Relationships & Connection
Your Relationship With Yourself
The relationship you have with yourself can be easy to overlook because you are always living within it.
You may be supportive and understanding towards other people while being highly critical of yourself. You might recognise when someone else needs rest but feel guilty when you need it. You may respect other people’s boundaries while struggling to establish your own.
Your relationship with yourself can involve:
- How you speak to yourself
- How you respond when you make mistakes
- Whether you recognise and respect your own needs
- How comfortable you are with your emotions
- The expectations you place on yourself
- How you understand your strengths and limitations
- Whether your sense of worth depends heavily on achievement or other people’s approval
- How well your choices reflect what matters to you
- Whether you can spend time with yourself without constantly needing distraction
- How you care for yourself during difficult periods
A healthier relationship with yourself does not mean constantly feeling confident or positive.
It can mean developing a more honest, understanding and balanced relationship with who you are, including the parts of yourself you may find difficult.
How Our Relationship With Ourselves Affects Other Relationships
The relationship we have with ourselves does not exist separately from our relationships with other people.
If you find it difficult to recognise your own needs, communicating them to someone else may also be difficult.
If you are highly critical of yourself, criticism from another person may feel particularly threatening.
If your sense of worth depends heavily on being needed, successful or approved of, you may find yourself saying yes when you want to say no, avoiding difficult conversations or putting other people’s needs ahead of your own.
Our experiences in relationships can also shape how we see ourselves.
This can create patterns that move in both directions. How we relate to ourselves can affect our relationships, and our experiences with other people can influence how we understand and treat ourselves.
Developing greater awareness of those patterns can create more choice in how we relate to ourselves and others.
When Relationships With Others Become Difficult
Every relationship is different, and disagreement itself does not mean that a relationship is unhealthy.
People bring different histories, expectations, personalities, needs, values and ways of communicating into relationships.
Difficulties can develop when those differences become difficult to talk about or when familiar patterns repeatedly take over.
You may find yourselves having the same argument in different forms. One person may withdraw while the other pushes harder to resolve things. Important conversations may be avoided because they seem likely to create conflict.
Sometimes there is no major conflict. Two people may simply realise that somewhere along the way they have stopped feeling as connected as they once did.
Over time, connection can gradually be replaced by frustration, defensiveness, resentment or distance.
Communication Is More Than Talking
Good communication is not simply about saying more.
It also involves listening, trying to understand another person’s perspective, communicating your own needs and recognising how tone, timing and behaviour affect a conversation.
It can also involve being able to listen to yourself.
- What am I actually feeling?
- What do I need?
- What am I reacting to?
- What am I assuming about the other person?
- Is there something I need to say that I have been avoiding?
Misunderstandings and disagreements are normal. The difficulty comes when people become unable to talk about them safely and respectfully or when attempts to communicate repeatedly become criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal or escalating conflict.
Sometimes the work is not about deciding who is right.
It is about understanding what is happening within ourselves and between people, and whether there might be a different way of responding.
Individual therapy can provide space to explore your relationship with yourself as well as the way you relate to partners, family, friends, colleagues and other important people in your life.
