Relationship Reset: A New Blog Series
One of the smartest things I ever did was to learn about happy, healthy relationships.
Several years ago, I began devoting time to reading everything I could about the kinds of personalities and relationship behaviors that psychologists identified as “difficult” (at best) and “toxic” (at worst).
It was a game-changer for me.
Looking back, the most important thing that I learned was that healthy relationships are carefully chosen and built, and deliberately maintained in thoughtful and attentive ways—by BOTH participants.
This sounds so simple and so obvious, but think about it.
If you’re like me, you set off into the world on the assumption that you’d be meeting wonderful people that you like—or maybe even love!— and then having wonderful relationships with said people.
And if you met a few not-so-wonderful ones, well, you’d be polite and avoid them.
And everyone would live happily ever after.
In reality, I never factored in the way in which the dynamic of the family in which I was raised subtly and systematically shaped my approach to relationships.
It made me both independent and resilient (good things!) but also unwittingly vulnerable to certain types of bad relationship behaviors and difficult personalities.
It’s like I had a huge sign on my forehead and didn’t even know it.
For example, for years, I had no clue that relationship “boundaries” were a thing, because I was raised by parents who belonged to a generation when “enmeshment” = parenting.
People of my parents generation often felt that being able to dictate and influence what their children thought, said, felt, and did, was their prerogative as parents.
As children, we were “allowed” to be ourselves (with the emphasis on needing permission) within certain limits that we discovered when they were overstepped and we faced the emotional consequences in the form of guilt-tripping, criticism, or outright punishment.
Learning that, when it comes to relationships, this is actually not how it works was key to creating a much calmer and happier life for myself.
It took time, it wasn’t always easy, but it was definitely worth it.
Looking back, I recall having had friends and mentors who tried to give me a head’s up about certain relationship vulnerabilities that I seemed to be exhibiting, but unfortunately, I was never able to see the patterns.
Unlike I began reading and researching, that is.
One benefit of researching relationship behaviors is that you can no longer unsee problematic behaviors or wave them away as a one-off “misunderstanding” or “bad time” or “just how” the person “is.”
You begin to see, not just what other people do, but how you respond to what they do—and how this becomes a recurring dynamic that plays out across a variety of relationships.
So in the weeks to come, I’ll be sharing some of what I’ve learned about things like mobbing/workplace bullying, emotional blackmail, emotional immaturity, narcissism, and a whole slew of other relationship behaviors.
My hope is that my musings about my experience learning to build better relationships can be helpful to others who might be experiencing something similar.
