Healthy Relationships

What constitutes a healthy relationship for you?

Only you can decide what a healthy relationship is for you. Only you know what brings you inner joy and happiness and only you know what is good, healthy and right for you. For some it might be having a great sex life. For others a healthy relationship might be having a partner to talk with about anything and everything. For some it may be to have a partner that is reliable. For others it might be being able to fight and argue a lot with your partner to get things out.

For many years I thought I had a great relationship with my partner because we never argued about anything. In fact we didn’t talked seriously about anything at all. I took care of the children and our home. He went to work and spent most of his free time with his hobbies. I actually thought our relationship was very healthy, but it wasn’t, and it showed up in my body. For years I had problems with my back. It hurt, and it hurt bad! I tried everything to get rid of my back-problems. I saw doctors and physiotherapists. I went to the gym to strengthen my body, I tried ago-puncture and several other types of alternative medicine. Nothing worked. I could hardly walk, but nobody could pinpoint what was really wrong with my back. At a certain point my physiotherapist said;

"I’m sorry, I cannot help you any further. You have to look elsewhere to resolve your problem. You need to look at your own life to find the solution. There must be something in your life that is not working.”

I still thought that my relationship was healthy, because we still didn’t have any arguments. I took care of the children and our home, he kept spending most of his free time with his hobbies. After several years (with still a lot of back pain) something dawned on me. I finally saw that my partner couldn’t see me. He only saw himself. It took building a house to find that out. We divorced and I started a new life and the funny thing is that my back problems are completely gone. What it took to heal my back was getting out of a relationship that wasn’t healthy for me.

If you are in a relationship that is not healthy, generally there is some kind of power-struggle going on. There are different types of power-struggle; One type is where one is the stronger person is in control of the situation. In another type of power-struggle you see one taking control by being super-super needy.

Only by taking complete responsibility for your own feeling and not pull on the other to do things in order for you to feel OK, you will finally be able to be in a healthy relationship. When you know how to love yourself, not in an egoistic and egocentric way, but through a true inner love and peace with yourself, you are strong enough to show true love to others. If both parts in a relationship know how to take responsibility for their own feelings and know how to fill themselves up with love, they will be able to share their true love with their partner.