Unmet Expectations with Relationships

Arising out of years of experience of working with couples and individuals experiencing difficulties within their primary relationships, the workshop looks at one of the most significant causes of those difficulties, unmet expectations within the relationship.

When expectations –unexpressed and often unconscious  – within a relationship are not met, it gives rise to exasperation, disappointment and often resentment, creating a competitive rather than collaborative dynamic.

The workshop looks at seven areas of expectation –children, money, sex, emotional, social, domestic and moral -within which the client(s) can be assisted to examine their own expectations, express them, modify them as required and come to a new understanding of how the dynamic within their relationships can be altered.

Exercises that the client can use to explore these areas are included.

Bio: Caroline Smith, humanistic and integrative psychotherapist.
I have been in private practice for 25 years, working with adults, children, couples and families.I also provide training and supervision for different bodies, among them the Kerry Traveller Health Education project and the Women’s Resource Centre, and I was national director of CARI’s forensic accompaniment service for the Child and Adolescent Sexual Assault Treatment service in Galway SATU and the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. For a number of years,I worked as a therapist for CARI’s outreach clinic in Tralee, providing therapeutic services for children who had experiences sexual abuse and their families.