Improving Your Relationships — Relationship Dynamics from a Spiritual Perspective – Part I

(Excerpted from “Invisible Blueprints”)

“Love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world.”

-Ralph Waldo Trine

“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.”

-Mohandas K. Gandhi

My Integrative Intuitive Counseling work with clients over the past fifteen-plus years has given me the bird’s-eye view of relationships and the dynamics involved in them from an energetic point of view.

One of the areas in which I had early glimpses of these realizations and lessons in energy is that of relationships, especially romantic relationships. It goes without saying that relationships are very important to most of us and represent an extremely important aspect of our human experience, as Trine and Gandhi above so articulately expressed it. So of course most clients will want information on this area of their lives.

I’ve looked at many, many relationships over the past several years, including those a client was involved in at the time of a session, those from a client’s past, and future relationships. I’ve also looked at nonromantic relationships, including those with friends, parents, children, other family members, work colleagues, etc. I have increasingly gained insight into how relationships work (and why they do work at times and often do not work) and what the causative or contributing factors to the dynamics operative in this aspect of our lives may be. Over time, I gradually saw several factors that I feel influence the dynamics and viability of relationships.

Resonance of Energies

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

-Carl Jung

“Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between partners.”

-Colette Dowling

Early on in looking at romantic relationships I was primarily sensing how people’s energies resonated — or didn’t resonate well — and how that energetic resonance between the two of them affected both the dynamics of the relationship and the positive or negative aspects of what the people in the relationship were experiencing. Some people’s energies resonated quite well. Other people’s energies quite simply abraded.

For example, I’ve seen relationships in which one person’s energy was overwhelming the other’s energy. This often leads to the latter person feeling overwhelmed and powerless or constrained, certainly not a pleasant way to feel in a relationship. I’ve also seen relationships in which one person’s energy is warm and expansive and the other person’s energy is cooler or indifferent and/or contracted or narrow. This is also not a good interaction of energies. As telling as these dynamics of energy resonances were, I came to learn in time, however, that there were factors involved other than just the resonance of energies that contributed to whether relationships were good, workable, or true partners or “soul mates.”

Learning Relationships

“How savage is love that plants a flower and uproots a field; that revives us for a day and stuns us for an age!”

-Kahlil Gibran

I soon came to see how people’s inauthentic stuff — their issues — affected the dynamics in a relationship. Because the inauthentic overlay contributes to and affects one’s general energy, this inauthentic stuff will often be part of what is resonating (or abrading) between two people’s energies.

Often the pull between two people will be their “stuff” resonating, rather than who they really are. For example, one of the more common manifestations of this type of resonance occurs when a dependent person who may also be sensitive emotionally and/or come from some sort of abusive background is romantically involved with someone with strong and controlling energy; or when one person who is open emotionally and needs to connect and communicate openly with his/her partner is involved with someone who is closed down or withdrawn emotionally and thus neither available emotionally nor oriented towards truly openly connecting with someone. I have seen instances in which two people’s “stuff” is so complex and mutually resonating that they appear to fit together like a complex system of reciprocal keys fitting into each other’s locks. Often a condition of button-pushing and/or mutual interdependence in an unhealthy manner results from this type of resonance. (Hence, the term codependence.) Relationships of this type often exemplify a mixture of contradictory energies; they may be love/hate relationships or be full of volatility – and are rarely “clear sailing.” They are also frequently quite painful and can be emotionally draining.

This type of relationship, that is based on the inauthentic stuff resonating is often, as you may suspect, doomed to failure. I have seen many clients who were in this type of relationship and who may have stuck it out for years because they have both resistance to and inertia over getting out of the situation. Other clients may extricate themselves in a shorter period of time. If, how, and when these relationships are resolved is usually a function of the individual’s process and growth and his/her readiness for or resistance to change.

Usually when the decision is made to leave the relationship, it is because the person initiating that change has grown personally to the point where the personal lessons from the relationship are learned and the relationship no longer serves a purpose or feels the same. In other words, the resonance is no longer there. (This latter instance is representative of the common phenomenon that, as we learn and grow, we may grow past the people we’ve been close to, if they are not also evolving and growing. Kristen Zambucka described this phenomenon when she stated that, “We outgrow people, places, and things as we unfold. We may be saddened when old friends say their piece and leave our lives…but let them go. They were at a different stage and looking in a different direction.” This can be disconcerting to us, especially if we don’t realize that, if our energies are no longer resonating, any former feeling of closeness usually evaporates — and if we further don’t realize that this “changing of partners” is indicative of something positive in us, i.e., our personal growth.)

Over time and through repeatedly seeing a number of this type of relationship, I came to realize that these relationships that are based on the partners’ inauthentic stuff resonating are what I now call learning relationships. In other words, we often enter into some relationships primarily to learn and grow by working on our inauthentic stuff, and this purpose of learning tends to be the primary raison d’être for this type of relationship. This is distinguished from the soul mate or partner relationship in which we may be stimulating each other’s growth, but it’s not the sole purpose for the relationship.

The positive aspect of learning relationships is that they are often a wonderful catalyst for our growth. Each learning relationship tends to be centered around healing or reworking one or more aspects of our stuff. Put another way, “Each relationship nurtures a strength or weakness within you” (Mike Murdock). And, usually, until we work on whatever the relationship is trying to teach us and we “get” it, we are doomed to keep repeating the lesson; that is, we can have a pattern of serially entering into similar relationships. Recognizing that we have a pattern in relationships can give us the key to realizing that there is something in ourselves to work on. “To understand is to perceive patterns,” Isaiah Berlin wrote — including our own patterns.

If, instead, we don’t recognize that there is something to work on in ourselves we may stay stuck in the pattern for a more prolonged period of time. Often we will then project our unhappiness and blame externally and decry all men or all women as being “worthless,” “unavailable,” etc. — until we learn to figuratively point that finger back towards ourselves and look within to see what we need to work on or change in ourselves. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves” (Jung). Or, as Molière wrote, “One should examine oneself for a long time before thinking of condemning others.”

A variation on this theme of projection and blame centers around those people who are “rescuers.” Rescuers (not an essence type) are often soft-hearted people who are perpetually trying to help and rescue others, sometimes to the extent that they actually believe that that is one of their purposes in life. As with those who project their own stuff outwardly and blame others and things outside of themselves, rescuers often need to figuratively point their fingers back at themselves and look within for what they need to rescue in themselves. A pattern of needing to rescue others often serves to deflect one’s attention from his/her own stuff and what he/she needs to work on within him/herself. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that’s your own self.”

Learning relationships, especially those that engage us emotionally in an intense manner, are a strong mechanism by which we can evolve, as we are stimulated more — through the power of emotion — by these often difficult and/or painful relationship experiences. I myself gained a major lesson in self-esteem through a relationship that was dysfunctional and quite difficult. However, the lesson was extremely valuable and was permanently gained — and, indeed, may have been all the more permanently etched in me due to the extent of the difficulty and emotional struggle I went through.

What we stand to gain from relationships such as these will vary from one person to the next and can run the gamut from learning self-esteem, to becoming less passive and dependent, to learning to be more emotionally available, to being more caring, to being less self-absorbed — or even to becoming more discerning about relationships. The lessons can be quite diverse. However, one theme running through these learning relationships is that the universe is drawing attention to our inauthentic “stuff” that keeps us from being who we really are and is asking us to work on it. Not everyone, of course, will work on all, or even any, of his/her stuff in a lifetime because that may indeed be, as previously mentioned, what we are to experience in that lifetime – never getting back to our pure essence (and, also as previously mentioned, not everyone will have much inauthentic stuff to work on or clear).

Interestingly, I’ve seen another mechanism by which these learning relationships operate and that has to do with another factor that induces the two people to be together in a relationship, other than just the resonance of the inauthentic stuff. This factor will often manifest itself as a “pull” between the two people. This pull is often experienced as a sexual attraction, but may also be experienced as a mental or psychic pull: they are just drawn to the other person for some reason and can’t get that person out of his/her mind; or they are continually trying to figure the other person out. (And, yes, this can lead to obsession.)

What I have frequently seen that I find fascinating is that often when the lesson that was a major raison d’être for the relationship is finally learned, the pull between the two of them — sexual attraction, mental conundrum, obsession, or whatever — just disappears as if by magic. I regard this “pull,” however it is expressed and experienced, as a device used by the universe to get us to learn a lesson (by getting us into the relationship that will teach us the lesson). Such an interesting and creative device!



By: Diane Brandon

About the Author:

Every couple hits rough patches. Some may even find themselves suddenly “skidding on black ice.” But whether the problem in the relationship is chronic, causing simmering resentment, or seems to explode like a land mine, almost every couple contemplates getting help at one time or another.

In a tight economy, the pressures that couples experience intensify. This can put you in a push-pull situation: Already strapped for money, you are faced with the additional prospect of paying for a service that has no guaranteed outcome. Yet you suspect that if you don’t get coaching, your relationship won’t survive. You have to weigh the immediate costs of professional help against the potential costs of a break up, including double rent or an additional mortgage, a forced sale of your home, moving expenses, attorneys, and additional childcare. Even if you aren’t married or don’t have children, breaking up isn’t just hard to do; it can be costly.

So how do you know when the right time for relationship coaching is? How do you know if it’s going to work? How do you know if your relationship coach/counselor is good?

Because each couple’s situation is unique, there are no simple answers to these perfectly reasonable questions. However, there are some things you can do to decide if relationship coaching is a good option and to maximize your chances of a satisfying experience. Here are 11 Keys for getting the most out of relationship coaching:



Don’t wait until you feel hopeless. Maybe you’re already at this crisis stage. In that case, don’t delay in getting help. If you’re on the fence about relationship coaching but think you want to salvage your relationship, consider this metaphor: When a scuba diver descends too quickly, her ears may hurt from the imbalance of pressure. At that depth, it won’t work for her to continue trying to relieve the pressure by swallowing. She must swim back up to the point at which the pain began, clear her ears with a good swallow or two, and then descend slowly, checking for pain levels periodically. Successful counseling is akin to the scuba experience. It is often a matter of finding the initial spot where the pain began. This is easier for everyone—coach and couple—if you don’t have so far to travel back or can’t even remember the last time you felt no pain. Crisis intervention leaves little time or energy for exploring the root causes of heartache, which may often include past relationships and childhood events. So, just as you wouldn’t let a physical wound fester without treatment, don’t ignore your emotional wounds.

Don’t use your coach as a referee. When couples are angry, they want someone to listen and see their side. That’s expected and reasonable. But don’t expect a good counselor/coach to take your side. That need can be met by friends who may commiserate out of sheer loyalty. A seasoned relationship coach knows that taking sides is counterproductive for the couple. She should listen to both of your feelings, fears, and complaints. She should then connect these to the deeper issues that precipitated your problems or even predated your relationship. A good relationship coach will provide you with useful insights (those AHA! moments), tools for communicating, and homework to raise your self-esteem, which often gets declines as a relationship deteriorates.

Don’t focus on being liked by your relationship coach. She’s not there to take sides; she’s there to help you find clarity, learn relationship skills, and develop higher self-esteem. If you try to be “teacher’s pet,” you may feel betrayed the first time your coach calls you on a behavior, which she will no doubt do if she’s any good. Don’t idealize her. Remember, when she’s not being paid to be the perfect listener and guide, she may not even be someone you’d like as a friend.

Commit to the process. Presuming you feel some “chemistry” with one another after the first session, your relationship coach will probably ask you to commit to a minimum number of sessions or length of time. If one or both people can’t make even a minimum commitment, there may not be enough elasticity in the relationship to make counseling worthwhile. If you have one foot out the door already, be up front with your coach. Don’t pretend that you are more invested in working on the relationship than you actually are or you’ll end up fighting the label of “the bad guy.”

Unless you have been abused, don’t threaten your partner with leaving during your counseling timeframe. If you’ve committed to three months of counseling, don’t walk in after three weeks and say that you’ve changed your mind. Give your relationship coach a chance to help you through at least one emotional abyss. I once worked with a couple where the husband threatened “the end” in the middle of every session (even though I asked him repeatedly not to do this). After enough of my calling him on his threatening behavior, he was willing to admit that his ultimatums made him feel a semblance of control. But he could also see that his threats fueled his wife’s distrust and provoked her in destructive ways. Once he stopped “crying wolf,” they both became more vulnerable about their underlying feelings and fears. From staunch enemies they grew (in just a few weeks) to become each other’s best friend.

Don’t withhold. If you have some big secret, there are many ways to handle this. Here’s how not to handle it: Don’t tell your relationship coach your secret in private and ask her to keep it from your partner. That’s poison for any relationship. If your counselor reinforces you in any way in keeping your partner in the dark, find a more ethical counselor. You don’t want to work with someone who colludes on secrets. How can you trust that she isn’t holding a secret of your partner’s that you would want to know? You’ve probably heard the saying, “We are only as sick as our secrets.” Your secret, be it about infidelity, credit card debt, or herpes, is already eating you up or you would have shared it with your partner. Because secrets reinforce our fears, they inevitably damage our relationships. Here’s what you can do if you have been keeping a secret from your partner: If you can’t imagine telling your partner outright, then go ahead and talk to your relationship coach privately. Tell her you need help finding the courage to share your secret. She won’t sugarcoat the consequences. Yes, you may lose your partner. But in my experience as a life coach, the relationships that almost certainly end are the ones where one or both parties had a secret they were unwilling or too afraid to confess. Think about it this way: You are afraid to tell because you are afraid of being abandoned. But the reality is that you are likely to be abandoned if you don’t tell. Why? Because your relationship is a mirror. If you are afraid of being abandoned, your relationship will mirror that fear in some way. If you think you are unworthy of your partner because of your secret, they will unknowingly mirror this back to you. Secrets set up a Catch 22, no-win situation. So you might as well offer the truth and find out if your partner can forgive you as you learn to forgive yourself.

Be truer to your values than to your fears. No one wants to be abandoned. But if you abandon yourself or your core values to keep somebody in your life, you will regret it. Most of us have done this at one time or another and know how bad we end up feeling about ourselves. Yet we sometimes try to “work around” our values in order to avoid loneliness or dissention. If your partner is behaving in ways that offend your moral sensibilities, speak up. If you try to talk about other, less sensitive topics in counseling when you are bothered by something bigger, you are wasting your precious time and money. Give your counselor an opportunity to help you honor your values and to explore your partner’s core values. Maybe your partner is behaving in ways that go against his/her own ethics and feels ashamed. If so, there’s a good chance that a relationship coach can help your partner realign with his/her values.

If you disagree with your coach’s interpretation, speak up. Even the best relationship coaches have filters based on their own life experiences. But a good coach doesn’t care more about being right than about the success of your relationship. While you don’t want to be rude, you don’t want to worry about objecting. You’re not there to coddle your coach’s ego just as she isn’t there to massage yours. She may disagree with your point of view and you may feel defensive. That happens. But you shouldn’t feel bullied, intimidated, or humiliated.

Don’t shoot the messenger. You may not like what you hear from your coach. But if it rings true, even if it bruises your ego, don’t blame her for doing her job well. Ignoring the truth translates to you and your partner suffering needlessly. Try to remember that a hard truth is better than a soft lie if your priority is a healthy, happy relationship.

Talk openly about financial issues. If you are wobbling about coming to a counseling session because of financial difficulty, let your counselor know before your next session. Obviously, it is respectful to give her time to think about how she wants to handle this. But perhaps even more importantly, she may make a connection between your financial difficulty and other issues in your relationship. Being truthful about financial stresses will help her put the pieces of your puzzle together in a way that could be quite illuminating as well as financially stabilizing.

Practice compassion. You might not be in counseling if this were already so easy, but if you can’t find any compassion for your partner’s emotional wounds or the fears that drive his/her counterproductive behaviors, it’s hard to move forward or find hope. Ultimately, the capacity to create a successful, intimate, joyful relationship lies in our ability to recognize and remember that everything that doesn’t look like love is simply a disguised cry for help. Your relationship coach should demonstrate enough compassion that it “wears off” on you. It is compassion that promotes healing, vulnerability, truth, and forgiveness. Although there are few promises that can be made about the outcome of your time in counseling, I guarantee that the more compassion you practice, the more satisfied you will feel about the experience.



 



By: Jane Straus

About the Author:

Having breakfast at my favourite restaurant this morning I was again reminded about why we get involved in relationships. It always blows be away as to how many people are in convenient relationships, or stagnant relationships were there is only a possibility of growth.

There are unlimited personal reasons for people being in relationships. They are called relationships because you physically demonstrate who and what you are in relationship with another. In other words your relationships define you and your personal thoughts and beliefs about yourself, your environment and your circumstances in the moment.

No matter what you may think, say or how you may protest this statement; how you act demonstrates your thoughts in the moment. What you think always manifests itself physically and is somehow demonstrated.

A couple came into the restaurant and sat down two tables in front of me. The man with paper in hand immediately opened it up and started reading to himself with little more than a couple of words to his partner. During the time they were in my focus, the man continued to read while the woman starred off into space, and every once in awhile she would say something, and he would answer. Admittedly I am judging here, but his words were more to acknowledge her words than her existence.

This is not the real value in a relationship. Evolution, involvement are the natural mechanics of personal growth. If it is the nature of all living things to evolve or better themselves, then they do that in relationship to another, and their environment. A close personal relationship is the greatest opportunity for mankind to demonstrate his/her growth. In the moment when one has prioritized his choices to the newspaper over the relationship, he is short-changing his growth if he does not include his partner. The relationship is demonstrated physically as him reading the newspaper over engaging his partner. He has prioritized his choice no matter how he may object to this statement and actions speak stronger than words.

There are underlying developments that we can’t see in this relationship. It may be a continuing opportunity for both partners to believe either consciously or subconsciously, that their relationship has become mundane, boring, or indifferent. It may add to a growing feeling that the relationship has died, and it can be a long term buildup to an appropriate action by either one.

Partnerships may be relationships of convenience were there is growth outside the relationship, and clearly this is a physical demonstration of how the partners are using the relationship. It’s a place to park the car, but all the action is outside the parking lot with minimal movement in the space.

Longevity is no measure of a good or poor relationship, and it is also a demonstration of the thoughts one has about themselves, acted out in the current relationship.

There is nothing right or wrong about these kinds of relationships and they exist all around us for purpose - the purpose of each individual. However, if there is no personal growth coming from the relationship then at its best, you are just keeping up appearances. If you understand the nature of spirit and its desire to evolve in its physical experiences, then does it make any sense to stop growing, to become lazy and indifferent about your life? The true nature of “life” is “movement” the words are interchangeable.

Relationships are gifts, they are opportunities to declare yourself, and that is all that life desires - is a declaration of existence. The only true assertion that humanity can make to the universe is that “I Am” and everything thing else that follows is a lie or an imagined experience.

If a man unexpectedly appeared on the planet in a remote part of the world where no one else visited, all he could really say about himself is that he is here. If a women suddenly appeared next to him, then he could then start declaring himself as this or that in relationship to the women, her values or beliefs, her mannerisms, her physical attributes and all things female and human. He would identify himself then as either the same or different from her. It is she, who gives him life, meaning and his sexual difference as male or female. This would be the same no matter what the sexual orientation or attributes. Humanity always creates itself in relationship to each other.

I personally don’t like how most couples interact with each other, whether it is aggressive or passive aggressive. I believe that if one has love and respect for oneself he/she will seek to find that and return it to others. He will also seek relationships that are based on personal growth rather than convenience. If she is in contact with the love that she truly is, she will also remove herself from relationships where there is little possibility of growth - love empowers whether self love or the love of another.

This article is not about reading the morning paper. I didn’t mention that while I was focused on the couple sitting together but apart, a second couple came into the restaurant and sat down between myself and the couple. I noticed something about the new couple; the woman was reading a newspaper and so I thought wow, this is the reverse; interesting. I then noticed that the man also had a newspaper and both of them were enjoying their read. Every few moments one would look up at the other and make a comment about what they were reading.

It would be unfair of me to say that this particular couple had a maturing and supportive relationship and the other couple didn’t. However, at that moment they were expressing what I would consider respect, a meaningful exchange, and the honouring of each other’s presence.

Are you missing out in your relationship? It is a mirror or reflection of how you are feeling about yourself in the moment you are thinking about him/her. How you interact or react to her, really expresses the thoughts you have about yourself. He/she is the greatest gift that can come your way. It is an opportunity to say; I am alive, this is who I am, and this is how I demonstrate or express it.



By: Roy E. Klienwachter

About the Author: