ABSTRACT
This exercise will be useful for participants who are talking about the pain of being unappreciated, unacknowledged, unseen in life or those who have spent years in some form of rejecting, non-affirming relationship where they get an appreciation once in a blue moon, but they stay. It’s called seeing rarities as pearls. Some people adjust too easily to situations in relationships which are not good for them. They begin to view abusive relationships as the norm. Or they may desensitise around the emotional neglect in a relationship, where there is just not enough praise, or listening time or curiosity from the partner in what the person is interested in or about what happened in their day at work, for example. Some people continue in relationships that would have been better ended with a mistaken belief that “Isn’t that all you get anyway?” As the psychologist Erving Polster (Polster and Polster, 1973: 74) says, “It takes considerable artistry to know when something is finished.”
