This website provides help with the range of typical problems that can crop up in a relationship. There is however one issue that is common to all these problems, and in fact it’s the most important relationship principle there is. It is:
If your partner is behaving badly,
they are hurting inside
they are hurting inside
While this is a simple enough idea, it is incredibly difficult to accept in practice. When your partner is behaving in an unpleasant or hurtful way, the last thing you will feel like doing is to be kind and empathic towards them. And yet this emotionally mature response to bad behaviour is the key to solving your problems and having a much happier, love-filled relationship.
The way to work with this principle is to understand the underlying cause of all relationship problems. Our essential state is one of love and connection to the people and world around us. We suffer whenever we turn away from this state and start believing that we are separate and personally lacking in love. When we lose our connection to love, fear and pain immediately enters our mind. We try to ignore this pain by becoming dependent on the people around us to give us love, or by becoming independent so that we can pretend that we don’t need love. Both these strategies create a range of negative behaviours that push our partners away and hurts them.
So if your partner is driving you mad, under-valuing you, withdrawing from you, or acting in an untrustworthy way (or any number of other problematic ways), then they have lost touch with their natural state of love and connection. It doesn’t matter how confident and happy they seem on the surface, if you are not experiencing love from them, then they are hurting inside.
The way forward for any relationship problem is therefore to recognise bad behaviour as a call for love. Avoid judging your partner for their behaviour and then open your heart so you can bring love back to yourself and your partner. This is an act of supreme leadership, but I promise you that it will always work. Do have a look at my online coaching module called Lovecoach for practical ways to solve a variety of relationship problems using the principle I have just described.
