Why Relational Psychotherapy Helps People Have Better Relationships

By Allyson Burke


Psychotherapy is the way a therapist works with a client. Relational psychotherapy looks at how a patient's friendships can impact their mental and emotional state. It is still a reasonably new discovery within psychoanalysis but it is thought to be extremely important.

It was originally established during the nineteen eighties and tried to acknowledge the significance of a person's internal response to those around them. Exponents of the therapy suggested that our personalities are created by our responses to the people we interacted with when we were very young. This includes members of our family.

Where relational theory diverges from other methods of psychotherapy is that it does not see the individual's instincts as the primary driver of action. Freud said that these instincts were deep rooted and had nothing whatsoever to do with our experiences. Proponents of relational psychotherapy however, say that a person is driven by the relationships they want to have with other people. Furthermore, they say that people try to recreate their earliest relationships in order to satisfy their needs.

Psychoanalysts who use relational techniques, tend to ignore the Freudian use of free association. Instead they focus their efforts on building a relationship with the patient. They believe that psychotherapy works best when their is a healing relationship. In so doing, they believe they can get rid of a patient's habitual way of relating to others and so heal them.

Therapists look at the friendships which have impacted their client negatively. They look for any patterns within the friendships which are reminiscent of childhood. These childhood experiences are then analyzed in an attempt to understand how they might have affected their client's view of life and of themselves.

These techniques are usually associated with social constructionism. This is the idea that people do not form their ideas about life on their own but with others. There are two crucial parts of it. The first is that we deal with what happens to us by constructing a model in our mind for how we think the world operates. The second is that language is the main way in which we define our world.

A lot of people who would like to have better quality relationships. They engage in therapy because they hope it will help them remove the problems they're having. They believe that their happiness is being ruined by stressful friendships. Lots of therapists suggest that trying to find help is a very courageous step to take because it means you are facing up to your issues. Six to eight sessions is what they recommend as the minimum to find out whether this treatment works for you.

In relational psychotherapy, the friendship between the client and the person treating them is the most important thing. The client's anxieties must be correctly understood otherwise the treatment will have no impact. If the analyst's agenda is allowed to dominate the clients, then this can create real problems. As a result, the sessions need to have a feeling of trust about them. This kind of therapy just doesn't work for some people, so they need to find something else.




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