Life Change Blog

Over the past twenty years we have amassed huge amounts of knowledge and experience in "life change". We post a new Life Change Blog article every Monday morning. Hope you find them useful.

Relationship Problems and How To Fix Them            

Relationship problems cover a huge area. Generally when people seek relationship or couples counselling they are looking to sort out difficulties within their marriage or with their partner. Such difficulties generally fall into 2 categories;

1)      Problems that you can identify, such as coping with affairs and lack of common interests.

2)      Problems that you can’t identify clearly, such as persistent arguing and simply not getting along together well.

The first category is usually easier to deal with as the difficulties are known quantities, as long as a good degree of honesty and openness are achieved and a willingness to sort things out. A good relationship/ couples counsellor should be able to help enormously.

The second category is a lot more tricky to deal with; where would you start?

We have been delivering relationship counselling for a very long time and have worked with couples experiencing every sort of difficulty on the planet. The relationship counselling program that we have developed aims to address and resolve difficulties in both categories within a short but intensive framework.

The starting point for our counselling work with couples is our Personality Profile. There are now  thousands of personality profiles in use around the world, most of them are not very good. There are 3 big problems with a lot of these profiles;

• They are not very good a distinguishing between emotional states. There is a famous questionnaire used by lots of people that is not very good at differentiating between anxiety and depression. This kind of error leads to all kind of other problems.
• Secondly, it is very difficult to identify the difference between someone’s long term personality “traits” and transient emotional “states”. For example, it is often difficult for most profiles to identify a depressive personality trait if that person has just won the lottery.
• Thirdly almost all personality profiles suffer from reliability error. This means that your results will be different if you repeat the same questionnaire the following week or month or year.

The profile that we use is the most reliable and accurate clinical tool available in the world. We have been analysing the profile results for nearly 20 years, during which time the profile has been refined and updated. It gives huge, accurate amounts of information about who we are and why we deal with the world around us (including our relationships) in the way we do.

We recently worked with a couple who were not getting along. One area of dispute was that “Dan” (not real names) always accused “Jane” of being “over emotional and histrionic”. This argument had been running for years. It ceased in the first minute of our session. The personality profile results showed very clearly and unambiguously that “Jane’s” emotional and histrionic scores where quite low, well within the normal range and certainly not anywhere near enough to be a visible problem.

The results can quickly show us who we are with very small margins of error. I can think of no better starting point in the world for good, productive and successful relationship counselling. It provides huge insight very quickly and makes what have become insurmountable problems wonderfully transparent.

If you would like to know more about how to fix relationship problems or our relationship counselling program contact us now on our Contact page.

Talk to you next Monday.

Alex.