Change your perspective – change the outcome

When feeling hurt, let down or disappointed, our view point becomes self-focused and limited. Have you ever noticed? We focus on our pain and what someone did to cause this pain. Next, thought is: they shouldn’t have done this to me. They don’t love me, or they don’t respect me. If they loved me or respected me, this wouldn’t happen. And the well-oiled mental image arises and we move into states of despair and helplessness. Followed by thoughts of, I guess I have to lower my expectations if I want to stay in this or I must leave the relationship because it is toxic. 

The conclusion: “there is something wrong with my partner, something wrong with me for staying or something wrong with my relationship.”

Sound familiar? What is this based on? An image and a judgement of who or what our partner is? I often hear a partner say: “he is an angry person, or a narcissist, or she’s crazy”. Coming from pain, this is a limited view and the person believes they are right. Then their partner must be managed instead of taking responsibility to look into one’s perspective on the situation.  

What also makes this worse, is that we get more of the same from our partner when doing the same thinking and responding. 

We are unaware of our impact and how it contributes to the demise or the disconnection in the relationship.

Human nature is such that when we are angry, we tend to become so emotionally reactive to what the other person is doing to us that we lose our ability to observe our own part in the interaction. Self – observation is not at the same as self-blame….self-observation is the process of seeing the interaction of ourselves and others, and recognize that the ways other people behave with us have something to do with the way we think and behave about them. We cannot make another be different, but we can do something different ourselves so that the old pattern can no longer continue as usual. 

Having said this, we are so tied to our disappointment and feelings of hurt that we don’t even see when our partner does something different. We don’t’ see that our negative bias or our pessimism may be contributing to our partner not changing. Perhaps it is a big deal for the partner to stretch into a new behaviour that is being asked….When they do it, do you notice they did it or again are you focusing on the pain and the hurt of all the times they disappointed you? Have you asked your partner for something they can do to reassure you? Have you given some grace to your partner being able to make changes with a possibility that they might fall back into their own behaviour. Do you praise or prize them when you see them do it? 

In the end, to build a foundation of connection, curiosity is key versus holding onto our painful hurts and images. Ask yourself, what image am I seeing about my partner? What am I telling myself, that is reinforcing this image? Given, this – how can I hold a different image of understanding and empathy and respond differently to have a different outcome?