Learn a new way to communicate and understand your relationship. Difficult emotions arise to be healed.
The difficult emotions we carry around are triggered in relationships. For example, feelings of betrayal, insecurity, loneliness, abandonment, jealousy, fear of loss. It can also be feelings of boundaries being violated, anger or powerlessness.
Your partner can actually be a good mirror to show you what things you need to look at in yourself to grow. Life is also about development, and the problem areas that arise in the relationship are some of the things that you can really use to learn more about yourself.
Mr Right
There is this idea in our culture that happiness lies in the right relationship. That if you just find Mr Right or Mrs Right who loves you in the right way, you will be happy. It’s a lot of pressure to put on the relationship, especially because it’s not right. Basic harmony and happiness is not found in your partner, it’s found in yourself.
When our partner activates difficult feelings in us that seem far from happiness, we may immediately think that it’s just our partner who is wrong or treating us in the wrong way.
Many of us know what it’s like to leave a partner who has a certain behaviour that bothers us, only to find a new partner who has similar behaviour or triggers the same feelings in us.
It can be a good idea to stop and look at ourselves in the “mirror” that our partner holds up to us and look at the emotions that our partner activates in us. It can be smart to turn your gaze inwards.
You can work on your relationship through individual therapy, where the focus is mainly on your feelings, how you experience your relationship and how you can get more clarity on relationship issues. You can also bring your partner to couples therapy, where we will work with the problems as you each experience them in the relationship. Mænd er fra Mars og kvinder er fra Venus will resolve a lot of relationship problems.
In therapy, I will distinguish between which of your problems are about improving communication between you and which are about each of you becoming better at handling certain emotions.
I will teach you, or both of you, tools for communication and for containing the emotions that are activated in the relationship.
Setting boundaries
Learning to manage your own emotions in no way means that you have to put up with behaviour from your partner that you don’t like or that you shouldn’t speak up to your partner. Nor does it mean that you should stay in a relationship that isn’t right for you.
As you get better at dealing with your own feelings, it will become clearer what you need to do or say in relation to your partner. You’ll be better able to set your boundaries and to set them in a balanced way because you are at peace with yourself.
