WIP: How Can You Improve Your Relationships

No relationship can remain in the first love and romantic stages. These stages are meant to help us get together with other people and meet our primal needs.

Most people have several primal needs:

Primal: food, water, warmth

Safety: The need to be safe, have a secure job, protect the level 1 needs.

Relationships: To meet this need the person must learn to both give and receive love. They need to grow and change until they are someone who can love, and someone who can make others feel loved.

Self-Esteem: Most of us grow to the point where our childhood abusers no longer look like monsters - they are just dysfunctional people. At this stage we see them as week. The woman who survives an abusive relationship and leaves has grown past the infatuation and passion stages and now sees the tormentor for what they really are.

People need respect from others to feel good. However, the only way to get respect is to learn how to give it. Forcing others to act the way you want, getting obedience, threatening, abuse - none of this makes others respect us. This is the vicious cycle of abuse. We want respect - we force others - they hate. In return we don't get the respect and lose the relationship plummeting down the list of needs until we only have level #1 and level #2 covered.

How do I Change My Spouse?

The first step is to change yourself. Learn the Five Languages of Love. Each person has a love language. Most of us want others to be happy with our own love language. That is why people buy gifts and then force others to wear it all the time. The gift buyer is trying to feel loved by forcing the other to meet their love language needs.

This never works. You need to learn your spouse's love language and then feed their love language. This will change how they feel about you. This will change how they feel about you. It will change how they treat you.

Learn how to communicate without becoming angry or yelling. Conflict is healthy. Conflict with abuse, control, punishment is not. If one person in the argument refuses to continue dysfunctional behavior, the anger level will eventually drop.

Choosing to change should be a personal choice. Do not change because 'He will treat me better' or 'she will stop spending so much.' Instead, change because it will make you a different person and move you one step closer to becoming an emotionally healthy person.

Changing a partner is a useless goal. You'll never do it. You'll never make them love you. You'll never fix them.

Problem Solving

There are strategies for solving problems. Most analysts learn how to solve problems (successfully) among several people, or an entire organization. This is a fact. Every couple can find solutions to their problems by incorporating typical problem solving strategies to their house.

The focus should be control. Learn how to control your emotions, your behavior, and how you communicate. The only way to learn communication is to Google it and learn the different styles. This will teach you new patterns of relating to others in various situations, speaking, reading body language, and 'letting go' of things that don't really matter in the greater scheme of things.

Problem solving is the 'healthy' part of conflict. Unhealthy conflict ends with everyone at a stalemate, angry and refusing to resolve the problem. Healthy conflict ends with both parties working toward a resolution.


Suppressing emotions is a learned behavior habit of a victim. The victim would rather feel hostility and separateness than resolve problems. Their goal is to remain the victim so they do not feel responsible for growth. Some people stay in this state-of-mind because they fear intimacy and the victim (submissive) doesn't need to show intimacy.

Solution

Good communication. If you were able to communicate well, with yourself and others, than you'd never entered into a difficult relationship. Sometimes, working through problems and learning to change, can bring the couple closer together. Each person feels appreciation, receive affirmation, and a sense of connection with someone else who is in the same boat.

When To Call It Quits?

This is hard to say. If a person has reached the level of self actualization needed to be emotionally healthy then they are able to create a relationship with anyone who is not emotionally or physically abusive.

If you want to leave a relationship (that is not abusive) then there is a good chance that you are running away from your own problems.