Liz Cobb Therapy
Relationship Counselling
You might like a brief introduction into some of the theories that underpin my work:-
Attachment (Bowlby)
Attachment (Bowlby)
Our earliest attachment to our primary caregiver sets us up with a tendency to be somewhere on the spectrum between very anxiously attached and insecure through healthy secure attachment to avoidant or struggling to want, or tolerate, closeness to another person. Therapy can help you to discover your attachment style and work towards an increased ability to form healthy, secure attachments.
“There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family. Or more happy. Or more exasperated. Or more . . . secure.” Jim Butcher
“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” Mitch Albom
Transactional Analysis (Berne)
Even as adults we have maintained a strong connection to our childhood selves, whether that child be a secure, happy one or a more insecure, unhappy or fearful personality. On top of that we have recorded and replay inside our heads a version of our parent(s) or caregiver which may be supportive and nurturing or critical and smothering. Without a functioning strong, confident adult self the parent and child voices and behaviours can cause us huge problems in relationships and life choices. Therapy will assist you to find your genuine adult voice and control those inner "demons" from the past.
'Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.'
Family Systems (Bowen)
Families all have individual ways of relating to each other and sometimes these cause adult family members to remain too tightly bound to the family and in desperate need of their approval/acceptance for a sense of wellbeing or with the alternative of emotionally cutting off. Therapy can help you to achieve healthy differentiation whereby you can accept that you need others in your life but you rely less on their approval and acceptance and stand confident as an individual.
“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.”
By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. ”