Four perspective shifts for more conscious and loving relationships
What happens when instead of expecting love and happiness from others, you recognise that you are the source of and responsible for your own love and happiness?
Most people think that they’re in a relationship to make each other happy. This often results in disaster: you’re trying to predict your partner’s needs, trying to meet their needs, feeling guilty when they aren’t happy, perhaps also at times frustrated and resentful that after all this effort you’re making, they’re still unsatisfied.
What if instead of believing that your role in the relationship is to make your partner happy, you recognised that your role is to make yourself happy. How would that perspective shift and moving from expecting others to provide love and happiness to being your own source of love and happiness impact your life? Would you be more empowered or less? Would you have more freedom or less? Would your relationships be more joyful or less?
There are four misconceptions about relationships that prevent us from having deeper and more supportive connections.
Fallacy #1: The loving thing is to make my partner happy.
What happens when you believe this constricting belief? You feel guilty when they’re unhappy and you try to change and fix them.
How is this unloving and self-defeating? Your attempts to fix them confirm their own limiting belief that they’re flawed somehow. Trying to make them happy ends up making them feel unhappy, because the underlying message is that there’s something wrong with them for feeling the way they feel.
If you’re fixing them, you’re also putting yourself above them, reinforcing the fact that they aren’t enough and creating separation between the two of you.
Thinking that you’re responsible for meeting their needs or making them happy is very disempowering to both them and you.The underlying implication that they can’t meet their own needs victimises and minimises them.
The truth: The loving thing is to honour and allow my partner’s experience as it is.
Your partner’s feelings are theirs to have and not yours to manage.
What’s the loving thing to do? Accept and be with whatever they are feeling and experiencing. If it triggers guilt in you or if it’s difficult for you to be with their sadness, the loving thing is to love your guilt and the part of you that finds it difficult to be with sadness.
See and trust in the sovereign and always already whole, wise and complete being that they are.
Fallacy #2: I’ll feel loved, accepted and appreciated when they love, accept and appreciate me.
What happens when you believe this constricting belief? You try to control, change and manipulate others–often subtly, sometimes not so subtly–in order to get the love, acceptance and safety you need.
How is this unloving and self-defeating? The more you seek love and safety, the less loved and safe you feel. The more you try to control, the more out of control you are.
The truth: I need my own love, approval and appreciation.
You are responsible for meeting your own needs. No one can give you the love you’re not giving yourself. The world can be showing you with love and you may be completely oblivious to it and not receive any of it, if your own heart is closed to aspects of you.
What’s the loving thing to do? It’s loving to not demand any love and acceptance from others because it allows them to be as they are, feel the way they feel, express what they want to express. Recognising that you are responsible for meeting your own needs is empowering to you–because it takes you out of the dependent and helpless state you’re trapped in when you believe that your happiness is in other people’s hands.
Fallacy #3: Only one of us can be right.
What happens when you believe this constricting belief? You try to win. You make them wrong. You control, manipulate and dominate them, or you let them control, manipulate or dominate you.
How is this unloving and self-defeating? If you’re trying to win, you’ve lost already. Wanting to be right creates a superior/inferior dynamic. If you’re right that implies that they are inferior and therefore not good enough. And! If you believe that it’s possible for someone to ever be not good enough, you are sitting in that same belief about yourself. In other words, wanting to be right is self-abusive because it’s reinforcing your constricting belief that you are not good enough as you are.
The truth: You are both right.
Notice that there’s no need for black-and-white, either/or thinking. Both of your realities are valid and can co-exist–even when they seemingly clash. Their truth doesn’t negate yours. If they are right, that doesn’t mean that you are wrong.
What’s the loving thing to do? Honour their reality, even if you don’t agree with it. Honour yours. Honour that they can co-exist.
Fallacy #4: It’s my fault! They feel the way they feel because of me.
What happens when you believe this constricting belief? You try to manage their feelings. You get angry or avoidant when they have feelings that are uncomfortable for you. You walk on eggshells. You play small. You make them feel small by caretaking them. You blame them. You blame yourself.
How is this unloving and self-defeating? You abandon them when they feel hurt (and your presence is all they want), because you feel guilty that they are sad, and in response you hijack the situation and make it about you.
The truth: They feel the way they feel–it’s not personal to you and it has nothing to do with you.
The way they feel is not personal to you and it has nothing to do with you. They are here as a sovereign being creating the very circumstances they need for their evolution and growth.
What’s the loving thing to do? Recognise that when a loved one shares uncomfortable feelings, you may automatically interpret that to mean that you’ve done something wrong. “She’s unhappy and that means I’m not being a good enough partner.” “She’s frustrated and angry, so I’m doing something wrong.” These are constricting beliefs. Their feelings are not your fault. Ever!
Trusting in your partner’s inherent goodness and in the powerful being that they are – is the loving thing to do. Not caretaking them, but meeting them and being with them in their experience. If you feel blamed, open your heart to your own blame and to the fearful inner child part of you who once learned the lie that she did something wrong.