What type of love do you have in your relationship?
- Healthy Love: Development of self first, as a priority.
- Toxic love: Obsession with relationship.
- Healthy Love: There is room to grow and expand as well as a for others to grow in the relationship.
- Toxic love: Security, comfort in sameness; intensity of need seen as proof of love — may really be fear, insecurity, loneliness.
- Healthy Love: Separation of interests; other friends; each spouse maintains other meaningful relationships outside of their marriages.
- Toxic love: Total involvement; limited social life; neglect old friends and personal interests and ambitions.
- Healthy Love: Encouragement of each other’s expanding beyond the relationship whether personal, business, or social. Each spouse is secure in his/her own worth.
- Toxic love: Preoccupation with other’s behavior; fear of other changing.
- Healthy Love: Healthy Trust (opposite of blind trust)
- Toxic love: Jealousy; possessiveness; fear of competition.
- Healthy Love: Compromise, negotiation or taking turns at leading. Problem solving together.
- Toxic love: Power plays for control; blaming; passive or aggressive manipulation.
- Healthy Love: Embracing of each other’s individuality. Loving each other as they are with healthy encouragement in areas that need improvement.
- Toxic love: Trying to change the other to fit one’s own image of the ‘perfect spouse’.
- Healthy Love: Relationship deals with all aspects of reality.
- Toxic love: Relationship is based on delusion and avoidance of things that are unpleasant.
- Healthy Love: Self-care by both partners; emotional state not dependent on the other’s mood.
- Toxic love: Expectation that one partner will fix and rescue the other.
- Healthy Love: Loving detachment (healthy concern for one another, while knowing when to let go and allow them to assume their journey to self-correction/refinement by themselves)
- Toxic love: Fusion (being obsessed with each other’s problems and feelings).
- Healthy Love: Sex is a choice growing out of loving and caring friendship.
- Toxic love: Pressure around sex due to fear, insecurity and need for immediate gratification.
- Healthy Love: Ability to enjoy solitude by being alone.
- Toxic love: Unable to endure separation; clinging.
- Healthy Love: Cycle of comfort and contentment.
- Toxic love: Cycle of pain and despair.
- Healthy Love: Conversations are based upon intent to understand one another, help and/or convey affection.
- Toxic love: Conversations based upon intent to blame, defend, or manipulate.
If you identified with having a toxic relationship I can through couples counselling or individual counselling help you to get to a place where you can define your relationship as a healthy relationship. Remembering that mental health and relational health starts with the health of the individual and only then can you work on the relationship as a whole.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me for an online counselling session. Let’s together create an environment where you can connect with yourself again, an environment that fosters and encourages authenticity. An environment where you can follow your gut and get to know what it looks like.
After doing an intake I might be able to help you with a few sessions using BWRT (Brainworking Recursive Therapy) read more about BWRT on another blog on my website: https://thewellsamaria.co.za/what-is-brainworking-recursive-therapy-or-bwrt/, or we will use another technique depending on your unique needs.
Contact Me & Book your online session!
