1. Expand your awareness of what really is a relationship.
Most people engage in relationship without really knowing what they are doing and what is really going to be involved in the act of ‘relating’.
The reality of human socialising is that we simultaneously interact at five different levels.
• Spiritually, we communicate from ‘being’ to ‘being’;
• Mentally, we come in connection through words, concepts and worldviews;
• Emotionally, we share feelings and emotions and need security, a sense of belonging and togetherness that is the foundation for sympathy, kindness, benevolence, love and all the joyful feelings that emerge from that.
• We also share energies and come together around common motives and intentions;
• At a physical level, we share the same planet, the same country, the same home or room or bed and use common resources and tools.
Nothing complicated here but we need to keep an eye on those five areas if we want to have healthy and harmonious relationships – I mean relationships that work.
Each level has its own needs and ways of functioning. If you miss one and fail to recognize the exchange going on at that level, you allow confusion to settle – and confusion leads do discomfort, communication breakdown and open or frozen conflict.
2. Do not Lean – neediness and demands push people away. Everytime you run after someone because you ‘need’ them, they move away from you. But the moment you come back to yourself and recenter, you access your own power and they start coming close. This is called the power of attraction.
3. Clarify expectations and identify which one you need to assert and which ones you can compromise - Expectations are the causes of our discomfort and pain in relationships. But not all expectations are bad – it is reasonable to expect reasonable things to happen but it is unreasonnable to expect unreasonnable things to happen. The trick is to clarify that for ourselves.
4. Awareness of needs, making clear demands and readiness to co-operate in fulfilling other people’s needs – some of our expectations express genuine and legitimate needs that it is our responsibility to fulfill because they are ‘our’ needs. In this context, healthy relationships develop around a common commitment to sincerity and co-operation. It is ok to voice our expectations and open a conversation about how we can co-operate with each other to fulfill our needs – yours and mine.
5. Redefine life – the way you define your life determines the way you live life. The way you define relationships determines the way you approach relationships. If your definition of relationships is ‘seeking pleasure and comfort’ you will most probably break it when it doesn’t provide you with pleasure and comfort. If it is about ‘social duty’, it will probably be relatively boring, stagnant and non creative. But what would happen if you were defining life as a process of continual learning and growth in your abilities to love, understand and contribute meaning and beauty, and relationships as one of the main subjects in this study?
6. Original purpose – Relationships often originate from a sense of purpose: we come together because we see the possibility of doing something meaningful and engaging together. When misunderstanding and frustration builds up or when emotions run high, it can be very useful to come back to the original purpose of the relationship – why you went into it in the first place. Purpose is the organizing factor of behaviour, thinking and emotions. Coming back to original purpose or reason ‘why’ you felt in love will reorganize the present and bring back a sense of shared reality, meaning and direction.
7. Getting out of your story – We all build stories in our mind about what we believe or imagine is happening to and around us. Those stories are our own version of reality. They are not reality. Most often, they are shaped by old fears and unmet needs. The more we believe them, the more complexity and misunderstanding builds up. The moment we manage to look beyond our own assumptions, expectations and fears and genuinely open sincere conversations in which we are willing to listen and hear, those misunderstanding clear up and love starts flowing again because love is a flower that grows in understanding.
8. Use emotional pain as an opportunity to dive in deeper – whilst most of us tend to prefer pleasure to pain, the nature of our heart is to experience joy and sorrow, love and pain. Both those experiences deepen our ability to love, to experience the power of love, enjoy life and be wise, compassionate, understanding and truly happy. We can chose to avoid emotional pain by blocking ‘unpleasant’ emotions but the problem is that when we do that, we also block the pleasant and beautiful ones. And after consideration, ‘unpleasant’ emotions are not so unpleasant: they are just facts of life.
9. Remove the personal dimension of love and hurt – although most of us tend to believe and feel we are the only one suffering, reality is that we all do – especially the people we love and with whom we have a conflict. One way out of this perceptual trap is simply to remove the personal pronoun in our formulation of things. Swop ‘I love you’ for ‘I love’. Replace ‘You hurt me’ with ‘you hurt’. And if you think about it, it is not just a mental trick to ease the pain, but it is one of the deep realities of life: I do not love ‘you’ – I love; you do not hurt: ‘me’ you hurt.
10. The secret of love? We all know it; no need to expand too much here: you only feel love in your heart when you give it. Why? Because to give it so someone else, it has to go through your own heart and when that happens, you feel it; you are the first one to be served! Lucky you ☺
Source: Frederic Labarthe
