The quality of the relationships in our life can only ever be as good as the one we have with ourselves. The sad fact is that we can only ever receive love the way we are capable of giving love. Most people have enormous trouble loving themselves as we have been raised to recognise our faults and to downplay our finer points. We can’t be seen to be ‘up ourselves’, can we?
A relationship is any meaningful interaction between ourselves and another person or group of people. So if we are continually having difficulty in our interactions with others we need to look carefully at ourselves in order to fix the problem. It is not possible to change anyone else, so we are left with no alternative but to change ourself. Of course, it would be far easier to go on blaming every one else for the difficulty, but that won’t change any thing and it means that we are handing them the power to control our sense of wellbeing. Interestingly enough, they are usually unaware that they are impacting on anyone else and don’t care anyway.
In order to change what is going on within ourselves we need to understand what made us who we are in the first place so we can then create the necessary changes. When this is achieved, our relationships improve dramatically and life takes us on a more pleasant journey.
We are actually a biological computer, far more brilliant than the electronic sort. We have a hard drive, better know as our subconscious mind, that is programmed from the time of our conception. By the time we are about 8 years of age, our adult personality has been formed. The vast majority of that programming is done by our primary care givers, which for all of us ‘mature’ readers, was our parents. There were no child care centres back then. For some of us, it may have been a grandmother or an aunt.
No matter whom it was they had no idea what impact they were having on our future lives.
If we did something wrong and were honest when we were asked, we were inevitably punished. Instead of teaching us right from wrong, we learnt it was better to lie and avoid further discipline. This was not the desired outcome, but it was the effect. Criticism taught us we weren’t good enough. Lack of emotion taught us to be withdrawn. It simply was not done to ‘spoil’ children back then. Children were to be seen and not heard and so we learnt poor communication skills. Rarely did we see our parents show affection for each other or discuss issues on front of us and so we learnt little about life skills.
I am not blaming our parents for our short comings, after all they were raised in even harsher ways than we were. They were doing the best they knew how. Today there has been so much research done that shows us what is necessary to produce balanced children but there are still no lessons to teach people how to be parents. As a result there are still inherent problems with our ability to experience healthy relationships.
We also need to realise that we attract to us what ever is going on within us. With this in mind we must own the problems we face and decide to do something about them. After all if it is in our life, then we are the only one who can fix it.
If we were taught some basic factors about ourselves then we could be far more tolerant and understanding of those around us and therefore our relationships would be vastly better.
If we examine the differences between men and women and realise that we are made so totally different, then we would not expect our partner to understand us or react like we do because we would know it was not biologically possible. Our creator certainly had fun when he made men and women and expected them to relate well in an intimate relationship.
Article by Bev Brock
Bev can be contacted by email at bbv76008@bigpond.net.au