Most people who are seeking and desiring a long term thriving relationship are going to need some degree of attachment healing in the early stages of a relationship forming.
This often takes at least 18 months and up to 5 years of consistently showing up and working through the challenges that will arise.
Those don’t prepare themselves for this kind of work by learning the tools and practices that will support the healing to take place, are likely to end up confused and in pain at the outcomes that can seem to come out of nowhere.
Anxiety, avoidance, uncontrollable jealousy, constant conflict and fighting, push-pull dynamics, threats to leave, regular breaking up and making up, control, closing of the heart, withholding love and affection, long periods of time without physical intimacy… are all things that can emerge from unhealed attachment issues showing up in relationship.
But if you know that a thriving relationship is your path, and something you want in this life, then you can prepare yourself by:
1. Learn about attachment, understand your attachment patterns and what other attachment patterns look like (more than likely you’ll end up with someone who has an opposite pattern to you ~ #polarity)
2. Do some initial work to gain the ability to discern and regulate your own emotional distress, develop healthy boundaries and authentic communication skills.
3. Screen for partners who are as equally invested and interested in healing as you are – forming relationships with people who aren’t aware, and don’t care to become aware, of what healing is and what it takes to truly heal in relationship is a recipe for suffering.
4. Acknowledge that healing takes time and commit to staying in the challenges with a willing partner. The rewards are worth it.
5. Banish relationship threats (threatening to break up when it gets hard) from your conflict patterns. Conflict is inevitable, yet if every time it gets hard someone threatens to leave it creates a foundation of mistrust and insecurity. It can be very difficult to move forward when there is consistent uncertainty.
6. Learn how to repair after conflict. Learn how to make sincere and vulnerable apologies, and use every conflict as an opportunity to learn, heal and make sense of the unconscious patterns threatening to sabotage your intimacy.
7. Communicate… a lot! Practice the art of vulnerability and revealing your inner world to your partner. Share your needs and fears openly and invitingly. Support each other through deep listening and validation.
8. Make space for love. Focus on ways you can support each other to feel more secure and more loved. Think more about what you can contribute to them finding stability and openness than what they need to do for you.
9. Act as a team. Healing in relationship is a co-creative event, and by working together in this endeavour you are also establishing interdependence, the ability to create a thriving and happy life together.
10. Celebrate every deepening of intimacy as it occurs. Often going deeper in intimacy is confusing and disorienting as we find ourselves in unknown territory. Allow these movements to settle into you and become a new way of being together.
The reality is, as much as we would love it to be different, navigating into a long-term, thriving, deeply intimate and evolving relationship requires work, time and patience. Just like anything worthwhile.
In this day and age it can seem easier to just cut and run when it gets difficult… and the current state of relationship in the world reflects that.
Around 50% of marriages end in divorce.
Very few relationships make it past a few years.
Those that do are often suffering in silence and resentment.
But another reality is… thriving relationship actually truly available to all of us.
We just have to be willing to invest what it takes.
~ Damien Bohler
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 