Healthy relationships don’t just happen out of luck. They don’t just show up randomly, at least not for me. For the first time in my life I am experiencing real, healthy love. The most peaceful and fulfilling love. I am so grateful for it and for him, but above all, I am forever grateful to me. This relationship, me in this relationship, is the result of a lot of work on myself. It took time, pain, work, and many lessons to learn how to identify and appreciate love like this. I recognize that this type of love would not have entered my life had I not been prepared and ready for it. Had I not made space for it and been in a place where I am able to appreciate, receive and reciprocate it. Often people talk about the “put yourself out there” “go out and socialize” “get on the apps” part of the process of finding a healthy relationship. I’m not talking about that part. I’m talking about the “doing the work” part. I’m talking about the uncomfortable, painful, challenging and incredibly confronting introspection that is sometimes required in order to step away from toxic relationships and find healthy, peaceful love. REAL love. Now, what does doing the work mean? I can only speak to my personal experience. But for me it meant a combination of things, including but not limited to — • Making space for feelings. All feelings. Invite every feeling, emotion, and thought as they come, without feeling embarrassed, guilty, or angry at them. When a feeling shows up, it demands to be recognized and felt. If we give space to the feeling, it can feel like it’ll never end, like we’ll die of that feeling somehow, like feeling it is the worst idea in the world, but then, if and when we surrender to it, those instances of terror last for much shorter than we think, and then comes a liberation that is only possible through feeling it. Like the sunshine after a storm. If we don’t make space for it, if we resist or deny the feeling, then that resistance can turn into anxiety or disease real quick. • Breaking patterns. Both in terms of my behavior in relationships and also the kind of partners that I was attracted to. Breaking these patterns started with identifying them and bringing them up to a conscious level. Being conscious of them didn’t mean that they would no longer exist immediately, but at least it meant that I would be aware of them when they showed up, thereby making my decision to engage with them or not a conscious choice. • Taking responsibility over my stories. As human beings, we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of the world and in order to justify our decisions. That is our superpower and what we do best, we tell ourselves stories. So many times in life you look back at a certain moment and think, how did that happen? But things don’t just happen to us. Many times, we let them or make them happen. So, how did I put up with that? What was I thinking? The real question to be answered was: what story was I telling myself in order to make sense of that? After ending a very toxic relationship, I went back and beat myself up for not realizing it sooner. That didn’t help, and I almost lost trust in my own judgement, so instead I spent time writing down the stories that I had told myself in order to justify all those things. Then, I went one by one through those stories, as if fact checking them, and realizing that I didn’t believe any of them. I instead re wrote those stories with the ones I did believe. By doing this exercise, I was able to both take responsibility over my life, and also, address the issue to make sure the source story was corrected. • Getting to the source of the problem. Spending time on my own, journaling, therapy, and honest introspection helped me identify the open wounds that I was so casually walking around with every day. Emotional wounds that at some point of my life were created, and that were being triggered on a daily basis, causing me to act a certain way over and over again , aka creating patterns. Even though I was not conscious of these emotional scars and open wounds, they were so insanely present in my life and controlling my decisions at a subconscious. • Remembering what intuition felt like. Everyone says “trust your gut” and “you always know”, and then when you find yourself coming out of a shitty situation you’re like “where the hell was my gut?”. I went back to those moments, meditated over them, wrote about them, analyzed them, and identified those moments when I ignored myself… remembering what intuition felt like, and therefore learning how to listen to it and identify it when it comes up. • Learning (and loving) to be alone. So many times we are in relationships, or we stay in a relationship, out of fear of being alone. I’d dare say that this is the top reason why people stay in unhappy or toxic relationships. I went from not imagining ever being alone, to not imagining wanting to share my life again because I was SO good alone. (That’s also an unhealthy extreme and I worked on that later, but it shows how far the change can go). I forced myself to spend time alone. To see what happened if I was just alone, in silence. I also forced myself to not fill in my alone time with distractions. I mean really being alone and hanging out with yourself. At first it was super awkward and uncomfortable, definitely unnatural. I had a few panic attacks even. And then, slowly, I started to overcome the fear, and I even started to enjoy it. There was a newfound freedom in alone time. Before I knew it I was loving it. And just like that, suddenly, I thought to myself: if I enter into a new relationship it has to be better than this, to add to my life in a positive way, otherwise why would I engage with it? And then it hit me… oh… that should be true for everything in my life, and also, that sounds like a healthy relationship. It sounds cliche, and it is. It sounds simple, and it’s not. Doing the work really does work. Attracting and having a healthy relationship really does start with having a healthy relationship with yourself. I am so grateful for the hard work I have put in, and continue to put in every day of my life. I am fully aware that it is a constant effort and a life long commitment of choosing to do the work in order to maintain a strong and healthy relationship, both with myself and my partner. I stand by that commitment, and I’m grateful to have found a partner who is willing to do the same.
