3020: [Part 2] How to Have a Successful Relationship by Alysha Jeney of Modern Love Counseling on Healthy Relationships

[00:00:00] Hey, it's Justin from Optimal Living Daily. Before we start, I want to share a super powerful practice I use called NSDR or Non-Sleep Deep Rest. In just about 10 minutes or so, this yoga nidra practice leaves you feeling as refreshed as after a nap without actually sleeping. Experience it for yourself on our guided podcast. Search NSDR and look for the one from Optimal Living Daily.

[00:00:25] Now before we start, you might want to check out our other podcasts covering topics like personal development and minimalism, money, health, relationships, and more. So to optimize your life in other areas, just search for Optimal Living Daily in your podcast app. Now onto the show. This is Optimal Relationships Daily, How to Have a Successful Relationship, Part 2 by Alysha Jeney of ModernLoveCounseling.com.

[00:00:54] Tips for Building a Successful Relationship So, how do you build a successful relationship? First, you prioritize working on yourself. If you're single, this can look like working with a therapist or a coach to help you strengthen your awareness and understanding of yourself, and your trauma and or identity, where there might be barriers that are blocking intimacy and closeness with other people. If you're in a relationship, it can also look like working with a therapist or coach to help both of you work on self-awareness,

[00:01:23] building trust, and more support within the relationship, even if there isn't anything wrong. The foundation of a successful relationship is self-awareness. So it's crucial to start there. Begin asking yourself every day,

[00:01:36] what am I feeling? Do I know what triggered these feelings? Am I expecting my partner to support me? What do I need? How am I reacting? Where do these beliefs, needs, expectations come from? Childhood? Abusive past relationship? Both?

[00:01:55] I would encourage you to reflect on your own behaviors and possible incongruences with your thoughts, actions, and emotions. Especially before you are quick to blame your partner or your lack of partners when you're feeling really misunderstood or alone.

[00:02:08] Building understanding within yourself is essential to promoting long-term success in your relationships. Check your patterns, your beliefs, your insecurities. Check your behaviors and your defenses. Understand what you need and why you need it. Be honest and vulnerable with yourself, and it'll take you and your relationship in a whole new direction. It's terrifying, but it is worth it.

[00:02:31] How I personally understand how difficult this process can be. I've had my share of unhealthy relationship experiences in my past. As I reflect back to my past relationship failures, I can now acknowledge several things that took me years to understand.

[00:02:50] In those moments, I remember constantly feeling heartbroken, unworthy, insecure, and completely unstable. I never felt good enough for any of my boyfriends, and I always felt I had to prove or deny something deep within myself. I stumbled around for years just trying to find a partner who wouldn't leave me. That was a subconscious need I had that was hindering me from finding a respectful, mutually committed partner.

[00:03:15] I wasn't consciously choosing a partner. I was looking for a replacement pacifier to help me self-regulate. As you can imagine, not having this awareness only put an insurmountable pressure on my boyfriends, and sometimes even my friends. Unfortunately, this only produced the complete opposite outcome, and most partners cheated on me, were rarely available, or became very mentally abusive. Without self-awareness, I didn't understand why people weren't showing up for me.

[00:03:44] This toxic pattern only reinforced that I wasn't worthy, and would never be in a successful relationship. Then one day, I decided I needed to choose to be alone. I decided that being alone had to be better than dating men that had the tendency to bring out the worst in me. I was still not aware of how my childhood trauma was causing me to behave in relationships, and I made this decision partially out of a victimhood mentality.

[00:04:09] I wrote a list of all the things that I needed and wanted from a relationship. I laughed, and then I cried. Emotions of hope soon dwindled into sadness as I felt completely torn and discouraged. How would I ever find a relationship like this? Did it even exist? I sat with myself every night, and through the process of loneliness and my own therapy, I would soon realize that a successful relationship does exist, but it required a whole lot of work on myself to be open to it.

[00:04:38] I went to graduate school to become a therapist, who would have thought, and dug deep within my own process. I attended my own counseling and discovered crucial parts of the puzzle that were missing all along. I had to establish a positive relationship with myself before I was able to find, create, and sustain a healthy relationship with someone else. I had to look in the mirror and take accountability for my inability to process my own emotions and my refusal to be real with myself.

[00:05:07] I had to take ownership of my pain, insecurities, and defenses. I had to accept that these personal things were a huge contributing factor to my past failed relationships, and recognize that it wasn't solely because I picked the wrong men. I was never in a healthy, successful relationship until I met my husband. How do I know?

[00:05:28] Well, because when I challenged myself to understand myself better, my self-confidence grew, and my intention of wanting a relationship shifted significantly. I attracted my husband with genuine qualities versus acts of desperation and insecurity. I was able to soothe myself when I felt uncomfortable versus relying solely on him to take away my fears and then getting angry with him because he couldn't.

[00:05:54] I pushed myself to be vulnerable and took the necessary risks, which helped him understand me and prevented me from exploding with resentment as I used to do in the past. This left little to no room for him to have to make his own assumptions of my reactive behavior. All of this work I was doing on myself, and may I add all of the work he was also doing on himself, made a huge difference in our abilities to get closer to each other. It's a relationship I never knew was possible.

[00:06:22] We've had our ups and definitely had our downs, but what makes our relationship successful is the evolution of committing our lives to each other, as well as to ourselves. We now have learned throughout the past 12 years how to show up and operate in our most authentic selves, and we constantly push ourselves to be transparent with each other. We are vulnerable, sometimes emotionally messy, but we are honest and true.

[00:06:52] You just listened to part 2 of the post titled, How to Have a Successful Relationship, by Alicia Janney of ModernLoveCounseling.com And there we have it, the rest of this post from Alicia, which I really enjoyed. We definitely learned a lot these last couple of days, and I liked hearing about Alicia's personal experience too. But if there's one thing I would add, it would be expanding upon her very last thought about how she and her husband are sometimes emotionally messy.

[00:07:22] I think one overarching area of importance in successful relationships is the ability to be patient and supportive when our partners are emotionally messy, and maybe can't come through on all of those other ideas we learned about in this post. Sometimes it's really hard to be vulnerable. Sometimes it's even hard to be respectful. And it's critical to remain mindful of our partners' overall deeper intentions in these times,

[00:07:50] and trust that their love for us is not necessarily gone, but it's just having a hard time coming through given other variables that have them reacting this way. Now, of course, part of the work is also taking the right measures, and knowing when this is becoming more of a pattern than an exception. But we have to allow some margin for error in the first place. So, take all of this into consideration, my friends. It's time to wrap up another episode of ORD,

[00:08:17] but I'm so glad to have had your attendance these last couple of days. Take this post with you, send it to someone who you think might be interested, and be sure to come back tomorrow for a parenting article. That's where your optimal life awaits. Thank you.