth, our level of confidence and our sense of resiliency. Interpersonal skill development helps us to feel more connected with the people we choose to be connected to.
- Increased resiliency through connections: Our social network is one of our main sources of strength when we go through difficulties. It is also something that prevents mental health issues from occurring. This is because when we have a strong social network we can feel like we have a team helping us with issues, increasing our confidence. It can also provide normalisation, which is where we might think something is wrong with us but a bunch of friends reassure us that they have experienced or thought the exact same things. Being social and having fun also prevents rumination and gives us ‘break time’ from our own inner dialogue and from spending too much time “in our own heads”. Interpersonal therapy helps us to build these relationships through skill development, assertiveness training and increasing our confidence.
- Processing grief & loss: When we are grieving we are saying goodbye not only to something or someone we have had a past with, but also any future we may have imagined that had them in it. Having help to process this grief and understand our own relationship with grief can help the process, and allow us to move forward in our own lives carrying the memories and lessons we wish to hold from that which we are grieving. Sometimes when we are feeling full of grief, having a safe environment to sit with our emotions and speak without fear of judgement, is the best way to navigate our way through.
- Understanding self destructive behaviours: A range of therapies can also help us to understand our own cycles of behaviour and how and why we may self sabotage, or lose relationships, or even help us to identify why we return to, or remain in toxic relationships. This is work done in a safe environment where we can have the strength to look at ourselves and our choices honestly, with the confidence that we can change with the support the therapist is offering to provide.
What to Expect From Treatment
At Mind Mode Psychology in Wollongong, we use different types of supportive therapies and skill-based counselling to help clients learn more about their interpersonal skills and needs, as well as attachment styles and how to repair attachments. We can help with learning communication skills, empathy skills, listening skills and the change of Cognitive Distortions which may be impacting on the way we relate to others.
Mind Mode can also help people who have left violent relationships where there was domestic violence, to understand the impact on themselves and their self perceptions. Therapy aims at helping to further develop confidence, boundary setting skills and self worth, as well as learning about what makes a healthy relationship and breaking the cycle of violence.
Get in touch with our local team today to make an appointment.