Tory Archbold recently interviewed Relationship therapist Lissy Abrahams about what it means to have a healthy relationship for her podcast Powerful Stories. Lissy, the author of Relationship Reset, explained that to begin with, it’s important to have a good relationship with yourself. Here is an extract of what Lissy said in the podcast.
Quite a few factors, I believe, make a healthy relationship. It’s important to have a good relationship with yourself. If we don’t know who we are internally, we are not going to be able to produce a happy enough relationship with our partner. If we’ve done the work and understand how we’ve been wired up for relationships, and recognize that it has been shaped inside of us through conditions we didn’t choose and we get to explore it, open it up; then we have the conditions for enjoying a happier relationship because then we know how to be more respectful, and we know how not to blame people and to dump our crap on them actually.
So, to answer your question, to have a happy relationship, I believe we really need to know how do we function? What upsets me? What gives me the shits? Then we are really going to understand who we are.
The condition for a happy relationship is really around the communication we share and it’s around the ability to move into different positions inside of ourselves. So firstly, one condition is we need to be able to depend on our partner and to also allow them to depend on us.
So, if we have uneven relationships where we’re completely depending on them, too much, that’s sucking something out of the relationship.
It’s also the ability to take the time out to discover who you are, because we do change, we do evolve. And I find that as we grow older, we have this beautiful wisdom, but it’s about taking the time out to discover what you’re talking about, discover what lights you up from the inside out and what you can do without.
Join Tory and Lissy on the new Powerful Stories episode, on Nova and Apple and Spotify.