When it comes to being in relationships, most of us are pros. We've had many throughout the years. Maybe we've held them with gratitude for what they each taught us. Or maybe we moved on without so much as a backward glance. No matter your relationship history though, we all have one thing in common. We learned how to be in relationships early. So much earlier than we think we did. It wasn't our first true love. It wasn't our middle school crush. It was our parents.
What?! No. My parents? No way, my relationships look nothing like theirs. I hear you, I do, it's just that I know that we imprinted on what relationships should look like before we were seven years old. That means your subconscious has a pattern set for relationships and a frequency for what feels familiar. Whomever you had in your life up until about 7 or 8 years old, modeling relationships for you, is what you encoded as a foundation.
This isn't to say you're going to recreate a carbon copy of your parent's relationship. In fact, a traumatic view of their relationship might have prompted you to recreate the opposite of what you saw. Our first major relationships as young adults are where we first have the opportunity to gain better understanding of our parent's relationship by recreating the feelings in our own. We will use this info as a baseline how to be in relationship and build from there.
Consider some main areas of relationships when comparing how you interact with your partner, to your parents. Map out how the relationship you saw modeled (even if your parent was a single parent) handled the following situations: conflict resolution, finances, showing affection, and stress. Ask yourself the following questions about each :
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What did I see modeled when I was a child?
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What did I decide was true in relationships in regards to this situation?
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How have I embodied or rejected this truth in my own relationships?
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How would I like to show up in my relationships in regard to this situation?
The understanding that we are all starting from a place that was gifted to us by the relationships we saw as children means that we can have compassion for how we've showed up in the past. And for our partners! The realization that so much of how they interacted with us was based on their own inheritance. Letting go of the identity that you were both holding in your relationship - the idea of what a partner does and how they react to the other. What an expansive place to consider.
As you answer the questions above, consider opening the idea of your relationship up in an expansive way. Throw off the inherited beliefs and consider what else could be true about you and your partnership. Create room for the intentional way you'd like to show up and the truths that now exist about you, your partner, and your relationship. This partnership is uniquely yours StoryHealer. Let's write a new story.