Relationship Counseling Philadelphia | Dr. David Steinberg, PhD, LCSW
The hardest thing to do in a relationship is to put aside your hurt and emotional baggage in order to give your partner the experience of being felt and taken in. The beautiful thing about relationship counseling is that it can be very effective working with a couple, a group, or on a one-to-one basis. When you help an individual to become clear in the emotional field, they then become a catalyst for others in their lives to emotionally evolve and grow.
Stop Old Patterns of Relating and Discover a New Way of Being in Relationship
Are you caught up in repeating old patterns over and over? Do you relationships tend to fail in the same ways? Understanding your patterns and truly healing your emotional wounds will lead you to a new way of being in relationship. Relationship counseling is in part about understanding why you play the role you play in your relationships. Through conscious and honest self-exploration we can unpack your relational behaviors and create new ways of being in relationship that are healthier and more satisfying.
Do you Become Enraged with your Partner Over Small Things that Build up Over Time?
Rage is a very common and destructive emotion. It is also always a secondary emotion to more vulnerable feelings. A parent can only help a child identify and relate to feelings that they have accepted in themselves. A father whom can’t accept and acknowledge feelings of hurt will be incapable of accepting hurt in his child. Eventually the child learns to push the hurt down, or hide it from his father because the feeling us unaccepted and met with either rejection or shame. Eventually, the feeling can be walled off from the child, and as an adult, and this is often done through various self-medicating behaviors (drinking, drugging, and excessive television watching to name a few).
Clarify the Emotional Field and Shift your Relationship with Yourself
Clarifying your emotions is the pathway to authentic relationship. Truly loving all parts of yourself, including your hurt and shame is the key to authentic connection with others. For many people, being vulnerable and open with your feelings feels dangerous and risky, because vulnerability is a sign of weakness and leaves you vulnerable to being hurt. But if you truly loved yourself completely, then you will be there to protect and take care of yourself if someone becomes unfriendly or hostile. It’s when you are disconnected from your emotional world that you are at most risk of allowing others to hurt you.
Your Feelings are Connectors
In relationship counseling, I work with you to develop the basic building blocks for improving your relationships with everyone you meet, and this starts with you developing more clarity in your internal world. We are so externally focused as a culture, that we often lose sight of our own emotional life. Without this internal awareness, our relationships with people we love will suffer, because our feelings are the bridges to connection and understanding.
You are the Gatekeeper
Once you develop more emotional clarity, then your relationships will begin to develop a new level of flow and a deeper level of intimacy and connection. You will develop the capacity to see who is willing and able to honor your emotional life, and you will become aware of those needing a little help to go deeper. This work gives you another level of self-understanding, and the option to decide who deserves to be let into your heart, and who has work to do before you let them in.