5 Ways to Transform Self-Love into Strong Relationships
When you’ve nurtured the most essential relationship – the one with you – you’re ready to turn self-love into strong and powerful relationships with others. You’ve heard you can only love others when you love yourself, and it’s true: if you don’t fully know and accept yourself, you will project onto others everything you love and hate about yourself. You won’t be able to see them at all. But when you are good with you, when you are fully comfortable and accepting of your flaws and your strengths, you can open yourself to others. You can see them, hear them, and allow them to be who they are without judgment or the urge to change them.
Here are five ways that you can leverage a strong relationship with yourself into healthy relationships with others:
- Take Responsibility and Avoid Laying Blame
Taking responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and values is a huge step toward having healthy relationships with others. How often have you had relationship conflict because you blame someone else for your reaction or vice versa? Don’t take the bait! If you have a feeling or reaction to someone else, pause and look at what’s being triggered. And don’t accept blame from others either. Look for future blog posts on relationship conflict when I’ll go into more detail about how to handle it.
- Recognize and Respect Needs
When you know your own needs and have strategies for taking care of them, you stop having to manipulate others into doing it for you. And that frees you up to listen to others and hear what their needs are. Just remember, you’re not responsible for meeting their needs any more than they are for yours. When you have a repertoire of ways to take care of yourself, you don’t have to rely on anyone else to feel good. And you can recognize when someone else is leaning too heavily on you and step back.
- Set and Keep Boundaries
“The right of my fist ends at the beginning of your nose.” While this is a simple summary of physical boundaries, it applies to the mental/emotional aspect as well. Stay connected to your thoughts, feelings, and actions, and let others have theirs. Define your values, and use them to define your boundaries of what you will and won’t accept in a relationship. Remember you must also respect other people’s boundaries.
You can say to a friend, “I’m happy to talk with you about your problems, but if it turns into a blame fest, I’ll need to get off the phone.” And they can respond however they need to, ideally with their own boundaries, such as, “Well I just need to vent sometimes, but I can call someone else if it bothers you.” Boundaries must be within your control, not with the intent to control someone else’s behavior. And, if you set a boundary, it’s crucial that you keep it, or else you begin to erode self-respect and introduce confusion into the relationship.
- Know the Difference Between Helping and Enabling
It’s natural to want to help our friends, family, and other loved ones, but before reaching out, it’s critical to understand your motivations. If you’re giving something they can do for themselves, you’re taking away their responsibilities, and that’s enabling. You’re trying to save them. Real help comes from a generous place with no expectation of return – whether in kind or in terms of their expected behavior. Be cautious of wanting to change people! Helping is giving without demand or expectation, and should come from your excess, not your essence.
- Practice Compassion, Not Codependence
When you have a good, clear connection with yourself, and know your needs and boundaries, you don’t need other people to be or do anything in your relationships. You are grounded in yourself and easily able to avoid codependence. They can have their feelings, and you don’t have to take them on. This does not create distance and separation but gives space for compassion. So if someone’s having a bad day, you can be empathetic instead of getting dragged down with them.
Building strong relationships with other people is very possible, when you start by strengthening your relationship with yourself. Always bring yourself back to that touchstone, and you will have guidance for how to be in your relationships with others. Take responsibility for yourself. Know your needs. Set up clear boundaries. Know your motivations for helping people. And be compassionate. These are beginning steps toward healthy relationships with the people you love and those you are getting to know.
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash
