Improving Yourself In A Relationship
How can examining my own patterns improve my relationships?
If you can examine your own patterns of behavior, you can really help your relationship in a key way: you take the stress off your partner. The more you understand about what it is that sets you off, and the things that upset you, and the more you can communicate that to your partner, the less likely they are to do those things, the more likely they are to respect those boundaries of yours. And what happens is, you end up getting upset a lot less often, because you have a partner who's aware of what it is that will upset you. And when you can ask them to examine within themselves, what are the things that upset them, and you can sort of go out of your way to not do those things, you find yourself with longer periods of great harmony, and fewer periods of wanting to kill each other.
How can I identify my own relationship patterns?
You know, it's not that hard to identify your own relationship patterns, that is, the way you got along with previous people. It's not that hard, but it's something we don't like to do, because it might involve seeing that you've done things wrong. But if you're able to look back over who you went out with, what they were like psychologically, how you broke up, why you broke up, the things that caused you to fight with them, you'll start to see patterns in your own behavior that you're definitely still doing today.
What if I'm not good at self-reflection?
If you're not good at self-reflection, it means that there's a lot more in your unconscious than you know. This is the stuff we don't want to look at. So it's good to find somebody who knows you, or a few somebody's who know you. That can be relatives, that can be past boy or girlfriends, it can be good friends of yours. Ask them, honestly, what they've seen in terms of your behavior over the years. The more information you can gather about yourself the smarter you can be about your future choices.
How do I change my negative relationship patterns?
The thing about your patterns is you'll never really change them but you can break them. You can't just make yourself bend a little, but you can say, "OK, now I've got a choice. I've always been attracted to people who are a certain way. Here's my choice, I can decide, OK for the rest of my life I'm only going to go out with those types of people which will probably lead to lousy relationships or I can consciously say, I'm going to break my pattern, find somebody that I maybe less attracted to, but who seems better for me in other ways.” And that's really what you do with your patterns.