Relationships are not limited to what happens between two people. The ways we experience closeness and distance, establish boundaries, respond to separation, or find ourselves returning to similar situations can become recurring parts of our relationships with others.
Within individual psychological counseling, relationships can be explored through the person’s own experience: how they relate to others, what they expect from relationships, what becomes difficult, and what tends to repeat over time.
Recurring Patterns in Relationships
Certain difficulties may appear repeatedly across different relationships, even when the people and circumstances change.
Similar conflicts may emerge in romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, or other close relationships. At times, a person may recognize a recurring pattern without yet understanding why it continues to take the same form.
Psychological counseling can provide a space for exploring these repetitions and the experiences associated with them.
Closeness, Distance and Boundaries
The experience of being close to another person can involve different and sometimes conflicting needs. The wish for closeness may coexist with a need for distance; setting boundaries may bring relief in one situation and difficulty in another.
How a person experiences intimacy, separation, dependence, independence, rejection, or loss can therefore become part of the counseling process.
Rather than approaching these experiences according to a predetermined model of what a relationship should be, the work focuses on understanding how the person experiences and participates in their relationships.
Relationships in Individual Psychological Counseling
Work concerning relationships takes place within individual psychological counseling. It is not couples or family counseling.
The focus remains on the person and their experience: relationships in the present, relationships from the past, recurring patterns, and the ways these experiences may appear within the counseling process itself.
My work is informed primarily by psychoanalytic theories of psychotherapy and the Masterson Approach.
Individual psychological counseling for adults is available in person at Miyav Psikolojik Danışmanlık in Karşıyaka, Izmir, and online. Sessions are available in English and Turkish.