8 Steps to Save Your Relationship
- An Emergency Repair Kit
1. Set Your Goal
Before you set about saving or repairing your relationship, decide what you want the outcome to be. Write this down. Visualise yourself and your partner working through your problems and healing the issues that lie between you. Make this visualisation as vivid as you can. See yourselves smiling and hugging as you make up and re-discover your love for each other in the future. This visualisation will prepare your mind for the next 7 steps and make them much easier to achieve.
If you have spiritual or religious beliefs, ask (or pray) that you may have guidance and inspiration in repairing your relationship. If you have no spiritual beliefs, ask that your intuitive or higher mind will direct you.
- Understand What Is Happening
Just like a faulty car, you need to understand why your relationship is struggling in order to fix it. Where has there been a choice for fear and other negative emotions, rather than love? What need is not being met for you and your partner? What must your partner be feeling to act as they do? What feelings have you and your partner been suppressing and not talking about? Look at my other articles on the website www.iloveyouloveme.com for more help with understanding your relationship
- Become the Leader
Remember in a relationship that bad behaviour always comes from a negative, fearful feeling. This means that there are only two things happening in a relationship - love and a call for love. If your partner is not in a position to help the relationship, would you be willing to be the leader and answer the calls for love? The fact that you are reading this would suggest that you have begun this process already!
- Identify All Judgments
Identify where you are judging your partner. No matter how badly they are behaving, they are trying to communicate their pain to you – sometimes in very unhelpful ways! Judging them just makes them feel worse and further damages your relationship. See if you can understand why they are behaving in a way that you find difficult. Also try to understand and work on why their behaviour triggers your negative emotions.
- Forgive
This is the key step and can only happen after step 4. Pull off all your judgments about your partner and you will automatically forgive them. This will invite love to return to your relationship. To do this effectively you will have to be able to forgive yourself for anything that you are doing in the relationship that is destructive and for any negative self-beliefs that your partner’s behaviour triggers in you.
- Appreciate
So far you have been working to change the way that you see and understand your partner and the issues that are holding you back. Now you need start moving towards your partner emotionally and physically. The easiest way to do this is to think of all the things you love, appreciate and are grateful for about them. You might want to write them down. Feel all these things and send your positive feelings to them. When you next meet them, look at them beyond their behaviours and realise all their wonderful gifts, and why you fell in love with them in the first place.
- Communicate
Now it is time to tell your partner how much you appreciate them and love them. Just make sure that you do this from the heart (rather than the head). It is the heartfelt nature of the appreciation that brings about the healing. Let them reciprocate if they want to appreciate you. Make sure you receive their words graciously.
If you have been able to feel forgiveness and love towards each other, you will be able to talk about the issues that have been causing problems in your relationship. Be as open and honest as you can. You can talk about how you have felt but do not blame or make your partner responsible for your feelings – own them yourself. Seek to share the issues and ask your partner how they have been feeling. Talk about what you need from each other (including physical needs) and how you might best fulfil these needs. Talk about how you can help each other build confidence and support each other’s healing.
- Re-Join
If you have got through steps 1-7 successfully, you will re-join and fall back in love again. You will have removed the negative feelings, judgments, fear and guilt that act as barriers to love. Make lots of eye contact, bring in humour and revel in the wonder of touch and physical intimacy. Keep talking about what is happening – honest communication is the key to a successful relationship. With your renewed confidence you may want to go through each of the steps again and progressively strengthen your love for each other.
- Celebrate!
Celebrate your love for each other and commit to a relationship in the future that has all these steps in it – not just when you have a problem, but on a daily basis. A joy-filled relationship comes from two people committing to work with each other to heal anything that isn’t love, that appears between them.
Note: These steps could take a few minutes, or several days or weeks – the speed is up to you. It can be difficult to find the forgiveness, especially after an extended period of disappointment and frustration in a relationship, but love will always win the day if you believe in it enough.
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