At our core, we yearn for a relationship in which we can feel safe and accepted. Unfortunately, the opposite happens in our lives quite frequently. Relationships become a source of pain and suffering. The marriage and family therapy offers therapeutic assistance to individuals, couples and whole families where relations are aching and even destructive

Our marriage and family therapy follows the model of Relational Family Therapy by Dr. Christian Gostečnik. Basically, people are relationship beings – this is why in therapy we perceive a person in the context of relationships with important others. The most important is the primary family. Basic relationships, emotional dynamics, manner of communication, behaviour patterns are unconsciously repeated in relationships we form as adults.

During the therapy, we try to feel an individual, a couple or a family in their vulnerability, we try to make them aware of the repressed and separated emotions, and we help them to start feeling them.

The basic assumption is the development relational family perspective which assumes that the family is the most complex unit of human development observation as the only system that includes all the diversity of mutual relations, intergenerational transmission, and through the development of attachment also the organic development of the individual (Kompan Erzar, 2006).

The basic energy of a system that drives all its dynamics and process and directs its development is an affect. This is the unconscious emotional dynamics that most strongly characterizes the system and relationships (Siegel, 1999). Relational family therapy seeks to regulate the fundamental affect that permeates all relations in their non-functionality and pathological psychic content (Kompan Erzar, 2006).

The work is carried out at three levels: interpersonal level of the marital relationship (where they met, what attracted them, where they are from, how they met, their way of communication, the values ​​they are pursuing (Gostečnik, 2007).) The next level is systemic, where we explore the original families, and then focus on the intrapsychic world, the world of images - the object of the relational theory, the self-image - the psychology of self and the basic affects that are created – interpersonal psychoanalysis (Gostečnik, 2007). This is where we explore the stored psycho-organic conditions, feelings and memories of parents or carers, and we try to reveal and understand the power of past experience in the life of the individual, the couple and the family

In the therapeutic space, we create an atmosphere of trust, as only a relationship can heal a relationship.

Gostečnik, C. (2004). Relational family therapy. Ljubljana: Brat Frančišek in Frančiškanski družinski inštitut

Gostečnik, C. (2007). Relational marriage therapy. Ljubljana: Brat Frančišek in Frančiškanski družinski inštitut

Kompan-Erzar, K. (2006). Love cleanses the memory. Ljubljana: Brat Frančišek in Frančiškanski družinski inštitut; Celje: Celjska Mohorjeva družba

Siegel, D. (1999). The developing Mind. New York: Guilford