Relationship Repair

How does one go about repair­ing a rela­tion­ship? We know how to
repair other “things”, like cars, equip­ment, house, clothes and
what­not. The ques­tion arises as far as rela­tion­ship repair is
con­cerned, is a rela­tion­ship a “thing”? As I men­tioned in my
pre­vi­ous posts, rela­tion­ship, although a noun, should not be
treated as a thing but as a verb, or as an action, if we want to have
any hope in our quest for rela­tion­ship repair.

So, in this con­text we will treat rela­tion­ship repair as an
action since it is a verb. Action, on whose part? Who takes the action
and what would the action con­sist of?

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From our point of view, if only our part­ner would change his or her
ways every­thing would be just fine “as before” and rela­tion­ship
repair would be com­plete. Unfor­tu­nately, that is only our “point of
view”. The prob­lem with our point of view is that from that point we
see all other points but our own. We are blind to it, because we have
so much invested in it that we take it for granted that it is as real
as it can get. Our point of view is the only real­ity we are aware of.
Our rela­tion­ship and our part­ner occur to us a cer­tain way, which
is only real to us, and is the only real­ity we accept. Any other point
of view when dif­fer­ent from ours, is sim­ply not cor­rect, not true
and WRONG. There­fore, in our attempt to
repair a rela­tion­ship we always look to the other side to change
his/her behav­ior and their point of view to coin­cide with our own and
to take this cru­cial action that would make every­thing OK
so that rela­tion­ship repair can take place. Although repair­ing a
rela­tion­ship may be much eas­ier that way, it rarely works and we
know it. Try­ing to change oth­ers is a fruit­less endeavor for the
same rea­son I men­tioned before: “oth­ers” have their own “point of
view” and if you think that the way you see the sit­u­a­tion occurs
bet­ter to them then their own view, think again. You can­not change
other peo­ple! The sooner you accept it the sooner you will be able to
pro­ceed to a rela­tion­ship repair stage.

As we are look­ing for the alter­na­tive to chang­ing oth­ers it
would be good to notice that what we call “relat­ing to oth­ers”
usu­ally con­sists of react­ing to each other. If that is so and if you
can­not change your part­ner what is left to do is that you change your
point of view. The first step is admit­ting that you have one. Whether
you think that your world-view, your opin­ion of how things are and
your point of view are the cor­rect ones or not is beside the point. If
you want to engage into the process of rela­tion­ship repair you must
look at your own behav­ior, which is usu­ally in your blind spot – you
do not know how you occur to oth­ers – and real­ize that your part­ner
is react­ing to your behav­ior there­fore cre­at­ing the con­flict and
dis­rup­tion of your rela­tion­ship. Take note, this is not an
oppor­tu­nity to blame your­self or start think­ing that it is all your
fault. There is no blame in this process only respon­si­bil­ity to
claim, which is the first step to true empow­er­ment and an
oppor­tu­nity to take the sit­u­a­tion into your own hands towards
com­plete rela­tion­ship repair. If you change your behav­ior, your
part­ner shall react to that. Now you are in charge. Good luck.

The whole process is dealt with in The Rela­tion­ship Saver and expanded upon in The Game­less Relationship.

Com­ments and ques­tions are welcomed.

Thank you

Radomir

http://www.RelationshipSaver.org/

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