4 Steps to Creating Healthy, Happy and Fulfilling Relationships

Posted on by

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

“Live like a mighty river” ~ Buddha

Posted on by

The Universal Inner Child

The poet Ted Hughes (son of Silvia Plath) wrote a letter to his 24-year-old son Nicholas, and, quite exquisitely, advised him to embrace his “childish self” so as to experience life to its fullest. Here it is, in part.

“Dear Nick,

It was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations. Every single one of us is still a child. It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of, only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle.

But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight-year-old inside. And we try to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of the secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet.

But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.

It is the carrier of alPenguinWithChildl the living qualities. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them.It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation.

Since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering-self back into its nursery, it has lacked training.

And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt.That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when something overwhelms their ordinary, carefully armoured self, and the naked child is flung out onto the world.

That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best remembered.

But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. The beautiful vulnerability of our inner child and its longing to be seen, heard, and let loose, provides the absolutely most exquisite moments in life.

We measure out our real respect for people by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy.

As Buddha says: live like a mighty river.”

Excerpts from:  http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/09/live-like-mighty-river.html