The challenge of relationships

Relationships are what makes us human. We are social beings that need others to be connected to each other and the world. Healthy relationships require a level of vulnerability, risk taking and clear communication that most of us struggle with. This is often because the way we do relationships is defined for us by our families. Families model for us how relationships should work. This is often faulty, dysfunctional or even toxic.

To be in a healthy relationship we need be able to tell the truth. To be honest. This sounds obvious but it is not straight forward. What is the truth? It turns out the truth is whatever is true for you. Two people can disagree on the truth which can make relationships tricky. This is also, in my opinion, what makes relationships interesting and valuable. You might say how is this possible? Surely there is only one version of the truth. Not really, it’s like having an opinion. There can be many opinions about something. All are valid, and in that sense true. 

Most people would claim that they tell the truth and that they are honest. No one wants to be thought of as dishonest. But how honest are we? For example, when someone asks “how are you?” most people will automatically say something like “I’m fine”.This is often not true. This response is a way to manage someone else’s expectations. A kind of control. In fact, most people who say “how are you” aren’t asking this question at all. They don’t really care about how you are, what they care about is their vulnerability to you. Such pleasantries are “normal” and common place but not really healthy.

Telling the truth is about boundaries. Boundaries are the way we protect ourselves from the outside world and protect the outside world from us. Boundaries encompass all the facets of being human. They are physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual, intellectual.They have two sides. The side facing out towards the world and the side facing in towards me. Boundaries are taught, like relationships, by care givers. We inherit our boundaries. Some people grow up without any boundaries because their parents didn’t have any. If you don’t have boundaries you don’t know who you are. It also means you are set up to be captured by dysfunctional relationships. 

Having boundaries means we need to own our truth. It’s not enough to tell the truth, we need to take responsibility for it. We need to be prepared to assert ourselves and be different from others. This is a risky business because we don’t know what other people will do. Will they reject us or attack us? To do this we need the power of emotions. Emotions give us the energy and conviction to take the risk. Emotions allow our truth to live in our bodies as well as our minds. Anger is a really important emotion for holding boundaries. If someone offends us or crosses our boundaries we need to be able to tell them we don’t like it or to tell them to stop it. For men, having strong emotions, especially anger can be really difficult because we are often brought up to repress feelings. Anger is often associated with the potential for violence. We learn to be ashamed of our emotions. The message we receive is emotions are messy, dirty or even inappropriate. Notice that when someone starts crying we often rush to “shush” and offer tissues to clean up the “mess”.

People pleasing is a way to avoid having any boundaries by merging into others. There is an assumption people pleasing is harmless because we are trying to make other people happy. This is faulty thinking. People pleasing is lying. We are lying because we are pretending to agree with others when often we don’t agree. In people pleasing we abandon ourselves - we invalidate ourselves and we become lost. In a sense, the other person takes up all the space and we disappear. This disappearance is very painful because we are still there. The pain is mental and often involves repressed anger and resentment towards the other person. 

Compulsive helping is a way to make everything look so agreeable that the other person doesn’t need boundaries. This looks like it might be a nice thing. In fact the word “nice” often appears in the dialogue. This is a kind of control and manipulation where one person controls the other by doing things for them. Women might take on this mantle because it mimics a mothering role. This kind of behaviour is destructive because it infantilises the other person. Making them into a child. It also takes away their agency, their own power to take action and make decisions. This is a powerful and subtle process because to be on the receiving end can feel nice and comforting. It is easy to be seduced by it. The helper is often overwhelmed because they feel like they have to do everything. Even though no one asked them to. This leads to resentment and anger towards the “child”. In a way it is a replaying of childhood patterns.

The irony of relationships is that to really get close to someone we have to become vulnerable and intimate. Taking risks in that scenario can actually feel life threatening. But it is essential to be able to do this if we are to be real and authentic with another person. This requires us to trust the other person. Trust them, even when they don’t agree with us, or dislike us, to still love and care for us. For many of us, we haven’t experienced this. It wasn’t modelled for us by our families. We don’t know how to trust and expect to be rejected or abandoned. Therapy is a place where this kind of trust can be modelled in a healthy way. The client learns to trust the therapist in a safe environment and can use that resilience in other relationships. 

I think my job in therapy is to help clients become aware of what is already there. Rather than fix their relationships I strive to help them see in their own eyes what they already know is going on. I help them see the things they have hidden or distorted in order to avoid confrontation with themselves or others. The paradox of change says that to really change we just have to become who we really are. My job is to help you see who you really are. Once this is seen, the client can’t help but to move nearer to that truth. The truth is like a magnet.