4 Steps to Creating Healthy, Happy and Fulfilling Relationships

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4 Steps To Creating Healthy, Happy & Fulfilling Relationships

 

March 26, 2014

Sometimes the people you love the most can also hurt you the most – your parents, a brother or sister, a close friend or a boyfriend/girlfriend. It doesn’t matter what you do, they continue to say things that put you down. Mistakes are OK every now and then, as long as they learn from them. It only becomes a problem if the hurtful things are so frequent that the happiness is being sucked out of you & you’re feeling bad more often then good when you’re with them. I want to share a thing (or in this case 4 things) that will help you create more healthy, fulfilling relationships.

1. Know you have a choice. The great thing with friends is that you can choose them. If your friends put you down more often than lift you up, it will make you miserable. You can change this by letting them know. They may not realize that the things they are doing are making you feel so bad, if they stop then that’s awesome! If they don’t, then it could be time to find new friends. I slowly built the courage & spent less time with the friends who would put me down, I took small steps, I’d say no to things that I’d normally do with them, I started doing things with people who were much kinder to me. I became so much happier.

2. Speak up. Family is important, you can’t choose your family but you can choose to spend less time with them if they put you down. If you dread being around someone you’re close to in your family because of the hurtful things they say, try talking to them and telling them how you feel. If the response isn’t what you were hoping & they aren’t willing to change then accept this and keep your distance. It doesn’t mean you never speak to them again, it just means you have to put yourself first. Looking after yourself is THE most important thing. You’ve tired to talk to them so remind yourself you’ve done your best. Instead of seeing them so regularly just because they’re family, you can choose to see them as much as you can manage. It’s ok to do this.

3. Let go of the fear. Fear will come up when making these changes. You care for these people so worrying what they will think or if you will hurt them is natural. There will be uncomfortable feelings in the beginning, they are only temporary. The person will eventually accept your choice. Remind yourself that you are doing what’s best for you & that’s what really matters. Take small steps.

4. Be open to new relationships. We worry we won’t find fulfilling relationships so we stay stuck in unhealthy ones. I was one of these people. I gained the strength to change, what a life-changing affect it has had on me. I learnt that healthy relationships do exist. You have a choice. This is you’re precious life. Don’t waste it with who people who bring you down. You deserve the best, I’ve written another post on this here. Take a small step today by spending more time with the people who believe in you & appreciate you. Keep taking small steps & eventually you’ll be surrounded with great people who make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Tan

Veiw original: http://www.inthesoulshine.com.au/blog/4-steps-to-creating-healthy-fulfilling-relationships

Yann Dall’Aglio: Love — you’re doing it wrong | Video on TED.com

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http://on.ted.com/YannDallAglio

Yann Dall'Aglio

 

Why you should listen to him:

Yann Dall’Aglio is a philosopher who thinks deeply about modern love. He writes about love in the digital age. His two books, A Rolex at 50: Do you have the right to miss your life? and I love you: Is love a has been? explores the challenges and triumphs in the modern era, where individualism and consumerism reign. His work is a declaration of his faith in love, a major feat for a skeptical philosopher.  He studies “the joyful effects of nihilism”, that is to say, the happy and comical consequences of a non-meaningful life.

(Edited transcript of the Ted talk: “Love — you’re doing it wrong!“)

“What is love? It’s a hard term to define in so far as it has a very wide application. I can love jogging. I can love a book, a movie. I can love veal. I can love my wife.

But there’s a great difference between veal and my wife, for instance. That is, if I value veal, the veal, on the other hand, doesn’t value me back. Whereas my wife, she calls me the star of her life. Therefore, only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being. I know this, that’s why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired. Hence the eternal problem of love: how to become and remain desirable?

The individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules. You had a specific part to play according to your sex, your age, your social status, and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community. Think about the young woman who must remain chaste before marriage. Think about the youngest son who must obey the eldest son, who in turn must obey the patriarch.

But a phenomenon started in the 13th century, mainly in the Renaissance, in the West, that caused the biggest identity crisis in the history of humankind.This phenomenon is modernity. We can basically summarize it through a triple process. First, a process of rationalization of scientific research, which has accelerated technical progress. Next, a process of political democratization, which has fostered individual rights. And finally, a process of rationalization of economic production and of trade liberalization.

These three intertwined processes have completely annihilated all the traditional bearings of Western societies, with radical consequences for the individual. Now individuals are free to value or disvalue any attitude, any choice, any object. But as a result, they are themselves confronted with this same freedom that others have to value or disvalue them. In other words, my value was once ensured by submitting myself to the traditional authorities.Now it is quoted in the stock exchange.

On the free market of individual desires, I negotiate my value every day. Hence the anxiety of contemporary man. He is obsessed: “Am I desirable? How desirable? How many people are going to love me?” And how does he respond to this anxiety? Well, by hysterically collecting symbols of desirability. 

I call this act of collecting, along with others, seduction capital. Indeed, our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital. It is said that our culture is materialistic. But it’s not true! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds. We do it to make them love us, to seduce them. Nothing could be less materialistic, or more sentimental, than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees, because he wants to please Jennifer. Consumerism is not materialism. It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of love, or rather in the name of seduction capital.

In light of this observation on contemporary love, how can we think of love in the years to come? We can envision two hypotheses:

  1. This process of narcissistic capitalization will intensify.

It is hard to say what shape this intensification will take, because it largely depends on social and technical innovations, which are by definition difficult to predict.But we can, for instance, imagine a dating website which, a bit like those loyalty points programs, uses seduction capital points that vary according to my age, my height/weight ratio, my degree, my salary, or the number of clicks on my profile. We can also imagine a chemical treatment for breakups that weakens the feelings of attachment.

Of course, this race for seduction, like every fierce competition, will create huge disparities in narcissistic satisfaction, and therefore a lot of loneliness and frustration too. But such a future doesn’t have to be.

2. Recognize that we are use-less.

Another path to thinking about love may be possible. But how? How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued? Well, by becoming aware of my uselessness.  Yes, I’m useless. But rest assured: so are you.

We are all useless. This uselessness is easily demonstrated, because in order to be valued I need another to desire me, which shows that I do not have any value of my own. I don’t have any inherent value. We pretend to be with an idol; we all pretend to be an idol for someone else, but actually we are all impostors – a bit like a man on the street who appears totally cool and indifferent, while he has actually anticipated and calculated so that all eyes are on him.

The pretense to be someone else

By becoming aware of this general pretense to be someone else, we could ease our love relationships. It is because I want to be loved from head to toe, justified in my every choice, that the seduction-hysteria exists. And therefore I want to seem perfect so that another can love me. I want them to be perfect so that I can be reassured of my value. It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will break up, just like that, at the slightest underachievement.

Love as tenderness

In contrast to this attitude, I call upon tenderness – love as tenderness.

What is tenderness? To be tender is to accept the loved one’s weaknesses. And there’s plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness. For example, there’s a kind of humor that is unfortunately underused. It is a sort of poetry of deliberate awkwardness. I refer to self-mockery. For a couple who no longer relies on the support of tradition, I believe that self-mockery is one of the best means for the relationship to endure.”

~The End