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

The Therapeutic Process

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For Therapy to work, you must have a good connection…

and that’s why        

self-help books don’t work.

 

Our emotional lives, with all their emotional cues, are on board before any verbal or conceptual ability appears. And the consequences of these experiences are unaffected by intellectual efforts to change them. That may be because emotions, and our powerful “memories”, seem to be stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. And yet our thinking (or intellectualizing) is a left-hemisphere activity.

Books and conversations about why we act the way we do are certainly helpful, but they don’t seem to be enough to effect real changes in our interactions with the world and ourselves.

So how can we make real changes?

Only by recreating as much as possible the initial conditions in which the processes were created in the first place. We are born wired to seek connection with others. You may have heard that, “your first loves (parents) create the models for every relationship there after.” They become our relationship-blueprints, if you will. Our experiences, especially with our caregivers, will become unconscious, intuitive memories that form the basis of our emotional life.

So if you want to change the deep, un-conscious patterns that define your reactions to life’s events, you need an environment that can mirror those earliest connections, while, ideally, re-writing them (“neuro-plasticity”). The result is a more harmonious existence in your current situations.

Helping-whiteBackgroundCTBA powerful way to do this is through a positive connection with a trained professional (i.e., a psychotherapist). Good therapy aims to create a safe connection with the client so that emotional healing can take place.

And there is more to it, of course. Techniques that require direct experience have proven effective, such as working with the “inner child” through writing exercises, mindfulness meditations, and others. I believe these techniques work because they access the right brain.

When my client opens up to me as much as they can in a session, I know that we are accessing the right brain. In doing so, the chances for authentic change become possible.