Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, we wrote about why constancy of connection is important in your relationships. These previous articles discuss aspects of that topic.
How To Deal With The Bumps You Encounter In Your Relationships “If you desire true peace within yourself and in your relationships, you too can find such a path. Peaceful relationships cultivate openness and trust. A constancy develops from knowing where the values lie within you and between you. The sense of safety derives from the repeated experience that the two of you are always on the same side. You approach each other from this trust, not as adversaries. This sense of trust allows a different behavior when moments of apparent clashing occur. You are interested in how the other person feels without any thought of who is right or wrong. You also feel safe and able to communicate what you are feeling. These sharings are devoid of blame and accusation. When you share about your feelings, it is clear you are talking about just that, how you feel. When you are listening, it is clear that you are hearing what the other person feels. It’s not at that point about you.”
Why Trust is so Important in All Your Relationships “We may all have a different list of what elicits trust in the other person. There are different aspects we translate into trustworthiness. Yet, whatever these are, we all recognize this feeling, when it is there and when it is not. Constancy is a big part of it. Are they always the same person, or does a completely different personality appear at times? For us, an important factor was experiencing that each of us remained the same person every time we encountered each other. That may sound strange to point out, but we had both had the previous experience of being in a relationship where we never knew who we might be interacting with when coming together. The moods, and it seemed the person, were ever changing. This caused a state of insecurity and unease. In our relationship, there is a constancy of personality expression that brings with it a feeling of peace and calm.”
How You Can Choose to Have a Better Relationship Now “Do you want to have relationships full of joy and peace, lacking in fights and arguments? If you do, really do, then it is possible for you to have that experience. Every relationship you have can be permeated by love and peace. If you want this it takes a choice; a choice to let go of seeing things in terms of separate sides, of winning and losing, of holding on to being right. True, making this choice is not magic, and there is a process to getting there. The more you practice this step by step in your relationships, the more natural it will be and the less effort required. How do we know this? The constancy of our relationship. The pervasiveness of knowing we’re on the same side. It’s like walking through life and having a path constantly appear before us; in other words, no obstacles ever arise. It feels completely automatic; a form of grace that has been given to us, yet at the same time, we know that it is something we’re doing. We don’t even notice doing it, except maybe occasionally when we have the choice between being kind and being snippy.”