Too often when things in a relationship are not going well and one partner feels it’s more urgent to do something sooner than later, and their other half doesn’t agree, the partner may give up. Or worse, the partner resorts to more harmful behaviours such as complaining, criticizing, blaming and guilt to motivate the other half to change or go to counselling—either way the results are usually not positive and tend push people further apart.
If you are not happy with your relationship, you actually have 100% control over your half of the relationship … and that means you have 100% control over your choices, actions and thoughts. If you really want to bring about change there is no purpose in handing the repair of the relationship to a non cooperative partner and making your behaviour conditional on his/her participation. Instead, you can start learning skills to make the relationship better without your partner.
Relationship counselling can start with just one person who wants to make changes and improvements in the relationship. Counselling is about giving individuals or couples more effective relationship skills. So even if your partner doesn’t want to come in the beginning, you can start learning the skills to improve what you have control of yourself!
In any relationship, it’s highly unlikely that if one person significantly changes how he/she behaves toward the other, the other’s behaviour will remain unchanged. The status quo is disturbed and there is hope!
If you want help learning how to set in motion more effective and positive effort to improve the relationship, counselling can help you. Our professional trained counsellors have over 6000 hours of supervised and clinical counselling experience. Tammy Fontana is a certified Choice Theory Reality Therapy Therapist as well as she received level-I training of Gottman’s Couple Method Therapy. We are certified in various counselling theories and methodologies and can help you get change quickly. Call us to find out more at 9030 7239.