3 Relationship Rules to Live By

As a relationship guide, I spend a lot of time simplifying the most important elements that make a good relationship. The more I teach, the more concise it gets. And I think I have it boiled down to just three parts, three important ingredients to help your relationship thrive.

While they are few in number, the steps might be considered challenging as they require a lot of thought, patience, and trust. The thought part is you thinking about the parts and actually deciding to make yourself do the work. The patience is not expecting to get things right all at once, to be able to allow yourself to develop new positive behaviors in the time it takes. The trust is so you will believe in yourself when you doubt your progress and remind yourself that you can indeed do this.

It happens to all of us. We hold on to our thoughts and don’t say them because we are afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings. We stuff them down inside and just stay silent. We may grouse about them later with someone else, but most of the time a lot of us don’t speak up.

If this sounds like you, you are not alone. This is one of the most common themes I come across while helping people in counseling. Most people are aware they do this, and they are not sure how to change it because it’s something they have always done…put their feelings aside and take care of the other person first.

Many people struggle with taking responsibility in a relationship. They feel victimized, they blame, and they feel miserable. It doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the hardest things I see couples struggle with is the idea that each person in the relationship is responsible for his or her own part of the problems that surround them. It’s not uncommon for people to want to blame the other person for how they feel as if the partner did something to cause the upset. Something bad happens and people start pointing fingers at the other person.

By the time we are grown up almost all of us have figured out how to get what we want in life and how to get things that we don’t like to stop. We usually learn these skills when we are very young, starting with our first empowering word: “NO.”

As an adult we find out partner and then we use these same skills to continue the process of getting what we want and stopping what we don’t want.

But for many couples the habits and skills we bring into a relationship often create difficulty with our beloved…

I was thinking about acceptance the other day and was realizing that this is a practice that might take a long time to get good at, especially when we are talking about relationships. You see, all of us pretty much like who we are. We like how we think, how we behave and act. We like our ways.

And many of us get really perturbed when our partner doesn’t agree with us. They might do something different than what we learned growing up. Or they might like something arranged differently then how we prefer. They might even say things we would never say.

So many relationship challenges have a common root.

As individuals we learn a lot about how to be humans. It starts from our early days in our family. We learn how to talk and walk and feed ourselves, go to school and play with others. We are taught everywhere; parents, teachers, laws, religion, family, friends, everyone is a teacher.

We get good at interacting with life. We learn how to rely on ourselves to get our homework done, to babysit siblings or neighbors, to make our own food, to clean our rooms and to be a functioning member in a family system.

But do we learn how to be good partners?

Wondering how to stop arguing with your spouse? You’re not alone.

Couples often tell me they are so tired of having continuous arguments about the same thing with the person they love. They say those arguments always end up the same way, both people exhausted and nothing gets resolved. They want to fix the problem but they just don’t know how.

This is a very common problem for people in relationships and marriages. So why does this pattern occur? Let me explain.

When we think of someone strong in a relationship many of us imagine someone tall and powerful, maybe someone who has a deep voice and a forceful way of expression. These all represent strength. But this isn’t the strength I am referring to in a relationship.

I am talking about the strength it takes people to be real. What does real mean? It means that you are not afraid to talk to your partner about what you think, feel and desire. It also means you are not afraid to take “ownership” of something you might have done to hurt your partner’s feelings.

When people get their feelings hurt, they usually want someone to make them feel better. This pattern of getting hurt and someone being there to sooth you can be traced back to when we were little children. We all fell down and someone, (hopefully) took care of us.

Sometimes I hear couples tell me they are good communicators. One or both will say they know how to tell their partner when they get upset. I ask them how they do this and they tell me they say, “You hurt my feelings.” I listen and nod my head and wonder if it works. Then I ask them, and they always say, “No.”

Getting our partners to make changes is probably one of the hardest parts of being in a relationship. It certainly is the number one issue people talk about when they come to see me for counseling. So why is it so hard to get what we want from the people who are supposed to love us?

Tag Archives: counseling

3 Relationship Rules to Live By

Open Communication for Getting Your Needs Met

How Taking Responsibility in a Relationship Brings Peace

Gentle Requests – On Communication in Relationships

Accepting Differences Between You and Your Partner

The Universal Relationship Challenge: Being a Good Partner

How to Stop Arguing with Your Spouse or Partner

How Being Strong in a Relationship Improves Your World

Why Saying “You Hurt My Feelings” Never Works

Why It’s So Hard to Change Your Spouse’s Behavior