Relationships

In Sheree's opinion relationships have a unique capacity to bring to the surface anything that is most unlike love, and a relationship dynamic studied in mindful awareness can provide a unique container for personal healing and growth.

Sheree and Somatic Rehabilitation help couples identify and work usefully with difficulties and challenges in this way.

Relationships as a system

From the perspective of Hakomi Experiential Work with Couples, a relationship is regarded as a system, where each member of the couple relationship contributes unconscious patterns and habits that influence the way our behaviour in a relationship rolls out.

This includes how we may relate to the Other, and how we may perceive them, as well as how we relate to ourselves - and our self perception.  

Sheree notes from her experience with Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy, that we seem to learn about love most usefully from within a relationship, and usually once we have encountered the problems and challenges that can cause relationships to flounder, which then hopefully cause us to seek therapy.

How can Sheree help yours?

With this in mind, Sheree uses mindfulness and Hakomi Mindfulness-based Somatic Psychotherapy to identify and then explore the couple system as it presents in a session.

We study what is occurring in the present moment for each person, and how each interacts with the other from this place of mindful awareness. 

This gentle, yet effective process of self-study is designed to facilitate awareness about what is going on in the relationship via the couple dynamic.  It is a present moment focussed process where each person learns and applies mindful awareness to what is happening now.  

In the session room, and because this is a real time experience that is being worked with now, what is learned from this process of exploration can lead to greater intimacy for both partners.

The process goes beyond insight and into action: working in mindful awareness with what is occurring now, can free us to focus on our interactions with each other, helping us to move forwards.  

Raising the issues

Couple differences tend to arise around needs, vulnerability and self-protection. Becoming aware of how these create patterns of relating, and observing how this rolls out in the present moment, can provide us with useful information about our self and the other.

Finding pathways ahead

As we begin to see what is happening in our moment to moment interactions, we also see that this experience can become information that we can use to help ourselves and our relationship.

As we're doing this, we're also building our capacity for sharing and understanding our own experience and that of the Other. In this way, it is possible to strengthen our relationships, and build our individual resilience, expanding our ideas about who we are, and about who the Other is. 

Being able to bring more of ourselves into our connection with the Other potentially allows us both to deepen, and to flourish together.

Our scientifically grounded approach

Authors Lewis, Amini and Lannon in their book 'A General Theory of Love' write:

“From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilising our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains.”

This view best sums up Sheree's approach to understanding, working with and being in relationship: the neuro-biological processes involved in attachment and behaviour play a much bigger role in what we create together as a couple, than what we realise.  

Understanding how this combines within family systems and impacts human developmental processes, is vital to create understanding and compassion.  In Sheree's opinion, this is what love and relationships are all about.