Learning the Fundamentals of More Healthy and Balanced Relationships

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

This week I was at a Family Constellations workshop, which addresses personal and ancestral trauma in a group therapy setting. It happened to be all women in the workshop, and we each had different issues we wanted to look at ranging from unwelcome and unhealthy patterns in our lives to taking a deeper look at anger (and why they felt unable to express any) or love (and why they felt unable to let it in).

As always it was an insightful day, and afterwards I headed to the nearby beach to take a long walk. When I was there I met an elderly tourist who had been here travelling for several weeks, and she was intrigued by the Bluebottle jellyfish that had washed up on the shore.

As we got talking, we seemed to wander into the topic of relationships and it transpired that – similarly to the other ladies I’d been in the workshop with – this lady, although older, also had the same history as most of the workshop participants with the father of her children.

It is interesting how many people I come across with this co-dependent dynamic of a people pleaser coupled with someone more self absorbed. Although it’s not exclusive to women (I know several males who tend to be the pleaser) it certainly seems common. I have read its one of the most common dysfunctional relational patterns there is.

Certainly as we all shared stories over lunch, and then on the beach, the commonality of patterns as these relationships broke up was extremely similar. The more self absorbed partner was focused on money and material things, using lies as a means to get what they wanted with seemingly no moral regard (and certainly no regard to the equal rights of their prior partner), and very quickly moved on to new partners in order to help manage their childcare responsibilities and provide the validation they needed and adulation that had long since waned in their previous relationships.

This makes sense to me since one is a giver, the other a taker. These are patterns we learn in our childhood – both insecure - seeking responses and reactions from the other for validation of a sense of self and value. And yet healthy relationships are founded on a balanced flow of give and take, where each person’s wants, needs and desires are held in equal regard.

What I was heartened by in the workshop, is the conscious awareness that each of us had awakened to in terms of owning our own parts in these dynamics, and the willingness and desire to learn and grow from them.

I now recognise that I grew up with an anxious attachment style, I was overly attuned to others’ feelings and most definitely derived my sense of self worth from the responses and reactions of those around me, rather than having a healthy sense of self esteem. As a result I became a perfectionist, a giver, had an over developed sense of responsibility and was highly independent, rarely asking others for help. I became what Terri Cole would describe as a high functioning co-dependent.

What also seemed to be a commonality between the women I spoke with this week is, once children come along, our focus necessarily shifted to their needs and – as a consequence – our value to our partners changed and diminished as we found ourselves alone in the arena, and often berated for our choices.

It is a rude but necessary awakening, especially since women are socially conditioned to nurture, fix and care for others. And, certainly in my case, like many, when children are involved there is a much deeper sense of obligation to stay and fix things or at least ride them out. Also in my case there were practical financial challenges to overcome, having made a conscious choice to leave my career and focus on child rearing in the hopes of providing my own children with a healthy sense of attachment and emotional regulation.

However, life had a way of manoeuvring, and I found myself navigating through a post-split carnage beyond my control and sharing more in common with these other ladies than I would ever have thought possible for myself.

It is an experience that has been simultaneously difficult and rewarding. I won’t deny as I’ve learned to have and hold healthier boundaries, especially with people whom I had previously over-catered to, it has brought about the death of some relationships and the reorientating of others, as well as new relationships that are on a more healthy footing.

The older lady I met was reflecting on the ways in which her grown children mirrored some of those unhealthy patterns in their own relationships and how hard it had been reorientating to them after many years of overgiving and finally deciding enough was enough.

When a friend of mine had then been talking about how female lionesses’ choose multiple partners in order to have the strongest cubs, it made me reflect on how it’s my offspring that have given me the strength to become aware of and tend to my own wounds.

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to learn and live my own lessons alongside my children’s development years. Who knows how they will turn out, they do and will continue to have their own challenges for sure, that is life, but at least I feel they are now seeing more healthy examples of behaviour from me in terms of interacting with others.

And, as one workshop participant put it, even as we learn healthier ways of being, the anxiety that comes up in our bodies in response to our older, well-worn pathways still remains. Certainly for me it has taken more than just conscious awareness of unhealthy patterns and why they occur to create great shifts.

In fact, one of the things I got real clarity about at the workshop is the top down sequencing I’ve been using all these years. As a child I learned to suppress and deny my own feelings in favour of the things I was told were “right” about pleasing others, which required my head overriding what my body and nervous system were telling me.

I realise that it’s now time to take a more body led approach. There’s a phrase that most learner drivers in the UK learn about sequencing when about to brake or turn the vehicle “Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre”. The workshop facilitator suggested this was an excellent thing to apply in learning to be more body led.

Using my body as a mirror, a reflection of how I truly feel, when I’m considering doing something for myself or others, sounds a smart way to go. I can use it’s signal to tune into whether my body’s response reflects something healthy or unhealthy, and then use my head to determine (on the basis of that answer) which manoeuvre is more healthy for me, more in alignment with my true needs, wants and desires.

If something is going to cause me frustration, pain, resentment or otherwise compromise my wellbeing, I’ll know it’s something to say a firm “no” to. Sometimes that will mean feeling anxious (my body’s wired response to those earlier childhood beliefs about what is “right”), this is when I need to actively practice regulating my nervous system in order to help my body learn some new wiring when I repeat this over time.

And I’m also aware that, in the past, if I had wanted to say “no” to anything it would also require a rational explanation as to why it was the wrong thing to do. This would often involve making others’ wrong for asking in order for me to feel I could legitimately reject their requests.

Learning how to say no without making others wrong is also another skill to learn, because it requires vulnerability, and the ability to express my true feelings (where appropriate) requires a more sophisticated emotional vocabulary than I’ve used to date.

And, finally, a quote I read this week (from an unknown source) also hits on another aspect that is important in getting relationally healthy:

“Ironically, when we start to get better, we also start to get sad – because we realise how much we’ve missed out on, how badly certain people failed us, what the younger version of us actually deserved. Healing involves healthy grieving. No way around it.”

Do you feel relationally healthy? Learning to become healthy is more than just a decision, though it starts there. It’s an ongoing commitment to learning healthier ways of being and doing, and a willingness to practice and repeat putting you first (with grace) over time until it becomes embedded as the “safe” thing in your body. But, as the lady at the beach said, better late than never!

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Expand Your Emotional Vocabulary to Get Your Real Needs Met, Put Mature Parts of You in the Driving Seat for Better Results, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and Ways to Reach for Growth Rather Than Reacting With Old Conditioned Constriction. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.