Reconnect with Kids
Are your kids reaching their late adolescence teen years or perhaps getting ready to leave the house? Have you and your spouse been focused on raising the children and not staying connected? As your kids were growing up did you often think: ‘We will focus on the marriage later, I don’t have time’? Now, that your kinds leaving are you starting to realize how far apart you and your spouse have grown? Do you feel distant and disconnected from your spouse and now do not have the kids in between you? Were the kids the main thing you discussed and now that the kids are older you are finding you hove nothing to talk about?
A common phenoma that all couples have to going through is the transition from when they are full time dedicated parents to learning to create a new life as the children leave. Oftentimes, during the busy periods of raising children, couples deprioritize their relationship. They find they don’t have time, they don’t have the energy between work and raising the children, selfcare, friends, family.
Then as the children leave, couples are starting to look at one another and starting to realize they don’t know each other. This can be a very scary prospect and many couples have a hard time faceing into the fact that they don’t know each other, they don’t feel connected. Most couples don’t want to face that.
One of the common ways couples start to tackle the fact that they have grown apart while not consciously addressing it is to focus on their sex life. Many couples who have grown apart will focus on sex.
Sex is a concrete way to measure how well they are doing it. Couples will want to try and have sex because then they can reassure themselves that they are ok, but then as they start to go to have sex they find that they are not able to. It feels weird or awkward, they will have fights. Other symptoms that they have grown apart is to have little conversations or little fights over nothing that lead to big escalations. For many couples it is very difficult to acknowledge how they have grown apart because they think that that means the end of the relationship. It does not.
If you are finding and wondering if you guys have grown apart, if you are afraid to face that, therapy can help couples rediscover one another. All relationships need a purpose. In the beginning of a relationship the focus may have been to have children, build a family, work on your career. As children age, leave the house, couples need to create a new purpose or new focus and find a new way that they going to connect and organise.
All relationships need to have a purpose. Many times, due to extremely busy life styles of raising kids and working, couples forget who they are individualy and then who they are as a couple.
Therapy can help couples navigate this by helping them redevelop and undrestand how to do intimacy, have better communication skills, have productive conflict that leads to buliding intimacy, help them rediscover and find a new way back to intimacy and sexual connection.
If you would like to find out how All in the Family Counselling and Tammy Fontana, lead therapist can help you, contact us for an initial consultation at +65 9030 7239, WhatsApp is preferred, or you can send an email to tammy@allinthefamilycounselling.com.
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Through an initial consultation we'll help you frame goals and outcomes of therapy and what that would look like to achieve it.