Helping you discover your Happily Ever After?
What does not being relational mean in your relationship with yourself and others?
What being stuck in a non-relational relationship may look like with a partner or family member.
”A lack of relational connection in a relationship can mean that there is a lack of depth, communication, or emotional intimacy which can lead to anxiety, depression and a ton of resentment”
Lack of emotional connection
A relationship that lacks emotional intimacy may appear okay on the surface, but there is no real depth. Signs include not feeling understood, not talking about important things, and not being very touchy feely.
Lack of communication
You might feel like your partner doesn't listen or understand you. You might also avoid communication or block your partner's attempts to connect
One-sided relationship
A relationship where one partner leads almost every aspect, such as what activities you do together and when. This also can include one sided parenting of children. This can lead to feelings of resentment and exhaustion.
Unbalanced relationship
You might feel drained, stressed, or dissatisfied after spending time with your partner. You might also feel like your partner makes little effort to help meet your emotional needs
Unhealthy relationship
A relationship where one party uses strategies to achieve their own goals and needs, often at the expense of the other party. This can include power imbalances, manipulation, and putting your own feelings on the backburner.
Transactional relationship
A relationship that is more self-serving and short-term, with the goal of getting something with minimal effort.
Lack of trust
A relationship where there is no emotional connection, communication breakdown, or you don't trust your partner.
Being relational with others means that connections are reciprocal, rewarding, and rooted. They are about trust, communication and being heard and seen. Feeling safe to be vulnerable with your loved one and that feeling that is you and them against the world and you have each other’s back no matter what.
What being non-relational with yourself may look like.
”Not being relational with yourself can mean not having a healthy relationship with yourself, which can negatively impact your mental health and relationships with others.”
Low self-esteem
Being critical of yourself can lead to low self-esteem, which can cause you to avoid partners, loved ones and friends, or to have poor boundaries with others.
Unhealthy habits
You might develop habits that take you away from yourself, such as viewing the world through limiting beliefs, addictions and engage in misery stabilizing behaviors to keep people at a distance.
Losing yourself in relationships
Being a people pleaser. You might merge your identity with your partner, or go out of your way to please them.
Not expressing yourself
You might not share your opinions, wants, or needs, or establish boundaries
Weighed down by the past
A past filled with trauma and bad experiences if not therapeutically processed can feed depression and anxiety which prevents you from discovering who you are supposed to become because there is only one story you have been telling yourself.
Being relational with yourself involves self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-care. Through self-awareness, you learn to understand yourself better, understand other people better, and in turn, your relationships improve along with your mental health. Most importantly provide you with an opportunity to get to know the real you,
who is happy, fulfilled and at peace.
Hi, my name is Richie Pryor, I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Relational Life Therapist. Are you struggling with relationship and life challenges that have you feeling stuck in life? Are you thinking? We do not communicate at all. I am so tired of arguing and fighting. My partner doesn’t hear or see me! We fight and they shut down! I feel as though they resent me. I feel like we are living like roommates. I don’t feel as though they love me anymore.
What my clients want. They want to have conversations. I they want to be seen and heard. They want a 50/50 relationship. They want to feel safe be vulnerable. They want to be happy and enjoy a loving relationship. They want things to go back to the way it was when they first met. They want their children to see what a loving and connected relationship is. They want peace, intimacy and to grow old together.
How can I help! My method of therapy focuses on helping my clients become relational with themselves and others. I offer couples counseling, individual therapy, Family therapy, Relationship and Parent Coaching. I help my clients therapeutically explore and transform the dynamics within relationships with themselves and others, healing from trauma, addressing communication issues and working through mental health challenges. I support my clients by helping them explore the root of what has them stuck in life so they can foster a deeper emotional connection with themselves and the ones they love. I listen and help my clients solve problems so they can become unstuck.
The most important thing to remember is that no matter what challenges have you at a crossroads in life, a glimmer of hope is all you need to unlock the life you always dreamed of, have the relationships you want, heal from trauma and experience life on your terms. Fairy tales can come true and hope is where we start so you can discover your
Happily Ever After!
What Relationship Problems Are You Having?
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Poor Communication
This is the top complaint for all the couples I see. We don't communicate! There are two core reasons for lack of communication. #1 One partner has shutdown and fears conflict so they say nothing but their resentment bank is about to blow. #2 Both partners trigger each other and this activates your freeze, flight, fight response and you will never hear a word each other is saying.
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Infidelity
If there has been an infidelity in the relationship,that will destroy the trust in the relationship. Once trust is broken it is hard to be vulnerable again with your partner. One partner wants to know why while the other one for the most part either does not know why or fears telling them the truth.
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Dealing with Grandiosity
Riding their high horse. Grandiosity is one partner needing to be higher than the other. They need to be right all of the time. My way or the highway thinking. Grandiosity typically happens when one partner feels as though they are being disempowered which impacts their already low self-esteem so they yell, argue and behave in a way that makes them feel empowered. Their attitude is "I had to take that from my parents when I was a kid and now I am an adult and have power and I am not going to let anyone speak to me like that or tell me I am wrong!"
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Feeling Dismissed
When one partner fails to hear and see a partner they feel dismissed and not understood. A dismissive partner will yes you to death, gaslight you and may shut you down by yelling, walking away or retreating within themselves which is so frustrating for the other partner.
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Feeling Controlled
A partner that is controlling typically struggles with a tremendous amount of anxiety. They are trying to control whatever they can so they do not feel out of control. However, this can leave their partner aggravated, resentful and leave them with a feeling that they are being parented and managed by their partner. "You treat me just like my mom or dad" I hear that quite a bit in sessions. Nobody wants another parent. They want a partner.
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Feeling Suffocated
The feeling of being suffocated is like being controlled but different because this typically involves one partner not feeling loved enough. This partner will always be talking about how much their partner doesn't love them regardless of how much they believe they are doing. They pursue their partners with high intensity and if their partner is walled off from childhood they will run further away because they are love avoidant.
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Resentment
Resentment is a poison that slowly will eat away at your relationship until it ends. When your partner flies off the handle and has a huge reaction to something minor there is resentment in the relationship. I tell clients that it has noting to do with leaving the cap off the toothpaste. It is something in the past that they are holding onto that have them fired up and attacking you. Resentment is one of the biggest problems in relationships that is why I spend a lot of time in sessions working through them with clients and helping them heal so they can move forward.
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Living Like Roommates
Lot's of couples have this problem. It can be a result of several things, resentment about the past, one partner treating the other like a child, being walled off but one that I find apparent with a lot of couples is when they engage in Misery Stabilizers. These are the things each partner may do to avoid intimacy, connection and conversation with their partner. They kind of do their own thing. Some popular misery stabilizers are. Phones, social media, work, kids, hanging out with friends, Substance use and other addictions.
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Stable Ambiguity
The only way you connect is through your fighting and arguing. When I see a couple that uses this dysfunction to connect I ask them "If you stopped fighting would you still have a relationship?". They fight instead of having conversations because they have not learned relational communication skills and most likely are modeling what they saw when they were younger. Parent #1 makes a demand from Parent #2. Parent #2 Feels controlled and managed and goes on the defensive and that is the dance. They are communicating but in a very dysfunctional way.
What Makes My Therapy Approach Effective
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Good Energy
I believe that having the right type of energy in therapy is a key to making a connection that allows you feel safe and be vulnerable so you can process and heal from your challenges in life. I strive to provide a warm, empathetic, positive, calming and healing energy in my sessions so my clients feel comfortable to do the work.
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Problem Solving
I am not a therapist that sits there and nods while taking notes. My clients at times ask for help with problems they are having in life and we roll up our sleeves and we work as a team to solve them together.
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Talking About The Elephant
I find that partners feel that directness in couples counseling is helpful because a lot of untrained couples therapists will spend a lot of time beating around the bush of dysfunction and I go right through the bush in the first session and talk about the elephant sitting in the room. Clients have said "Wow we are not wasting any time and getting right into it". Yes, we are and that quickly I work so you can get back to living your lives.
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Time is Important
We can’t make or buy more time in life. Therefore, I believe that we should not be spending years in therapy. You have challenge in front of you that you want help and support with so you can get back to living your life and finding your happily ever after.
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Being Relational
I do not hide behind a veil of professional secrecy and we are equals in the room. I model what being relational is with my clients and meet them where they are at. When it is helpful I share my own life experiences with them which I feel accomplishes two things. Letting them know I am human and helping them understand they are not alone on their journey.
Couples Counseling
Couples counseling is typically the last stop before separation or divorce because most couples that have relationship problems typically wait until it’s almost too late before seeking out a couple’s therapist. Unfortunately, all couples’ therapists are not created equal and some don’t even have proper training in couples therapy and marriage counseling. Which results in the couple wasting more time because the therapist is either not effective or takes too long to get to the core relationship problems and the partners give up. Every couple I see comes in with “Communication problems” and or “We are living like roommates” and typically in the first session we can determine that these are just a symptoms of other problem. If you want to solve the relationship problems than you have to get to the root of what is causing the dysfunction and this comes with an unhealthy dose of relational resentment that results in the partners triggering each other and fighting and arguing which typically leaves one partner withdrawing and the other partner pursuing. The more one partner withdraws from the conflict the more the other partner pursues them and the more the partner withdraws the angrier the pursuer becomes and more suffocated the withdrawer becomes. That is one of the dysfunctional dances that I see many of my couples engage in for years and this is a relationship killer.
I utilize what’s called Relational Life Therapy to support couples in learning how to be relational with themselves so that can be relational with their partners. My Couples counseling and relationship work focuses on helping partners discover the real reason they are having relationship problems, and it typically is not “communication problems”. My couples work can be transformational for most partners, and we don’t waste time arguing in sessions about the weekly argument or fight. I help both partners uncover the reasons behind their percentage of relationship dysfunction, and we develop a path to resolve it through healing, developing relational skills, working on self-esteem and reigniting the passion that they may have lost. If one or both partners are truly “done” then we develop a plan to support each of them in transitioning either through separation or divorce. This process is the letting go of the relationship with each partner so they can both move forward in their own lives and find happiness again. As an RLT Therapist I just don’t sit there and nod and ask you how that feels. We get uncomfortable together because that is where the work and healing is done. I don’t hind behind a veil of professionalism and as an RLT Therapist we talk about our own relationship challenges that we have overcome if we think it will serve our clients. Now that is being relational!
My job as a couple’s counselor is to assist the couple in determining what the best path forward is for both partners. I ask all my couples to give the process at least 3 months, which is 12 weekly sessions or an intensive (Relationship Bootcamp) 8 weeks of 90-minute sessions. My job is not to waste anyone’s time because life needs to be lived and we can’t do that being in therapy for years. So, I do it as efficiently as possible with four easy steps and if either partner is not willing to engage in our work as a couple we can focus on the work with one partner that wants healing, closure and finding a path forward in life. This is done in 4 simple steps. Click here to learn more about my couples therapy and marriage counseling.
“These are the Five Reasons why you may be having relationship problems and it is not you or your partner’s fault”
#1 When you are triggered you revert to a younger version of yourself and all their job in childhood was to survive. So congratulations on that. However, how we adapted to survive in our childhood are the same resources we use in our relationships today which is not relational and not your fault!
#2 You and your partner most likely learned your relationship skills from your parents. Take a moment and think about that! Most Couples Therapists teach skills to the parts of you that can’t use them. I teach skills to the part of you that will use them.
Again. Not your fault.
#3 You have been triggering each other’s inner adaptive child without even knowing it, which creates your dysfunctional dance. Again Not your fault because you had no idea!
The more you criticize them, the more they withdraw, the more they withdraw the more abandoned and angrier you become, the more angrier you become and pursue them the more resentful they become.
#4
A. You grew up in a Walled up family where nobody showed their emotions. This would leave you love avoidant and fearing intimacy and connection.
B. You had a parent that that was boundaryless and you felt suffocated by their love. This would leave you love avoidant and fearing connection and intimacy.
You run from your partner and love!
C. You grew up in a Walled of family where you were emotionally and or physically abandoned or neglected. You didn’t get the love you needed and had to rely on yourself. This would leave you love dependent and craving for the love you never had when you were a child. You pursue your partner with intensity!
Once again, Not your fault because your parents learned their relationship skills from their parents!
#5 You haven’t found the right Couples Counselor until now because most Couples Therapists listen and nod while you and your partner argue about the argument of the week! Not Helpful. To become relational and discover intimacy you need help with healing your inner wounded child, freeing your adaptive child and awaking your wise adult that can be relational with yourself and your partner. Because the truth is that most couples therapists aren't trained or are not comfortable with taking this approach to therapy until now.
That is certainly not your fault!
“Because You Deserve A Happily Ever After”
“Don’t You?”
What clients are saying!