Relationship Therapy at PPSC

A good relationship can be an essential component of a fulfilling life. Couples who struggle, or misunderstand each other, or devolve into resentment often have trouble staying together. Yet if there remains a base level of trust and intimacy, many couples have a chance of survival. At PPSC, we offer relationship therapy that emphasizes resolving the emotional issues that keep us apart from those we love. Often personal issues from earlier in life can color intimate relationships, where they wreak havoc with communication and drive us to enact dynamics that don’t really belong in the present. The goal of analytic therapy is to surface and understand these forces better, and to master them through this understanding.

As part of our abiding commitment to this relationship therapy, we occasionally host workshops for treatment professionals who want to grow more adept at identifying and improving the issues their couples patients face. One recent presentation, entitled, “Collaborative Couples Therapy: Turning Fights Into Intimate Conversations,” covered some material our therapists have found useful:

The central therapeutic task is to move couples out of their spiral of alienation–their adversarial or withdrawn state–and into a cycle of connection. The therapist creates intimate conversations by bringing into the couple dialogue the haunting feelings that each partner struggles with alone.

The PPSC Annex consistently hosts some of the most engaging and effective seminars in New York City. If you’d like to learn more about relationship therapy or continuing education in psychotherapy, please contact us today.

Are Stressful Relationships…Fatal?

For the second week in a row here at PPSC, we are delving into the thorny question of how relationships influence mental health. Last week saw a discussion of the various ways having a stable partner can relieve neurotic tendencies; now we have the converse, a new study which suggests stressful relationships actually shorten your life. The article in question was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Danish researchers gave nearly 10,000 people a standard questionnaire about how often they experience conflict with friends, neighbors, family members and other people. A longitudinal follow-up found a strong correlation:

Eleven years later, 422 of them were no longer living. That’s a typical number. What’s compelling, Rikke Lund and her colleagues at University of Copenhagen say, is that the people who answered "always" or "often" in any of these cases were two to three times more likely to be among the dead. (And the deaths were from standard causes: cancer, heart disease, alcohol-related liver disease, etc.—not murder. . .)

The question with all associations like this is which is the chicken and which the egg. Do conflict-ridden relationships lead to early death, or do people who instigate conflicts already suffer from poor health, when then drives the conflicts? Although the researchers applied the standard regressive statistical tools to determine what was going on here, the study’s design still doesn’t really answer these basic questions.

Yet the correlation is powerful. Stress and conflict are clearly associated with poor health and diminished life spans. It would make sense, then, to take active steps to repair combative relationships and end destructive ones. One of the easiest ways is to do so is to understand yourself better.

PPSC offers focused relationship therapy as part of an ongoing commitment to analytic therapy in New York. If you want to understand where your conflicts come from and why they seem to persist no matter how hard you work, contact us today to learn how you can find a therapist in New York.

How a Successful Relationship Quiets the Mind

It is hardly news to suggest that neurotic people find comfort in being loved. People who struggle with depression, anxiety and OCD often experience isolation as a result of these conditions. Sharing them with a partner who can withstand such gale force emotions is often a great relief. Now someone has studied just how great this relief can be. A study published in the Journal of Personality followed several couples over many months to see how they handled neurotic behavior. The results were encouraging:

The scientists found that, while in a romantic relationship, neurotic behavior seemed to gradually decrease over time . . . For one thing, they receive support from each other, said Christine Finn. Secondly, the world of inner thought plays a crucial role: “The positive experiences and emotions gained by having a partner change the personality — not directly but indirectly — as at the same time the thought structures and the perception of presumably negative situations change,” Finn said.

Of course these researchers have ignored the far thornier question of how to land a stable relationship when you feel like a fragile and self-admonishing bundle of nerves.

At PPSC, we offer relationship therapy to help bridge this gap, offering patients the tools they need to make sense of their romantic relationships. Issues such as frequent arguments and problems of trust are often the product of each individual’s emotional history.

If you’d like to build healthy relationships and discover more productive ways to work through difficulties with your partner, please contact the New York relationship therapy experts of PPSC today.