A Process in Developing a Loving Relationship

By Karyl E Pope

1. You accept the challenge of creating an excellent relationship. You realize that it is more important to be the right partner than to find the right partner. You understand that a good marriage requires commitment, discipline, and the courage to grow and change; in other words marriage works if you work. You see that both parties need to be putting out equal effort to resolve relationship problems.

2. You realize that your relationship has a hidden purpose - the healing of unresolved childhood issues that lie beneath the huge upswell of emotions that your partner triggers in you. Now painful old feelings like rejection, shame, abandonment, worthlessness, or feeling unimportant or unloveable, have purpose and meaning.

3. You feel grateful to your partner for helping you to get in touch with those old hurts, because when you were not aware of them, they could never be healed but now you can determine where they really came from (not from your partner), understand and accept them with mercy and compassion, and heal them.

4. You create a more accurate image of your partner as you recognize and take back the projections you have coloured him/her with. (a projection is a false perception in which you see an unwanted and usually unconscious part of self, in you partner). You begin to appreciate the complexity of your partner and to focus less on the aspects of him/her that trigger your old childhood issues. The differences are no longer threatening.

5. You take responsibility for communicating your needs and desires to your partner instead of feeling hurt because s/he didn’t read your mind. You do not expect your partner to meet all of your needs or be involved in all of your interests.

6. You take charge of your interactions, learning to ACT rather than REACT. You determine not to let your partner’s actions determine your reactions. You take total responsibility for what you do or say. You know that you always have power and you always have choices.

7. You learn to consider your partner's needs, wishes and interests as important as your own. You begin to spend more time and energy helping him/her to meet needs and develop interests than you did before. Because of centuries of socialization, this is often more difficult for men than for women.

8. You begin to recognize and accept parts of your personality that long ago, you judged bad and wrong, and covered up so thoroughly that even you could no longer see them. Perhaps you had looked for them in your partner, and even exaggerated any evidence of them there, transferring the attached feelings of bad and wrong onto him or her. You begin to see how these previously denied parts of you have hurt your partner. You begin to take back these parts of Self, and just owning and accepting them in yourself, begins to create changes in them. You no longer need to blame your partner for what s/he didn’t do. You also begin to forgive your partner for what s/he did do, seeing that s/he too is acting out of a need to cover up old bad feelings from childhood or personality traits that s/he buried long ago.

9. You take responsibility for getting your own needs and desires met. You ask your partner to help you to do that but not at his/her expense. You develop strengths and abilities within yourself that enable you to meet your own needs and to cope with your own problems as well as to cope with behaviour in your partner that you previously found irritating or upsetting. You now have your “eggs in more baskets”, more ways to get what you need and want.

10. You begin to discover within yourself, your natural drive toward being a compassionate, Spiritual Being, at peace with your whole Self, your partner’s whole Self and with the Universe.

It Works If You Work!

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
© Karyl Pope 2004

Karyl Pope
Burlington, Ontario
905-639-4529
Permission To Reprint:

You are welcome to reprint this article in your own print or electronic newsletter, provided you include the following credit. Compliments of Karyl Pope

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info@kpopeassoc.on.ca