We tend to think of relationships as the connections we have with other people, but we are in relationships with almost everything in our lives.
We have relationships with our partner, children, family, friends and colleagues, but also with work, money, our body, ageing, food, our home and the world around us. We have a relationship with our past, our future and, most importantly, ourselves.
To relate means, at its simplest, to make or recognise a connection. We don’t simply encounter people, things and events. We think about them, decide what they mean and develop feelings and behaviours around them. Our thoughts, beliefs and experiences all shape how we relate.
The Relationship Is Not the Thing Itself
My relationship with money is not money. My relationship with work is not my job. And my relationship with another person is not simply that person.
The relationship we experience is made up of what we think and believe about them, our memories of what has happened, what we expect from them and what we think their behaviour means. This doesn’t mean the other person or their behaviour doesn’t matter. It means that much of the relationship is happening within us.
I saw this clearly with a coaching client who had a difficult relationship with her boss. She couldn’t understand why a colleague got on with him so much better. I asked her to notice how her colleague approached him and experiment with changing her own attitude towards him. The relationship transformed.
Her boss hadn’t changed. She had changed how she related to him, and that changed the relationship.
What We Learn to Want from Relationships
When we become more self-aware, our relationships are one of the most useful places to look. How we relate to people, things, and circumstances reveals a great deal about what we believe and what we think we need. In the world of separation, we experience ourselves as individuals making our own way through life.
Relationships therefore become enormously important. We need other people for love, belonging, cooperation, safety and support. From our earliest relationships, we learn who we can trust, what gains approval, what risks rejection and how to get our needs met.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. It is part of being human. But it means we learn to look to our relationships for many different things.
This article is about what we go to our relationships for, and what happens when they can’t supply it. In the next one, What Your Relationships Can Teach You About Yourself, I look at the same relationships from the perspective of the Higher Self, and at how we can use them to learn about ourselves.
Every Relationship Carries an Assessment
Because we look to relationships for things we need, we are constantly assessing them.
Is this safe? Do I trust this person? Do they value me? Is this working for me? Am I giving too much? Do I want more of this or less?
Most of this happens without us consciously thinking about it. And it doesn’t only apply to people. We make similar assessments about work, money, our bodies, our homes and life itself. That doesn’t make our relationships transactional. It is simply part of how we have learned to get through life.
Here are some of the things we are looking for.
Survival, Safety and Security
We need each other. Humans have always depended on other humans for survival, protection, care and cooperation.
We also look for emotional and practical security. We want people we can trust, enough money to live and somewhere safe to call home.
Love, Connection and Belonging
We want to love and be loved. We want friendship, intimacy, companionship and a sense that we belong.
The difficulty comes when belonging starts to mean I matter, and rejection starts to mean I don’t.
Validation and Worth
Relationships can also become evidence that we are good enough. Being chosen can make us feel desirable. A promotion can make us feel successful. Someone’s approval can reassure us that we have done the right thing.
But if something outside us can give us our sense of worth, it can also appear to take it away. As I explained in How Beliefs Shape Your Experience, for years my relationship with money led me down a painful path. It wasn’t until I considered the idea that I was worthy of a better way of living that it changed.
Predictability and Control
We like to know where we stand. We learn what to expect from people and circumstances, and what keeps things running smoothly. A relationship we can predict asks less of us, and most of us arrange rather more of our lives around that than we would care to admit.
Comparison and Confirmation
We use other people as reference points. We compare careers, relationships, bodies, homes, money and achievements.
Relationships can also confirm what we already believe. If I believe people eventually let me down, I will notice when they do. The relationship then becomes evidence that I was right all along.
A coaching client explained how his business was being affected by his relationship with his partner. She was unreliable, and he clearly did not trust her. It turned out that his distrust and doubt lay not with his partner, but with a previous relationship where his ex-partner had cheated on him. His current relationship was suffering adversely because of his belief that he could not trust. I think you will agree this is a fairly common problem for many relationships.
The Search for Completeness
Perhaps the greatest expectation we place on relationships in the world of separation is that something outside us will finally make us feel complete.
It might be the right partner, enough money, success, security or someone’s approval. The promise underneath is the same: when I have that, I will be all right.
This is when relationships begin carrying a weight they were never designed to carry. We are asking something outside ourselves to provide what we believe is missing within us. In How Unity Consciousness Changes Our View of Connection, I put it as asking our connections to do a job they were never able to do and noted that we usually conclude we have the wrong people rather than the wrong expectation.
What a Relationship Comes to Stand For
This is how a relationship can come to mean much more than the relationship itself. A friendship can mean I belong. A career can mean I am somebody. A marriage can mean I haven’t repeated my parents’ mistakes. Someone’s approval can mean I am good enough after all.
Then ordinary events can take on much greater meaning. The unanswered message I began with is small in itself. But if that friendship means I am loved and wanted, an unanswered message can suddenly feel like evidence that I am not. We aren’t only responding to what happened. We are responding to what we think it means.
So, a useful question is: What has this relationship come to mean about me?
Why We Are Drawn to Some People and Not to Others
We rarely build relationships consciously. Sometimes we meet someone and like them immediately. Someone else makes us uncomfortable or irritated when very little has happened to explain why.
We tend to assume those reactions are telling us something about the other person. Sometimes they are. More often, an attraction is telling us that the person is showing us something we either recognise in ourselves or want for ourselves.
Carl Jung’s work on projection, which I touched on in Transformational Relationships, helps explain why particular qualities in others can attract or repel us so strongly. Relationships don’t begin with a blank sheet. We bring ourselves with us.
An introverted friend fell for a vivacious extraverted woman, who simply lit up the room. At a party, we were watching her weave her magic, engaging and entertaining. Wistfully, he said to me, “That’s what I love about her; I wish I could be more like that”.
When a Relationship Becomes Part of Who We Are
Some relationships matter deeply without becoming part of our identity. Others become woven into how we see ourselves. I am someone’s wife, mother, best friend, successful colleague or dependable daughter. A career, home, income or appearance can become part of our identity too.
In How Beliefs Shape Your Experience, I wrote about levels of attachment, and the threshold that matters is the one between something being a preference and something being part of who we are. Relationships sit on that scale as well.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. The difficulty comes when we need those relationships to remain the same in order for us to feel all right because they won’t.
I wrote earlier that when I left my 20-year career, the loss of identity about what the career said about me wasn’t something I was expecting. But it felt acute at the time.
Relationships Change Because Life Changes
People grow. Circumstances and needs change. Children become adults. Jobs change. Bodies age. Friendships built around a shared stage of life sometimes lose the thing that held them together. People we love change their minds and priorities.
Sometimes a relationship that worked perfectly well for years simply stops working in the same way. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything has gone wrong. Life has moved. The problem is that we don’t always move with it.
We can find ourselves wanting things to go back to how they were. If only they would be the person they used to be. Suppose work would go back to how it was if my body would behave itself. If life would cooperate, then I could feel all right again. I have spent a considerable amount of my own life doing exactly that.
About six years ago I became an “empty nester”, and I had to do a considerable amount of work to regain a sense of purpose. After all, if I wasn’t providing for and looking after my children on a daily basis, who was I? It wasn’t so much that I wanted my children to return home; on the contrary, I was very proud they were forging their own way. But what I wanted and needed was something else to create a new meaning for me.
Again, from the perspective of separation, it makes sense. If I believe the problem is outside me, changing what is outside me appears to be the obvious solution. Sometimes something outside us does need to change. We may need a conversation, a boundary, a renegotiation, or even to leave.
But there is another possibility we often miss. Sometimes the relationship has changed, and we need to change the way we relate to it.
Relationships Are Messy
None of this happens neatly. We can love someone and be furious with them. We can be attached to a relationship we no longer enjoy. We can want someone closer and also want more space. We can know something needs to change and desperately wish that it didn’t.
Relationships contain love, memories, needs, disappointments, hopes, fears and expectations, often all at once. We shouldn’t expect looking at them to produce one simple answer.
Perhaps the most useful thing to understand is that, in the world of separation, we spend much of our lives looking to people, things and circumstances outside ourselves for something we believe we need. We assess them, attach meaning to them, sometimes make them part of our identity and then struggle when they change.
None of this makes us wrong. It is simply the way we have learned to relate. But it isn’t the only way.
Try This: What Does This Relationship Mean?
Choose one relationship. It doesn’t have to be a difficult one.
Write down ten simple things you think or believe about that person. Then look at each one and ask: Is this something I actually know, or something I have concluded?
Finally ask: What does this relationship mean about me?
Don’t try to find the right answer. Just notice what comes up.
Where We Go Next
So far, we have looked at relationships from the perspective of separation, where we naturally ask what they give us, what they mean and whether they meet our needs. But there is another way of looking at the same relationships. Instead of asking what a relationship can give us, we can ask what it can show us about ourselves.
That is where we go next, in What Your Relationships Can Teach You About Yourself.
Articles about 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