When your life feels like its unravelling

When your life feels like it’s unravelling: how relational counselling can help you gather the threads.

Do you sometimes feel that you are unravelling?
That you can’t quite catch hold of the strands of you that are slipping away just out of reach? That you are fraying at the edges and you have to keep on going, and then you are running trying to grab and hold on to the different threads of your life?

We can all feel that life is getting out of control at times. Talking with a relationally trained counsellor might be a way for you to unpick and carefully unravel the strands and threads of your life. At Indigo Thinking, we have all been trained to work relationally.

But what does that even mean, we hear you ask?
And it’s an excellent question. As people we are wired for connection. From birth, as newborn babies, we are totally dependent on someone to care for us; to meet all our needs. To feed us, keep us warm, change our nappies. And to love us. We are primed to seek out close bonds; we need them to survive and thrive. These early attachment relationships are fundamental and therefore ‘relational’ in origin.

Gaining a deeper understanding of how our needs were met, or not, can help us pull together the strands of our lives and can help us work out our patterns of behaviour in relationships. We can struggle to understand ourselves when we try to do this on our own, because so much of how we are is driven by our unconscious mind. To quote Professor Gillian Straker and Dr Jacqui Winship in The Talking Cure (2019); ‘By definition, we cannot be conscious of our own unconscious.’

Working with a trusted relational counsellor can bring your unconscious processes and ways of relating to people into your conscious awareness. And what is key about working relationally is that it’s a collaboration. The counsellor-client relationship is used as a way of understanding how you live, work and experience the world and your relationships. In this way, your understanding of yourself is deeper, more meaningful and felt in an emotionally embodied way. Feeling understood in a fundamental way may be completely new for you, and in this way, you will be able to collect the strands of your life together.