Relationship Stress Intregration
Our relationships suffer when we haven’t addressed our unmet needs. Unprocessed relational stress causes our relationships with ourselves, our family, our friends, our bodies, time, money, food, and our environment to be altered in such a way that we’re not experiencing things as they really are. It lays around our psychological space like unwashed dishes in the sink. We end up building our lives around these forgotten messes only to be surprised (oftentimes at the least opportune moment) that we don’t have any clean dishes. When we’re hungry, sleep deprived, or don’t have our emotional needs met we don’t get to experience our best selves.
Relationship stress integration helps us triage our relational distortions and identify and integrate deep and unmet needs so that we can get back to enjoying the relationships that are most important.
We start by learning to recognize common relational distortions. Like a magician’s smoke and mirrors, oftentimes our minds can be fixated on one thing but lose awareness of what else is happening in and around us. Sometimes one thing can seem so important is eclipses other things that are in fact more important. (If you’ve ever stayed up too late binging a show, you know how seductive it can be to finish the season before bed.) We call this the “glamour mirror” because it makes something mundane seem so important.
Other times we might find ourselves fighting against the people we love the most in the world. Things that are small, like dishes, laundry, crumbs, interruptions to movies, games, or shows can feel like major disturbances. They can cause fights with the people we love the most! We call this an “enmity mirror” because we only see a funhouse reflection of a person we know, but in the reflection they look like our enemy instead of our ally.
There are so many more distortions! But once we start recognizing and naming these distortions we can start to follow the breadcrumbs they’ve left back to the deep unmet needs that are sustaining these distortions, and in the clarity resolve them.
One of my favorite things I learned when becoming a trauma therapist is that “once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.” A resolved unmet need should be like last week’s lunch: gone. Unmet needs come and go. Sometimes we don’t always get what we need, but our bodied have the ability to metabolize that absence, adapt, and move forward and meet our needs. When we use relationship stress integration to find and resolve those unmet needs we’re suddenly left with clarity in our relationships.
Suddenly we see things with clarity and we know the next right thing to do in that relationship.
If this sounds like something you’d like help doing, or something you’d like to learn to help others do reach and book a consultation with me. I’d love to hear from you.
