What Our Relationships Can Teach Us About Ourselves

Our reactions, judgements, expectations and disappointments can reveal beliefs and patterns that are very difficult to see on our own. This is why relationships can become such powerful tools for self-awareness and transformation.

Seen through Unity Consciousness, the other person is no longer only somebody to assess, resist or defend against. They are another human being with fears, needs, beliefs and blind spots, just as we have. That does not remove discernment; it makes our reaction to them worth learning from as well as responding to.

The Pivot Isn’t Always Easy

This sounds simple, but it can be surprisingly difficult. We have spent our lives learning to assess other people. When something goes wrong, it feels natural to decide what they did wrong and what they need to do differently. It can also feel safer. If the problem is them, we don’t have to look too closely at ourselves.

Looking within can even feel as though we are letting the other person off the hook. We aren’t. Someone may have behaved badly, and we may need to challenge them, set a boundary or leave. Looking at ourselves does not make their behaviour acceptable or make us responsible for it.

It simply means that, alongside deciding what we need to do about their behaviour, we are willing to ask what our own reaction can teach us.

Curiosity, Not Judgement

There is one important proviso. This isn’t another opportunity to find fault, only this time with ourselves.

If looking within simply changes they are wrong into I am wrong, we haven’t really changed anything. We have just moved the judgement. In the article on the Two Thought Systems I made the point that our Higher Self isn’t looking for a verdict at all, because our worth was never one of the things under discussion. It is curious instead: What is happening in me? What am I believing? What have I made this mean? What, if anything, might this relationship be showing me?

Here are some of the ways we can begin to find out.

Seeing Ourselves More Clearly

Our Beliefs Become Visible

Relationships can reveal beliefs we don’t even realise we hold. Rejection, criticism or disagreement can expose what we believe about love, trust, worth and how relationships should be.

A coaching client was struggling with his second marriage, despite believing he had married the woman of his dreams. As we talked, he said he was devastated because he believed marriage was forever and that once the bond was made, it should never be broken.

I gently asked how that fitted with leaving his first marriage to be with his second wife. The realisation was immediate. It had never occurred to him that, by holding so tightly to the belief that marriage should last forever, he had also condemned himself for the failure of his first. He had carried that judgement into his second marriage without even knowing it.

We Can Spot Our Patterns

One difficult relationship may not tell us very much. Sometimes we simply come across somebody we do not get on with. But when a very similar problem keeps appearing with different people, it can be worth asking whether there is something more going on.

A client once told me about her daughter, who had just left her third job in three years. The first two times, her mother had been completely supportive. In both jobs, her daughter felt that a woman manager had taken against her and had made working there increasingly difficult. From what my client knew, that explanation seemed perfectly reasonable.

When the same thing happened for a third time, though, she began to wonder whether there might be a pattern. That did not mean her daughter was necessarily at fault. She may genuinely have encountered three difficult managers. None of us was in a position to know.

The useful question was whether there was anything in her own reactions, expectations or behaviour that was worth looking at. If the managers were entirely to blame, there was little she could do except keep moving on. But if even a small part of the pattern belonged to her, recognising it would give her something she could understand and perhaps change.

That is the value of noticing repeated patterns. We do not have to decide immediately who is right or wrong. We are simply asking whether there is something here that we have seen before, and whether looking at our own part might tell us something useful.

We Can See What We Have Made It Mean

Often the pain isn’t only in what happened. It is in what we decided it meant.

We do this all the time, usually without realising it. She cancelled because she doesn’t care about me. He didn’t invite me because he doesn’t want me there. They are playing loud music because they have no consideration for anyone else.

Any of those explanations might be true. But unless we actually know why someone behaved as they did, we have filled in the missing information ourselves.

The important thing isn’t to judge ourselves for doing it. It is to notice when we have turned an assumption into a fact, particularly when that assumption is causing us pain. Sometimes another person’s behaviour has very little to do with us at all. Unless we know, it is worth separating what actually happened from the meaning we have added to it.

Choosing Differently

We Can Choose a Different Response

Relationship patterns can become established very quickly, but they can also change when one person is willing to do something differently.

We often get stuck because we are waiting for the other person to change first. We want them to listen better, react differently, understand us more clearly or stop behaving in a way that frustrates us.

The problem is that we cannot choose their response. We can only choose our own.

When we stop automatically supplying our half of the old pattern, something shifts. The other person may or may not change, but the relationship itself is no longer being fed in quite the same way. Sometimes that is enough to change the whole dynamic.

We Can Decide Who We Want to Be

Instead of asking How can I make them behave differently?, we can ask Who do I want to be in this relationship?

A work colleague was questioning whether her partner was really right for her. As she described the good and bad aspects of their relationship, it struck me how much attention she was giving to the things about him that irritated her.

We both knew another couple who seemed to have a particularly happy relationship. I suggested that perhaps the two men weren’t actually that different. Maybe the difference was partly in what each woman chose to focus on.

Her face was a picture. The penny dropped immediately, and the conversation changed from what was wrong with her partner to who she wanted to be in the relationship. The useful question became: did she want to spend the relationship mainly noticing what irritated her, or did she want to bring more appreciation and support to it while still being honest about genuine problems?

Of course, relationships are rarely that simple and changing our perspective doesn’t mean ignoring genuine problems. But sometimes changing what we focus on changes what we experience, and that can change the relationship too.

Learning to Love

We Can Practise Acceptance

Acceptance means recognising the reality of who another person is and the choices they are making, even when we wish they would choose differently. It does not require us to like those choices or stay in a situation that is wrong for us.

A friend was engaged and looking forward to her wedding when, out of the blue, her partner was offered a job three hundred miles away. He decided to take it. She knew she didn’t want to move.

At that time in my own life, I think I would have railed against his decision and made it mean all sorts of things about how much he loved me and what the relationship meant to him. She didn’t.

She told me she loved him, but his decision had shown that they wanted different things. She accepted his choice without trying to change it and made her own. They separated. Eighteen months later, she met someone who wanted the same kind of life she did, and they went on to plan their wedding.

Acceptance doesn’t mean a relationship has to end, nor does it mean agreeing with everything another person does. Sometimes it simply means accepting who they are and what they want and then deciding what we want to do with that reality.

We Can Develop Compassion and Forgiveness

Sometimes understanding another person’s history, fears, or limitations allows us to see their behaviour differently, without pretending that everything they did was acceptable.

My mother and I had a complicated relationship, as I suspect many mothers and daughters do. I loved her dearly, and she loved me, although when I was younger I wasn’t always sure of that.

Even at sixteen, I had begun asking the kinds of questions I would later learn to take to my Higher Self. After one particularly difficult exchange with my mother, I remember asking, why is she like this?

Something came back, and it changed how I saw her. My mother had experienced rejection herself and had received very little emotional support in her own life. What she couldn’t give me came from her own limitations rather than from anything about me. It wasn’t a measure of how lovable I was.

That was about my mother, and it was only a beginning. The fuller understanding of both my parents and of the lives they had lived long before I was born came much later, and I have written about that in the article on Unity Consciousness.

That understanding did not change what had happened, but it changed what I carried about it. I could see her limitations without making them a verdict on me. Compassion for her made forgiveness much easier.

It also showed me where love and control had been tangled together. There is a difference between loving someone and needing them to behave in a particular way so that we can feel all right. Most of us find, when we look honestly, that we have been doing rather more of the second than we realised.

Noticing that is not a reproach. It is an opportunity to separate love from control. We can love someone without approving of everything they do, and without requiring them to behave as we wish before we allow ourselves to choose a loving response.

There Are Many More Pivots We Can Make

These are only some of the ways we can begin to use relationships differently. Once we become curious rather than simply reacting, there are many other things we can notice. For example:

1. Recognise when we are projecting something of ourselves onto someone else.
2. Follow a strong feeling back to the thought that produced it.
3. Notice where we are looking to another person for our worth, security or happiness.
4. See where we are trying to control someone else so that we can feel safe.
5. Pause before reacting and ask whether there is another way to respond.
6. Take responsibility for our own feelings without taking responsibility for someone else’s behaviour.
7. Give up the need to be right and become more interested in understanding.
8. Set boundaries without needing to make someone else wrong.
9. Notice when we are relating to our history with someone rather than who they are now.
10. Recognise our shared humanity and what we have in common, even when we strongly disagree.
11. Experience the relationship as an opportunity for connection rather than something we need to defend ourselves against.

We don’t need to do all of these, or even consciously look for them. The important shift is much simpler. Instead of asking only what the other person is doing, we become willing to ask what the relationship might be showing us.

And every time we do that, we create a small gap between what happened and our automatic reaction. That gap is where a different choice becomes possible.

All of these ideas move us in the same direction. We stop using relationships only to assess what other people are giving us or doing to us and begin using them to understand ourselves. Something interesting often happens when we do. As we change what we bring to a relationship, the relationship itself can change too. Even when it doesn’t, our experience of it can.

We stop using relationships only to assess what other people are giving us or doing to us and begin using them to understand ourselves

This also points towards the final article of the series. As we become less interested in blame, defence and changing other people, we make more room for love. Next, we look at love, which is the true nature of your Higher Self.

Articles in Transformational Relationships

Transformational Relationships: How Every Connection Reflects and Refines You

• Experiencing Relationship From The Perspective Of Separation
• What Our Relationships Can Teach Us About Ourselves