Avoid Fear and Attachment in Your Relationship Conflicts

This week we are continuing our discussion on the differences between us and how we handle them, differences that have come up as a result of Phil’s recent illness. Handling larger differences is a stage of Our Process. You can find details of that process in our blogs and outlined in our latest book.

How do we measure what’s important to our partner and how does that affect what we do?

In the small day to day differences that come up, we often look at how much we are attached to our view, and if we’re not seriously invested, we are usually comfortable going with the needs expressed by the other. We don’t have that much attachment to the smaller things in life. It’s no trouble to let things go. Instead of compromise and resentment, this is non-attachment in action.

What do we do when the differences seem to be larger or more important to one of us?

Click here to find out what to do, or click here for Phil to read it to you.

Successful Relationship Reading Corner

We wrote in this week's blog about avoiding fear and attachment in your relationship conflicts. Here are some articles and a video about unearthing the reasons behind your conflicts.

How to Develop Self-Love and Why This Will Strengthen Your Relationship "Of course it helps to be entering a relationship with a strong feeling of self-love. But I also think that if you are in a partnership where self-love is lacking, and the space between you is needy, irritating, and harmful, things can be turned around. Learning self-love is an ongoing process. It's not a switch you can just flick on. Even couples who have a healthy amount of self-love could have more."

Don't Overcome Fear: What to Do Instead This is a video from Dr. Gail Brenner (see above) about which she says "Do you feel stuck in fear? Are you trying to overcome it? Turning toward the fear with curiosity is the beginning of building a friendly relationship with it. When you stop fighting fear, it begins to lose its power over you. And here you are...peaceful...at ease in your life..."

Don’t Let Fear Destroy Your Relationship "Why do we fight with our partners? I’m not referring to small arguments that resolve reasonably quickly with a compromise. I am talking about fights that blow like a hurricane into a peaceful day and leave us broken, exhausted, and confused as we wonder, what just happened? These consuming and crazy-making fights are generally fueled by unspoken and unnamed fears. Because most of us do not like feeling scared, we have spent years developing strategies to try to control our fear by squashing it or avoiding it. The problem is, fear does not like being forced out of town. It may ride away for a while, but it will come back, with its posse, armed and ready to force us to hear it and take it seriously."

Spreading peace one relationship at a time
Phil and Maude
 
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