With all the pressure of spending Valentine's Day with a partner, it’s easy to forget the most important relationship you can have: the one with yourself. We sat down with Cynthia, namesake of Confidence With Cyn, to talk about her work and how she helps women find their self confidence, inner beauty, and a new chance at love.
Cynthia operates as a relationship therapist or relationship coach, and uses a combination of personal experience and somatic therapy to help women work on themselves and build healthier relationships. Her work deals with figuring out and breaking generational patterns, something she first noticed when doing her first internship working with instances of hard emotional cases that stemmed from childhood. While she described it as "intensive, heavy work", the patterns she noticed in childhood often reappeared in her adult clients that had gone through their own trauma. This connection led her to become passionate about "helping women break generational patterns, especially when it comes to relationships." Unhealthy relationships are "normalized", says Cynthia, and in helping women work through their trauma, rebuild their confidence and relationship with themselves, they can grow to have better relationships with others.
A demographic Cynthia's website targets is millennial women. When asked why she sticks to that age range, Cynthia responds that she "was the girl" who was chasing the wrong relationships for so many years. In her wisdom lies the key to her work: her experiences in healing her relationships can help women learn to take the first steps toward self-improvement. She says that "seeing the progress" in her clients is what brings her the most joy. "...it's really about challenging these beliefs that society conditions upon women and figuring out other ways to meet our needs, other ways to fulfill purpose or pleasure."
Although women come to her to start attracting better relationships with men, the ultimate goal in Cynthia's work is to help them foster a better relationship with themselves. She says it's often common for her clients to finish work with her and their romantic relationships are no longer the priority, because they have addressed the underlying patterns that cause unhealthy relationships.
To women who are skeptical about trying relationship coaching, Cynthia says that it doesn't hurt to give it a try. It comes down to comparing the pain: how much harder is it to stay where you are than face the discomfort of where you want to be? She mentions her clients having a breaking point, or an "I'm done" moment. Her goal is to help women explore that moment, and to figure out the pain of staying in that pattern or rebuilding new ones.
If the thought of jumping into a one-on one session is overwhelming, her advice is to make self-compassion, self-acceptance, and self-respect a daily practice. Rather than be critical on yourself for your mistakes, focus on what you've done right, or reevaluate where your perception of yourself might be too harsh.
"They’re small things," she said, "but...the little things make such a difference with how you relate to yourself over time. The way you treat yourself is going to reflect your whole life. As women we are taught so many things, and it really starts with those smaller things that then become a new way of relating to yourself."
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