Healthy Relationships Notes
How do we treat each other: husband and wife, parents and children, ourselves and others? What are the fundamentals for us to get along? What are potential problems? How do they develop? What are some warning signs?
The only way of avoiding problems in interpersonal relationships is to not have any relationships. You become a recluse or unmarried. But as human beings, we have been created for relationships. God sought for companionship and created Adam. Adam wanted a relationship that was more than caring for God’s created order so God created Eve. And we know the rest of the story.
In Psalm 8, we read that in God’s majestic creation, God made human beings a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor. In God’s image, God created us. This divine/sacred creation of human beings means that inasmuch that we respect and praise God; we respect and praise each other.
Treating Each other
The bottom line here is that we treat each other as divine beings. In our history and culture, both Chinese and western, this mutual respect has not always been the case. There’s been “inequalities.”
Someone once said, “Don’t walk ahead of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me, and be my friend.”
Maintaining the practice of “traditional roles” when not all members are in agreement is one of the warning signs that lead to the straining of relationships. If the context describes, the members subscribe, they would ascribe! However, when members begin to live up to their God-created potential, but others don’t support this transformation, signs of unhealthy relationships develop.
Here are three ways toward maintaining healthy relationships.
1. Listening Better
The couple that listens together stays together. A couple shows their love and caring by trying to listen well. Partners create a warm and respectful emotional climate in which what each has to say is important to the other.
The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen more and talk less.
Active Listening—Hearing involves the capacity to be aware of and to receive sounds. Listening involves not only receiving sounds but, as much as possible, accurately understanding their meaning. Active listening involves both receiving and sending communication skills.
Taking Your Partner’s Perspective—A native-American proverb says: “Don’t judge a person until you have walked two moons in their moccasins.” If people are to feel that you received them loud and clear, you need to develop the ability to ‘walk in their moccasins,” ‘get inside their skins’ and ‘see the world through their eyes.’
“Your view of you.” and “My view of you.”
“Your view of me.” and “My view of me.”
Showing that You are Listening—Your body posture demonstrates interest and attention: trunk lean, facial expression, gaze, eye contact, gesture, spatial zones, touch, and between bodily communication.
Reflecting Feelings—Reflecting and mirroring feelings is the main skill of active listening. When you reflect feelings you give your partner the opportunity to listen more deeply to their own feelings.
Four common mistakes—
1. Interrupting
2. Talking too much
3. Being to judgmental
4. Giving gratuitous advice
Dag Hammarskjold said, “The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you the better you will hear what is sounding inside.” Learn to listen to your own thoughts, feelings, and needs first. You will then be more ready to listen to others.
2. Caring
Two meanings for “caring:”
Caring for someone represents the feeling component of caring. If you care for someone, you love and like them and feel concern for and interest in them.
Taking care of someone in some way, however large or small, represents the communication component of caring. You attend to their welfare, look after their interests and provide for them.
A. Caring for your partner involves respecting their difference and potential. There’s a distinction between ordinary caring and tough caring.
Showing care for your partner—verbal communications, vocal communications, bodily communication, and caring actions. Checking what care your partner prefers.
B. Receiving care from your partner—Failing to appreciate openly your partner’s caring behaviors, you lower the chances of these behaviors being repeated. You show your gratitude by verbal, vocal, bodily, touch and action communications.
C. Caring for self—Self-care can be distinguished from selfishness. Caring for yourself means that you prize yourself sufficiently to consider that you are worthy of care. You are a person in your own right and not just an extension of another.
3. Sharing Intimacy
Happy couples create and cultivate intimacy. You express you love by wanting to know and be known by one another.
By about two to one, women want more closeness than men.
The Latin word, intus, meaning within, is the basis for the word, intimacy. There are five kinds of intimacy:
1. Personal intimacy—revealing perceived weaknesses, taboos, family secrets as well as achievements and matters of pride
2. Emotional intimacy—willingness to experience and share feelings with one another
3. Intellectual intimacy—sharing your ideas and opinions
4. Spiritual intimacy—sharing your philosophies of life and religious beliefs
5. Relationship intimacy—sharing your thoughts and feelings about what is going on in your relationship
Dimensions of intimacy
1. Intimacy with yourself—by knowing your internal world, you provide a foundation for intimacy with your partner. You possess a basic acceptance of yourself as a person that allows you to be open to your emotions.
2. Reaching out-sharing your internal world with your partner
3. Receiving intimacy entails allowing yourself to become open to the internal world of your partner and to be influenced by it
4. Communication pattern is how you and your partner coordinate the sharing of your internal worlds. One of these is “progressive matching” when a disclosure is matched if the relationship is to remain in balance.
Closing: “The Man Who Loved a Tree,” Does God Have a Big Toe?, Marc Gellman, New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
Creating Happy Relationships, A guide to Partner Skills, Richard Nelson-Jones, New York: Cassell & Continuum, 1999.
DN, 6/15/2005