If you want to truly flourish, you need to have healthy relationships in your life.

Everyone has relationships, whether it is with family, mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister or work employer – employee, or friends, etc. Not a single person in this planet is not in a relationship.  

But what differentiates one type of relationship to another is the “quality.”  This brings us down to whether it is a healthy or an unhealthy relationship.

Your past, influences and often times dictates the quality of the relationship you are in. An unhealthy relationship is one that continually triggers childhood traumas and our wired – in reactions to them. In an unhealthy  relationship,  it’s  as  if  our  childhood  patterns  are  simply reactivated  and  replayed.  The  problem  isn’t  that  the  pattern  was  triggered, but that it is not brought to awareness, released, and resolved. Like the movie Groundhog Day, it’s  not  that  the  situations and people are exactly the same.  It’s that we still react according to old patterns or misunderstandings rather than using circumstance to grow and learn a new type of response.

The person is trapped in the past.  Your childhood experience was not used as an anchor for growth and development.  

For instance, a child might have been raised by an alcoholic father who was nonthreatening but also not responsible. That child might grow up and become involved with other men who are similarly irresponsible, maybe her bosses or spouse. She may feel compelled to take care of those men in much the same fashion she felt she had to care for her father. Continuing this childhood survival  strategy  clearly  doesn’t  serve  her  as  an  adult  – and it clearly  doesn’t  serve  the  men  that  she  will  not  confront.

A healthy relationship on the other hand is one in which there is an equal exchange of energy, a comfortable give and take’. Both parties communicate their needs and take 100% responsibility for their responses in the relationship. The two individuals may not be in exactly the same stage of growth, yet they support one another’s  evolution.  Childhood  traumas  may  get  triggered  but each person is aware – or becomes aware – and takes responsibility for resolving their own childhood survival strategies as well as any misunderstanding of the basic principles that may affect the relationship. At its best, a healthy relationship becomes one of mutual healing and mutual growth. Both grow together. Fall together and rise up together.