Healthy Relationships Start Here...

By Barbara Lynn Allen

Healthy, satisfying relationships start with your relationship with yourself. If you can accept yourself, even with your flaws, you will have a strong starting point.

People come to therapy because they don't like how they feel or behave. Sometimes they don't like how others behave towards them. Often there's blame, judgment, or non-acceptance.

Perhaps our judgments help us feel less helpless, less lonely, or less vulnerable. When we blame or judge others or ourselves our energy contracts. We get smaller inside in order to get away from our unpleasant feelings. Our minds and hearts close to any other point of view. Then we can feel stuck. Maybe we feel self-righteous or self-loathing depending on our inclination. Sometimes at this point relationships break up.

Couples often get into a continuing loop of condemnation, reconciliation, distance and closeness. Each wants the other to change. For example, Diane wants to protect Richard's feelings by suppressing her own needs. Of course, she feels angry and resentful because her needs are not being met or acknowledged, and he feels stupid and inadequate for not doing what she wants when he finally finds out what that is.

Donna wants to please Roger by traveling with him. Donna really doesn't want a lifestyle of frequent travel, but suppresses her feelings and tries to go along. Her anxiety about an upcoming trip prompts her to say "no" to a travel plan she had reluctantly agreed to, causing a huge fight as his deep disappointment erupts in angry lashing out.

There is an amazingly simple, skillful solution to blaming, shaming and judging. The solution is acceptance. First, we practice self-acceptance. Then, we learn to accept the other person. This does not mean we suffer in silence. It means to respect who you, are and to equally respect your partner and who they are.

How do you solve problems with this simple but powerful approach? By starting from where you both are, with a sense of acceptance for both self and other, couples can learn to work out their differences in a loving and caring way. Blaming and shaming create distance and fosters even more fear of intimacy than most of us already have. This is the opposite of what we really want.

Diane recognized that she was helping to create the very situation she didn't want by withholding her needs. In therapy, she felt safe enough to share her deeper feelings, wants and needs with Richard. It was a great relief for him because he no longer had to guess what she expected of him. At first, she was too angry about past events to be willing to come out to him with her real feelings. When she finally did he was able to listen non-defensively and she finally felt heard and cared for.

People can, and do, need to learn communication skills in therapy, because we usually don't learn them from our parents. Deborah and Roger were able to agree that they would both stop judging Deborah for not wanting the lifestyle that Roger wanted. Even though Roger was not open to couples work, I was able to guide Deborah to implement this approach with him. They both agreed that Deborah would stop trying to please Roger by agreeing to do things she didn't feel comfortable doing. Roger learned to accept her as she was, as Deborah learned to accept herself. As a result they became much closer and loving. What Roger missed from Deborah not traveling with him, was more than made up for by the deep heart opening they were both able to feel. Fears about judgment, non-acceptance and abandonment ceased to be an issue for them both, and their relationship began to transform and thrive.

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