“I don’t know what a healthy relationship looks like but it sure isn’t THIS!”
“Jennifer” (not her real name and her story used with permission) shared this with us in one of her coaching sessions.
When she did, we just had to blow the whistle on it.
We had to let her know as kindly and as lovingly as possible how she was deceiving herself.
She seemed to know what an unhealthy relationship looked like so underneath, we knew she also had ideas of what “healthy” meant to her.
Because each one of us has a unique definition of what a healthy relationship looks like, this is what we explored with her.
As she looked beneath her upset and disgust…
She could see that she really did have an idea of what a healthy relationship could be.
She saw that spending energy and focus on what her relationship “wasn’t” had not led her to have something better.
Having a positive direction that she wanted to move toward seemed like a first step to relationship health.
The truth is that when you’re mired in blame, judgment and what’s wrong, you can’t see any way to move toward what you want.
If you think you’re in an unhealthy relationship, there are options once you realize the direction you want to go…
1. Recommit to staying in the relationship and find out if your partner wants to move in the same direction that you do…
2. Ignore the whole situation, hoping it will either just go away or magically fix itself…
3. Blow the whole thing up and start over with someone new(hoping you can figure out what went wrong in the last relationship)…
or
4. Just sit on the sidelines from this point on in the game of love and let others have love but not allow it for yourself.
If you find yourself in an unhealthy relationship, what’s next for you is entirely up to YOU…
But if there’s one one hope we’d have for you, it’s this…
NEVER give up on love.
Life’s just too short and too precious to just give up on the thing that (we believe) makes life worth living…
And that’s love–not just with an intimate partner but for anyone you come in contact with.
The real question when it comes to love and your relationship or marriage is what do you want?
And it’s not answering that question from a surfacy, superficial place but from a deeper, “I’m willing to explore and open to love and life fully” place.
What do you truly want?
The answers always come if you look beneath your emotions and the path does become clear–one moment at a time.
It’s what you’re inspired to learn more about and it’s what feels right in the moment to do.
Jennifer could see that identifying what a healthy relationship means to her…
One where both people can talk with one another without blaming each other…
Could lead her to realizing that she could stop blaming and see if her husband also wanted to stop as well.
But she could start with herself and allow her next step to show itself.
It always does if we allow it!