All opinions are mine and mine alone.
We talk a lot on our blog about feeling good and staying positive. It’s not always too easy to stay upbeat when contact with your partner is bringing you down emotionally. You can try to paper over the cracks with some retail therapy, but the emotional high it gives doesn’t last.
Here are a few ideas about what to do when your relationship is not going as well as you’d like.
Identify the Problem
Has something changed recently? Did you seem happy before but now you’re suddenly having many disagreements? What are the sources of conflict?
Talking things through with your partner is the right way to approach dealing with the issues. We tend to want to talk to our friends, but they’ll only take your side and support your point of view. This isn’t all that helpful to discovering what’s behind your partner’s unhappiness or the reason for conflict.
The person you should be talking to is your partner; not complaining to your friends about them! Doing the latter changes nothing at all. Also, if they find out you’ve been talking about problems in your relationship with your friends, they’ll feel betrayed and uncomfortable around them.
Create a Plan to Improve Your Relationship
Once you have a clearer idea about the issues, you can work to find a resolution to them.
Your focus must be on what is bothering your partner. That might sound counterintuitive, but when they see that you’re listening and hearing them, they will be receptive to discussing what’s wrong. If you have issues of your own with how the relationship is going, they’ll be more open to discussing them too.
When you have a meeting of minds, resolutions can be found. Trying to argue your points alone and discounting their grievances won’t bring them over to your side. It’s about harmony, not competitiveness or proving who is right. Being right won’t make romantic feelings genuine.
Getting a Deeper Understanding About Relationship Dynamics
Dealing with relationships is never easy or simple. There’s a lot going on with relationships and marriages. Much is left unsaid, but feelings are experienced personally all the same.
Getting a better understanding of how the relationships between couples function is useful for creating a long-lasting relationship, which is the goal for most of us. To begin the learning process, undertaking relationship therapy is a useful thing to go through. It opens your eyes to how relationships function best and provides techniques to use.
With eyes now open, some couples find the counseling process so interesting that they wish to study to become a therapist who can help other couples. In which case, the MFT accredited programs from Touro University Worldwide are a good way to study and later qualify as a family and marriage therapist.
When you want your home life to be all peachy, everyone needs to get along most of the time. We all need a “safe place to fall” as Dr. Phil likes to say. It’s good to remember that.
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