How Relationships With Loved Ones Change During Therapy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When a person undergoes personal therapy and changes, their relationships with those around them, near and far, also change. With someone, the relationship begins to improve, and it seems that the loved one is also changing, but with someone the relationship is deteriorating.

Why? This is how I see the situation.

The person has healthy / adequate parts and there are injured parts. Communication, especially close communication, is often based on the interaction of the traumatized parts. And this interaction takes place according to a predetermined scenario. Usually it is walking along the Victim-Aggressor-Rescuer dramatic triangle, covered with different decorations. It can be a sadist and masochist (domestic violence: physical, emotional, sexual), addicted and codependent, "child" and "parent" (although both people can be equal adults, or even the actual child can play the role of "parent" for their actual parent), "catching up" and "escaping" / "rejecting", etc.

In the course of therapy, the client's injured parts are gradually healed, and the healthy, adequate parts are strengthened. The client begins to interact more often with people from his healthy parts, and not from the injured, begins to at least sometimes get out of the script and act spontaneously, in his own way, and not according to the traumatic program.

Then people from his environment have a choice - to join the healthy field, leave the script and interact with this person from their healthy parts, or try to continue to interact according to the script from the trauma.

If a person has sufficiently pronounced healthy parts, there are resources to maintain them, and he chooses to interact from them, then it seems to the client that this person has also changed, the relationship is improving.

If a person does not have the resources to maintain healthy parts, or healthy parts are not strong enough, or he chooses to stay in the script, then he begins to "crumple and sausage" from the fact that his loved one, who goes to therapy, has become different. The client with his healthy manifestations, as it were, emphasizes the painfulness and traumatic nature of his environment, which cannot change with him. The client leaves the script and his environment finds himself in completely unfamiliar and unexpected conditions of interaction, this causes fear and aggression. Relationships deteriorate, and usually the one who goes to therapy is blamed.

It is also possible that in some ways the loved ones will react to the client's changes, maintaining healthy forms of interaction and thereby strengthening their healthy parts, but in some ways they will not. It is important to understand that the one who responds to the client's changes with his healthy parts will not necessarily react to everything, not the fact that he will completely change in sync with the client.

There are other reasons as well.

In the course of therapy, the client deals with his projections and transferences to other people, begins to see people more clearly, more clearly, without filters of his traumatic perception. So, the illusion of an idealized parent can "fly off" from the partner, and the partner appears before the client in all his multidimensional human essence, with pleasant and unpleasant manifestations. The client may be horrified - "how could I live with such a person for so many years." But the illusion of a demonized parent can also fly off (both from a partner and from friends or colleagues, and from the parents themselves), a person appears before the client in all his multidimensional essence, with pleasant and unpleasant manifestations. The client may be surprised, "how much easier and better everything turns out to be in the relationship with this person than they saw before."

In addition, in therapy, the client begins to try new patterns of interaction, at first this can be done intermittently, it takes time to learn how to do it "smoothly". For example, something that has been suppressed for a long time may appear in a hypertrophied form. If a person lived and did not protrude, did not show himself, his feelings, did not defend his boundaries, then at some point all this can go in an exaggerated form: a person fiercely defends his boundaries, conflicts and fights at the slightest opportunity, etc. It takes time for a person to find a balance, to find a suitable ratio for him, when and where to manifest himself, and where to simply remain silent, not to waste energy on "beads in front of pigs", when to defend his own, and when to step aside and also not to waste energy, etc..d. When there is an active and not yet very well developed development of new skills and patterns of behavior, relationships can become tense with everyone around.

So, if the relationship with someone close has become better, and the loved one himself seems to have changed too, then, perhaps, the client began to see more clearly in him a separate person, and not his projections and transferences, perhaps the loved one really reacted in some way on the client's changes, showed his healthy parts. But this does not mean that the loved one will change one hundred percent.

If the relationship with someone has become worse, perhaps this is a temporary period of grinding into new forms of interaction, and it is possible that this is already the final version of the renewed relationship, where one left the scenarios, and the other did not. And then it is worth making a choice whether to continue such a relationship or not.