Healthy Relationships

Revealed. . . Heal your Relationships - Heal your Life

Healthy Relationships are important to create and maintain for you as a member of the society, since strong healthy and positive relationships are essential for you to achieve a happy, healthy and successful life.

While different types of relationships require varied forms of our attention, basically they are all crucial to our well being and wholeness.

Think about it . . . we are in almost constant contact with others, should we not therefore make every contact an opportunity to strengthen our social skills and reinforce our relationships?

Surely the answer is YES however it is not always easy due to different personalities, interests and experiences.

Healing our relationship/s is most probably one of the most challenging tasks that we as humans encounter. Even so, healing your relationship/s will most definitely prove to be one of the single most important things you can do to dramatically improve and heal your life.

Of course you've heard and are aware that almost everyone encounters some sort of relationship problem from time to time - whether with self, spouses, partners, family, friends or co-workers.

DO YOU KNOW WHY?

The reason is simple - you are given absolutely no training! So in essence, you are left to fend for yourself, a sad state of affairs indeed.

Just think about it, ever since the day you were born you were forced to develop healthy relationships with people with NO TRAINING WHATSOEVER.

In every other area of human development, you are given some form of formal training. For instance in high school you are educated about health, science, literature, history, etc. but no one ever explained relationships to you, did they?

Healthy Relationships Are Fun

Healthy relationships are fun and make you feel good about yourself. They are essential to your happiness and emotional health. They also have a positive effect on your physical health influencing everything from heart health to age-related health issues.

You can have a healthy relationship with anyone in your life, including your family, friends, dating partners and spouse.

There are basic ways to make relationships healthy, even though each one is different. Research into what makes relationships work successfully - whether family relationships, friendships or partnerships - tend to come up with the same few things:

Click here to do the Relationship Quiz NOW to find out how healthy your relationships are and find out how to Restore a Healthy Relationship.

• Love Yourself

Unless you love yourself, it's hard for you to believe that anyone else will.

Self-esteem is important for healthy relationships. When you truly like yourself, in spite of any failings and weaknesses you may have, you'll feel confident. And when you feel confident and secure within yourself, you can enjoy all your relationships for instance being with your partner for the joy they bring to your life, not because you feel you need them to survive.

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• Acceptance of Difference

People in successful relationships do not try to force the other party to be exactly like them; or to be the way they want them to be. Instead they work to accept the other partys difference even when this difference is profound.

Therefore be flexible. Try not to keep people and situations just the way you like them to be as we humans are prone to do. Even though its natural to feel apprehensive, even sad or angry, when people or things change and you're not ready for it, be flexible. Healthy relationships mean change and growth are allowed!

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• Mutual Respect

Respect in a relationship means that each person values who the other is and understands - and would never challenge - the other person's boundaries.

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• Capacity for Boundaries

In successful relationships people are aware that there is a point where they stop and the other person begins. If we don't know that we have boundaries that must be respected, then we also don't know that other people have boundaries that we must respect.

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• Trust

For a relationship to develop, you need to build up trust between the two of you. It's OK to get a little jealous sometimes - jealousy is a natural emotion. But how a person reacts when he or she feels jealous is what matters. There's no way you can have a healthy relationship if you don't trust each other. Successful partners are quite vulnerable with each other - they take risks and are very honest with one another.

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• Honesty

This one goes hand-in-hand with trust because it's tough to trust someone when one of you isn't being honest.

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• Support

It's not just in bad times that you and the other party should support one another. Some people are great when your whole world is falling apart but can't take being there when things are going right (and vice versa). In healthy relationships, people should be there for one another with a shoulder to cry on when things go wrong and to celebrate with one another when things go well.

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• Fairness / Equality

There need to be give-and-take in relationships, too. Take turns choosing which new movie to see. Hang out with one another's friends. Try to keep a pretty fair balance. Things get bad really fast when a relationship turns into a power struggle, with one person fighting to get his or her way all the time.

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• Operating mainly in the Present - Stay in the NOW

Once relationships either focus on repeatedly picking over past events, or else are based only on the hope that things will be better tomorrow, they tend to go off the rails. The past is over, the future is yet to happen, now is all that matters in a relationship. It is called the present, treat it as a gift.

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• Respect for Individual Choice

In a successful relationship it is accepted that each person has the right to decide their own direction in life, the relationship then adapts to follow this.

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• Maintaining Separate Identities

In a healthy relationship, both parties have their own lives - families, friends, interests, hobbies, etc. - and that shouldn't change. Neither party should have to pretend to like something they don't, or give up seeing their friends, or drop out of activities they love. And you should also feel free to keep developing new talents or interests, making new friends, and moving forward.

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• Good Communication

Therapists say that the largest single reason relationships fail is lack of communication. Communicating well is something that couples really need to do in order to keep going happily.

You've probably heard lots of stuff about how men and women don't seem to speak the same language (women are from Venus and men are from Mars?). We all know how many different meanings the little phrase "no, nothing's wrong" can have, depending on who's saying it! But what's important is to ask if you're not sure what he or she means, and speak honestly and openly so that the miscommunication is avoided in the first place. Never keep a feeling bottled up because you're afraid it's not what the other person wants to hear or because you worry about sounding silly. And if you need some time to think something through before you're ready to talk about it, the right person will give you some space to do that if you ask for it.

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• Skill in Negotiating

Once each individual has decided what they want, with respect for one anothers individual choice and personal boundaries, the couple or family can then work out a acceptable way to fulfill these goals without compromising one another.

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• Sharing Positive Feelings

In a couple this may be sexual intimacy; however it can also just be pleasantness and kindness, as it is in a family.

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In conclusion healthy relationships bring happiness and health to our lives and studies show that people with healthy relationships really do have more happiness and less stress.