To be human is to be involved in interpersonal relationships. Interpersonal relationships are social connections with others. We experience a variety of interpersonal relationships on a daily basis with family, friends, significant others and people at our workplace. They can be brief or enduring. While every relationship is unique, there are some common themes that influence the health and continuation of all relationships. The ending of any relationship can be painful, and it is normal to experience a grieving process in relation to this kind of loss.

Relationship counseling is the process of counseling the parties of a human relationship in an effort to recognize, and to better manage or reconcile, troublesome differences and repeating patterns of stress upon the relationship. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple, employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.

You could have problems in relating to others or it could develop into a worse form of being anti social.

Relating to others

• Do you have problems forming the relationships you want to with friends, family, relatives, colleagues and partners?
• Do you have problems maintaining them or get into relationships that do not work or are abusive?
• Do you notice that a pattern starts to emerge and that the same problems keep cropping up in a series of relationship? If these patterns cause distress, it can be helpful to look at what might be generating them and keeping them going.
• Are you someone with low levels of self-esteem or feel an internal pressure to tolerate abusive behavior in a partner because you don’t believe you deserve better?
• Are you scared of getting too close to someone which stops relationships developing or you feel that they stay relatively superficial and unfulfilling?
• Sexual intimacy can be a source of worry and self-doubt, do you experience a pressure to be sexual that makes you uncomfortable, or leads to having sexual experiences that trouble you?
• Have you been through traumatic experiences in past relationships and family relationships interfere with your present relationships?
• Are you a victim of neurotic patterns developing which adversely affect relationships? Do you feel a desperate need for acceptance and affection?
• Are you a perfectionist with dire need to control and have power over others?
• All cultures have set emotionally toned ideas and beliefs that govern interpersonal relations Notions such as Women should be submissive, men don’t cry, all girls should be popular, all men are created equal, etc. Do you find your relationship with people around you suffering from such societal pre set notions?

Sometimes the support of friends and the passage of time is all that is needed to start to recover and move on, but sometimes people can get ‘stuck’ with feelings that they seem unable to resolve. In all these cases, it may be that there are underlying issues that would benefit from exploration and understanding and that talking things over with a counselor might help. Help is just a click away.

Worsening of these symptoms could result in antisocial personality disorder. People with antisocial personality disorder exhibit traits of impulsivity, high negative emotionality, low conscientiousness and associated behaviors including irresponsible and exploitative behavior, recklessness and deceitfulness, loneliness and chronic sadness and this in turn results in increased rate of difficulties with relationships.