By Yemisi Okunlola
Starting and maintaining a relationship can be one of the most difficult tasks in life. The ability to maintain a healthy relationship with your partner is, without saying, essential. Here are some of the ways to become better and have a healthy relationship with your partner.
Get to know yourself
To be your best self in your personal relationships, you need to develop your awareness of yourself. What do you value? What do you dream of? What are your strengths? Where are the skills you want to hone? When we ask ourselves these questions, we grow our awareness of ourselves and we can use that awareness to create relationships that are beneficial for everyone involved. Sometimes our personal relationships hit a rough patch. When this happens, your awareness will clue you in to how you might be contributing to the difficulty at hand and whether or not that relationship should be maintained.
Love yourself
Learning to love yourself is an important step towards creating a healthy relationship. It’s cliché but true – to truly love someone else, you have to love yourself first. This is because we’re unable to treat someone better than we treat ourselves.
Our limits in loving others come from our inability to love ourselves. Over the course of our relationships, these limits inevitably come to light. We may compensate for our inabilities by giving more to others than we have – or have allowed ourselves – to receive. Yet, this can set us up for difficulty. If we’re not loving ourselves then we’re likely looking for someone else to give us that sense of being loved. This can be the starting point for lots of problems like dependency, fear of abandonment, and fear of intimacy.To love ourselves, we need to see the unique value and intrinsic beauty of who we are without any externally imposed definitions. To begin to do this, take the time to tell yourself all the things you like about yourself. And do it often.
Clear your history
Part of showing up as our best selves is to be in the present moment as much as possible. This means that our previous experiences need to be left where they belong – in the past. To do this, people typically undergo a process wherein they remember the past, understand how it affected them and then disentangle themselves from it. There are a number of different tools that people can use to clear themselves of aspects of their past that no longer serve them. For example, there is EFT, access consciousness, energy work, core energetics and the list goes on. If you want to create a different baseline for yourself, it’s helpful to find a method that you can use to continually reinforce your new way of being.
Own your stuff
Nothing makes a relationship stronger than integrity. The biggest gift you can give yourself is to know and own your contributions to your relationships – both in the positive and in the negative. When things get difficult in a relationship, look for the ways that you’ve contributed to the problem. Simply ask yourself: “is there anything that I would have done better or differently if I had remained in full integrity?” If the answer is yes, then do your best to make right on what you know you could have done better.
When we’re unclear about how issues influence our relationships, we’re likely to do unintentional damage. When we’re unconscious of our unresolved feelings about our past, we’re more likely to blame, shame and guilt others when those unresolved feelings are triggered. It’s only when we’re aware of our contributions to the state of our relationships and able to stay in our integrity that we can create environments in which our relationships can thrive.
