Developing Self-Awareness Enables You to Understand How You Harm Your Relationships – and Change

It is very likely that your attitudes, reactions and behaviors in a relationship harm it, causing conflicts and arguments. Often, you don’t even know that that’s the case. When your relationship fails, you tend to blame your partners. Developing Self-Awareness will help you notice that many of your reactions and behaviors are UNCONSCIOUS. When you understand it you become free to choose CONSCIOUS WAYS OF REACTION AND BEHAVIOR, vital to cultivating a successful relationship.

DO WE REALLY KNOW "WHO WE ARE”?

We all like to think we know ourselves. We also believe that that the decisions we make are conscious ones. This, after all, is what differentiates us from all sorts of animals. Right? Wrong!

MANY OF YOUR DECISIONS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS

It might surprise you to hear that many of the decisions you make in life - about partners and relationships as well as in other areas - are based on needs which control you, fears which inhibit you, belief-systems which rule you, your subjective perception of reality.

These and other factors exert power over your decisions, without you even knowing it! You’re entrapped in emotional and behavioral patterns which lead you to sabotage your relationships. Not being aware of them prevents you from stopping these patterns and from becoming able to choose new ways of reacting and behaving with your partners.

DEVELOPING SELF-AWARENESS IS THE MEANS TO REALIZE HOW YOU HARM YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

In order to figure out what makes you sabotage your relationships, you need to develop Self-Awareness: getting to know and understand a host of factors that control your interactions with your partners.

Let’s suppose that for the last several months you’ve been telling yourself it’s about time you found a partner and develop a long-term relationship - but you’re still alone. You go on blind dates, you meet people, and once in a while you even develop a relationship. But often, after a short-time you find yourself alone again, without understanding why, running quickly again into the dating-scene. You don’t understand why you keep changing partners so often. Lately you began to be scared that you may never succeed in developing an intimate, satisfying and long-term relationship.

FACTORS WHICH MIGHT BE AFFECTING YOU AND PREVENTING YOU FROM HAVING A SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIP

* You may be operating on the basis on an UNCONSCIOUS FEAR OF COMMITTMENT.

* You may be operating on the basis of an UNCONSCIOUS FEAR OF ABANDONMENT and are protecting yourself by not staying too long in a relationship.

* You may have been hurt in previous relationships, and THE FEAR OF BEING HURT AGAIN might hinder you from opening up with your partners.

* During childhood you might have UNCONSCIOUSLY INTERNALIZED MESSAGES from one or both parents that you’re so special that on one is good enough for you.

* Perhaps you grew up without feeling your parents’ love and now, unconsciously, YOU NEED TO CONQUER AND/OR “SEDUCE” one potential partner after another in order to prove to yourself that you’re worth.

* You might be driven by FEAR OF AGING and the need to feel perpetually young.

* You might be operating on the basis of OTHER FACTORS which prevent you from having a relationship.

Until you develop Self-Awareness you won’t be able to understand what’s preventing you from finding and cultivating a serious relationship. You hope that “something” will happen (“someday” and “somehow”) and everything will change for the better.

But there is no reason that this “something” will happen unless you develop Self-Awareness, get to understand, acknowledge and accept what drives you to fail in your relationships, take the necessary steps to change it and become empowered to develop a successful bond.