In How We Experience Relationships From The Perspective of Separation, I looked at what we tend to go to our relationships for, and what happens when they cannot supply it.
Here I want to look at the same relationships differently. Instead of asking what someone else is doing wrong, what they need to change or whether the relationship is meeting our needs, we can ask: What can this relationship teach me about myself?
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 also stops being somebody to be assessed or defended against and becomes somebody a great deal like us. That is what makes our reaction to them worth learning from, rather than only worth 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 whatever they have done, we are willing to ask what our experience of it can show 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 Characteristics of Higher Self Thinking 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 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 tell us very little. When the same difficulty keeps appearing with different people, it is worth becoming curious.
A friend was worried 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 cases, a woman manager had apparently taken a dislike to her and made her working life miserable.
When it happened for the third time, my friend began to wonder whether there might be a pattern.
We never knew what was really happening, and her daughter may well have encountered three difficult managers. But simply blaming the managers left her with nothing she could learn or change. Looking instead at her own reactions, expectations and behaviour might have revealed something useful, even if ultimately she concluded that the problem really was theirs.
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. Very often, another person’s behaviour has far more to do with what is happening in their world than it does with us.
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.
I tell the story of my daughter and me in Transformational Relationships. What I want to draw out here is a different part of it. For a long time, I was frustrated, because as I saw it she was the one misreading everything, and what I wanted was for her to react differently.
Then one day it occurred to me that I didn’t have to wait for her to do that. I could react differently.
The next time things began to go the same way, I paused and chose a response that honoured us both rather than continuing the argument. I kept doing it. Within a month, the dynamic between us had changed, and it changed permanently.
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. Did she want to be his critic or his supporter?
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 allowing another person to be who they are and make their own choices, even when we wish they would choose differently.
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 If Everyone Is Connected, Why Is the World Like This?.
That understanding didn’t change what had happened, but it changed what I carried about it. Compassion for her made forgiveness much easier.
We Can Learn Unconditional Love
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 isn’t a reproach. It is where love stops depending on how somebody else behaves and starts being something we can offer whatever they do.
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, we can:
- recognise when we are projecting something of ourselves onto someone else
- follow a strong feeling back to the thought that produced it
- notice where we are looking to another person for our worth, security or happiness
- see where we are trying to control someone else so that we can feel safe
- pause before reacting and ask whether there is another way to respond
- take responsibility for our own feelings without taking responsibility for someone else’s behaviour
- give up the need to be right and become more interested in understanding
- set boundaries without needing to make someone else wrong
- notice when we are relating to our history with someone rather than who they are now
- recognise our shared humanity and what we have in common, even when we strongly disagree
- 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 give ourselves another opportunity to choose differently.
Try This: Notice What Makes You Uncomfortable
Think about one relationship and a recent interaction that didn’t feel right.
Look back through the ideas above and notice whether any of them make you slightly uncomfortable. Is there something you would rather dismiss, or something you immediately want to explain away? That might be worth looking at more closely.
Then ask yourself: What could this be showing me about me?
Write down whatever comes up. You are not looking for what you did wrong or trying to prove that the other person was right. You are simply becoming curious about your own thoughts, beliefs and reactions.
And if the exercise turns into a list of things that are wrong with you, stop. Your Higher Self isn’t interested in judging you either. Come back to curiosity and try again.
Where We Go Next
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.
And ultimately, this way of looking at relationships leads us towards love. In Love: The True Nature of Your Higher Self, I explore what that means, and why love has been underneath all of it from the start.
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