Toolbox Of Love
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In the mental health space failing of relationships is the biggest concern which most individuals are struggling with. We don’t even have an idea how deep it goes into our system when relationships fail.
And the beauty of it all is that relationships start from the minute we are born, in fact in my work, as a mental health expert, we understand how it starts even before our birth.
All your relationships are in reference to your deepest relationship.
One has to work on unclogging that deep relationship in order to heal all the others.
A healthy relationship is one where individuals are allowed to express all aspects of themselves safely. The environment around a healthy relationship promotes inner growth.
A healthy relationship doesn’t just happen by accident. It takes an imperfect person who is committed to putting in the work to better themselves and improve their partnership with other people in the process.
It takes the understanding of the frame of reference. It is the sum total of all the experiences and your perception of those experiences.
Everything that you experience is an experience unique to you. No two people ever experience exactly the same feelings in the same situation.
For instance: If you’ve been through trauma in your life, it often gets so deeply embedded that your behaviour becomes a reflex action.
You see these in a lot of cases. People who are unable to have a gratifying intimacy because they freeze when in intimate situations.
Anything that has formed a pattern due to continuous repetition, a habitual behaviour that is not adding value, will need to be evaluated. Recognize your wounds from the past. And work on deleting the corrupt drives. This can be done with the help of therapy.
In my practice I see everyone battling Expectation and a lack of self-love. People say things like ‘she doesn’t do anything to make me happy’, or ‘how can I be happy, he spends no time with me’. I even have single people who are waiting to be happy when they find a partner.
Then it moves on to… Our relationship is just lacking a child. We will be happy once we have a child.
THE CUE: She/He doesn’t make me happy. This is the cue to reassess and reevaluate your relationship with yourself.
When you are looking for another to complete you, you open yourself up to pain. This whole “Jerry Maguire line… 'You complete me'” is nonsense.
You were always complete.
You chose to break yourself down into pieces, fragments like a jigsaw puzzle and then looked for temporary solutions that kind of fit the puzzle and later built a little more confidence so started to put pressure on the piece to make it fit you.
But it cannot. Nobody can fit pieces of themselves into your soul.
Do not wait for the people in your life to make you happy, be the person in your life making you happy.
TIP FOR HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS: Love Yourself
When you do not have a wholesome relationship with yourself you put too much expectation on the other and this my friends is a recipe for disaster and builds toxicity in any relationship.
You learn these skills when you are young. I remember my childhood being emotionally tumultuous. I would often feel very sad. I would hold my knees and cry. The dog couldn’t bear it and would keep licking my tears away. When my mother would come to pacify me and tell me she loved me and I couldn’t ‘feel it!’, I would say things like ‘you don’t love me’, ‘you don’t know how to love me’, ‘you think buying things is loving’, “nobody loves me except my dog”
My mother would be stumped. And I believed every word of what I said. I believed in my sorrow. I believed in my pain.
I learned.
I learned slowly, but it was a series of painful lessons.
But once learnt, that you are the creator of your own feelings I quickly started to adopt new strategies to trust myself in my decisions to feel good.
Practice is the other tip in your TOOLBOX
So if you do not consistently awaken the old behaviours the new patterns will take root.
Like I’ve been saying repeatedly… the most important tool in your toolbox is to be able to value your relationship with yourself.
It is to recognize all your relationships are in response to how you feel about yourself. This is based on the understanding of your life through the experiences you had and the understanding of the experiences of life are based around your learned perceptions.
Only once all this is clear, the wounds from the past highlighted, one move towards the path of healing oneself.
Let me highlight some key aspects of a happy and healthy relationship that ought to be present in most relationships including your relationship with yourself.
1. Respect
2. Trust and Support
3. Honesty and Accountability
4. Shared Responsibility
5. Economic Partnership
6. Negotiation and Fairness
7. Non-Threatening Behaviour
These should be the premise of all relationships and if there are even one of these elements missing you need to start the process of investigation.
For Example:
When your relationship lacks respect, you feel like
I don’t respect my partner
You don’t resonate with his/her goals
I don’t allow for my partners right to say ‘no’
I am extremely judgmental of my partner.
All these things are not the Partners FAULT but your triggers to FIX, so you can have a respectful relationship.
Step one: Investigation of the history (FOR)
Start thinking about where these attitudes of yours come from.
When in your early life were you made to feel of value only when you complied?
How did that pattern repeat itself?
Step two: Understanding how it plays out and blocks you from having a wholesome relationship?
Why is it that you feel entitled to having the relationship follow only your requirement? How much anger and resentment does that create in you?
One of the things I like to ask myself is ‘who died and made me the judge?’ I tend not to take myself too seriously so this really helps me. I understand that people have their own journey in life and in a relationship we just need to add value to each other and allow room for the person to grow. So why are we in the judgment of their lives?
Step 3: Reframing
Once you’ve questioned yourself thoroughly and found out what fear keeps you in an unhealthy cycle you can start to reframe it. That's the beauty of life coaching, counselling and therapy. Recognize the old limiting beliefs, blockages and patterns, and create space for the kind of experiences you want in life.
