Tag: relationships

Investing in a Relationship – Damien Bohler

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

Careful : Involvement & Relationships

Be careful about having relationships with people with no emotional intelligence. They will never understand you, they will personalize everything,and you will never be seen and heard.

Be careful about having relationships with people who can’t regulate their emotions you will always be at the mercy of their rages, and bad moods.

Be careful about having relationships with people with no self awareness, they have no idea how their behavior affects the people around them, so it’s a matter of time before you get hurt.

Be careful about having relationships with people without empathy, they will never see or care about how you feel.

If no one has ever told you, I am telling you now.

Look for people in your life with emotional intelligence, self awareness, empathy and the ability to regulate their emotions or you will be at the mercy of their dysfunction and pay the price for their

immaturity and lack of growth.

-Maria Consiglio

Mr Rogers Wisdoms

Our sons watched Sesame Street and Mr Rodger’s

I’ve spent the past few weeks living with the words of wisdom from David and Solomon. Maybe that is why I wanted to write about the Fred Rogers documentary. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? takes a fresh look at Fred Rogers and the impact his television show has made on millions of children and their parents. According to a recent CNN article, the movie is just in time because “the new documentary also contemplates the beloved TV host’s battle on behalf of kindness and civility, one whose outcome appears very much in doubt.”

I think it is encouraging that the world is recognizing what Fred Rogers always knew was important. Rogers once said, “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” One of the points the documentary makes is that love was the common thread woven into almost everything that Mr. Rogers said and did, on and off the screen.

Love is the basis for the 143 Club, a tribute to Mr. Rogers’s legacy. The number 143 was very important to Fred Rogers. He was faithful to swim every day, except Sundays. For the last thirty years of his life, he was careful to maintain his weight at 143 pounds. But the number had another meaning to him. Rogers said, “It takes one letter to say ‘I’ and four letters to says ‘love’ and three letters to say ‘you.’” One hundred and forty-three.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is meant to be a trip down memory lane for people, but the director, Morgan Neville, hopes it will also serve as a reminder to people of a more civil time in our nation’s history. There is no doubt that social media has created a level of communication that sends anger, malice, and hatred to people’s devices and their minds at an alarming rate. Mr. Rogers believed in the importance of choosing words carefully, especially with children, because words formed pictures with meaning in a person’s mind.

Those who helped produce the television show, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, said that no one could imagine how much thought went into every program and every word that was uttered on the show. Fred Rogers had a nine-step process for every statement made on his show. His producers called that process “speaking Freddish.” One example mentioned by Arthur Greenwald, a producer, was a scene in a hospital in which a nurse was inflating a blood-pressure cuff. Originally, the script had her telling the child, “I am going to blow this up.” Greenwald said, “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air.’” Rogers didn’t want the words to sound like an explosion.

Fred Rogers had a degree in music, another degree in theology, and was an ordained minister in the United Presbyterian church. He was happily married to his college sweetheart, Sara Byrd. He never smoked and didn’t drink. His true passion was for the minds and hearts of children.

Rogers said, “When I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air, or picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed, so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.”

Fred Rogers received a lot of letters and was faithful to respond to all of them. One day, a high school student wrote Rogers and asked him what he believed was the greatest event in American history. Fred Rogers’s response to the boy’s question was, “I can’t say.” Then Rogers said, “I suspect that like so many great events, it was something very simple and very quiet with little or no fanfare (such as someone forgiving someone else for a deep hurt that eventually changed the course of history.) The really important ‘great things’ are never center stage of life’s dramas; they’re always in the wings. That’s why it’s so essential for us to be mindful of the humble and the deep rather than the flashy and superficial.”

Fred Rogers wouldn’t be classified as a “big star” by today’s standards. In fact, would his television show be picked up by PBS today? But his wisdom shouldn’t be considered “old-fashioned.” His thoughts and opinions are actually ancient, dating all the way back to King Solomon.

Have you been feeling like your way of thinking is no longer relevant in our changing culture? Mr. Rogers and King Solomon would tell you otherwise. God’s priorities and God’s truth are unchanging. Love, humility, and kindness may have lost some of the world’s esteem, but they will never lose God’s. The prophet Jeremiah wrote, “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16).

We don’t need to be worried about feeling old-fashioned. Rest on the thought that God’s goal is we would be downright “ancient.” Fred Rogers would tell us to humbly take our truth and our talents to a world that needs to know God’s love.