I've been asked about what helps us to have healthy relationships. These are some basic steps that I recommend in having healthy relationships:
1 Safety & Healthy Boundaries
2 Acknowledging Needs
3 Creating Agreements
4 Consequences
Safety and Healthy Boundaries
It's impossible to really be in true relationship with someone, instead of just projecting our issues onto them, if we are not feeling safe. When we're in trauma mode, our consciousness shifts from the frontal lobe to the primal/reptilian brain, which is all about movement - it's literally impossible to think because we're not using a part of the brain that does that!
What are some Trauma Grounding techniques?
- Feeling our feet on the ground
- Feeling our lower body with our hands
- Stretching out and feeling ourselves in a bigger, adult body so that we're not regressing
- Slow movement that helps us feel contained
- Pushing against a tree/wall to activate our active defenses and help us feel safe.
Getting any kind of trauma resolution therapies can help as well, which can include things like hypnotherapy, body-mind therapies, biodynamic cranial sacral work, EFT, EMDR, holotropic breathwork - the list goes on.
If we aren't aware of our boundaries, then we are likely receiving or creating a boundary violation with someone. Imagine standing face to face with someone with our hands out touching theirs. Now start pushing back and forth, sometimes receiving and sometimes giving energy, sometimes pushing to set a boundary, sometimes trusting and letting others in closer. A healthy relationship feels like this - a dance where the boundaries are changeable.
If we don't know how to change energetically change our boundaries, we will end up either physically moving (i.e. withdrawing, overpowering others), or we will begin to reflect our boundaries in our bodies (i.e. get rigid to push others away).
Acknowledging Needs - Once we're safely in our bodies with healthy boundaries, it becomes much easier to track our needs and communicate them with our partners. If we're not acknowledging ourselves, then it becomes very easy and even seductive (i.e. blame others, feel habitually angry, sad, rejected, less than) to override ourselves and not ask for what we want. Acknowledging ourselves includes using all of our body's senses, tracking our posture, movement, and even listening to our intuition.
Creating Agreements - If we our fully listening to ourselves and communicating directly, then it becomes easier to create agreements. If we don't have agreements then it becomes a series of guesswork which can make life difficult (i.e. "If he knows me, he should already know what to do!", "If she really loved me, I shouldn't have to explain to her!", "I want someone who just psychically knows what to do with me").
I'm not trying to downgrade relationships to business status, but imagine what your business would be like if you didn't have any agreements? Most people would be bankrupt.
Consequences - Just like children need to know the consequences of something so they can learn, if we make agreements and break them with no consequences, there isn't any reason to have an agreement. I've seen plenty of spouses and children who stop listening because nothing every happens - there is never any follow through. Stay committed to your vision of conscious, effortless life and lead by example, so that your spouse and children have an understanding of how to be.