'If love comes and goes so easily It is not love we're dealing with.'

Relationship with ourselves, our partner's, family, friends and community present ongoing joy and challenges. At best, relationships are fulfilling, fun, deep, intimate and full of learning and bring happiness and benefit to ourselves and others. They can also bring conflict, hatred, anger, misuse of power, revenge and jealousy.

Process Oriented Psychology or Process Work was developed in the last 25 years, by Dr. Arnold Mindell, a physicist and Jungian analyst. He and Dr. Amy Mindell and colleagues combine Jungian psychology, spirituality, modern physics and social activism to bring awareness to support individual and collective change. He discovered that the dreaming process goes far beyond our night time dreams and can be seen in body symptoms, relationship problems, group conflicts, addictions, extreme states of consciousness, social tensions and in death and dying. Process work is based on the assumption that the solution to a problem is contained within the disturbance itself and provides a practical framework and experience to unfold and bring awareness and meaning to our lives and help us live that.

Process Oriented Psychology talks about three different levels of relationship:

1. Consensus reality or the everyday level of life. This includes inner psychology, personal history and communication patterns and conflict

2. The Dreaming level which includes the background 'dreaming,' the dream figures trying to emerge, atmosphere, moods, fantasies, and 'high and low dreaming' (the best and worst) of the relationship and trance states. In the high dream, there is a signal of the seed of the low dream and vice versa. eg. you think that your partner/friend is kind, supportive and loving, a reliable provider for the family and will 'be there' for you. Just when you need them, they have a deadline at work and are not available in the way you expect and want. You then fall into a low dream, thinking they don't care about you and put their work first. Then, they get a raise at work and book a holiday for you both in Paris. You swing back into the high dream of romantic love again.

3. The Sentient or transpersonal, essence or deepest level of relationship.

Generally, we tend to give validity to the consensus reality level and marginalize the other two.

Practical Skills to Improve Relationships

What we do and say either will escalate or de-escalate (raise or lower the temperature) a relationship conflict, either one to one, or in a group or community. The following skills may help you process difficult situations with people:

• Talk for yourself, 'I am feeling.....' Use of a third party or an unconscious coalition will always cause problems. eg Sally also says she has a similar issue with you and your mother agrees with me on this.

• Try to pick up your own double signals/mixed messages and become more congruent. eg, notice you say, 'I feel angry with you' and at the same time, smiling.

• Be open and willing to pick up an accusation made against you, consider even one percent of it, rather than deny it.

• Being in the now. Often relationship problems trigger past memories, either from childhood or in the history of the relationship. It helps to realize that it is not usually what happens that is the problem, but how we react to it. Don't get stuck in the memory.

• Be aware of your habitual patterns, how we get stuck and remain there.

• Avoid using stereotypes.

• Notice and be sensitive to your own reactions and bring them in eg. you feel attacked and hurt. Rather than ignoring your hurt, bring it in by saying eg. 'ouch.' Your reaction may change what your opponent is saying

• Have a feedback loop eg. If someone apologises, don't continue to attack them.

• Be more direct in your communication. Being indirect through sarcasm, gossip or being patronising with always escalate an argument.

• Be flexible in learning how to take your own side and the other's side. If both sides become entrenched in their position, and won't move, that's how war starts.

• Stay in the now as much as possible. Bringing in unresolved arguments from three years ago and bringing up the past, is not going to help. Stay with one issue at a time. When you reach resolution don't start the fight again.

• If you are really stuck, think about your personal history. Is this topic similar to an argument your parents had, eg, over money, child raising, work etc Is this a conflict you have with a lot of people, not just your partner.

• Remember that change comes from changing ourselves, not expecting the other person to change.