The Green Flags
133. The Green Flags
What is a green flag? Unlike red flags, which should alert you about the person you’ve met, green flags are “indicators” of a relationship that’s healthy, fulfilling, and supportive of both partners’ well-being.
Green Flags in a Relationship
To open up to love, you need a safe and healthy relational space, meaning a space where you have the following green flags:
- A secure person.
- Commitment and mutual trust
- The ability for each partner to be introspective in order to change their own personal impact on the relationship
- Non-violent communication to talk about your emotions, your needs, your feelings about the relationship.
- A positive view of the couple and of the other person,
- A team spirit, the desire to grow together, and to support each other in achieving your dreams.
These green flags apply to all your relationships.
You can also listen to the 7 principles for building a good relational dynamic in episode 130, Handling the Early Stages of a Relationship Well.
What Makes Someone a Secure Person?
The Gottman Institute, in their book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” mentions 5 criteria that make a person secure:
- A secure person lets you feel like an equal, rather than making you feel like their parent or their child.
- A secure person is stable over time instead of being inconsistent.
- A secure person has empathy and acts accordingly, rather than only caring about themselves.
- A secure person wants to mature and grow and can admit when they’re wrong, whereas an insecure person avoids working on issues or admitting their mistakes because they believe they’re perfect.
- A secure person is willing to earn your trust, whereas an insecure person demands it without earning it.
- A secure person can respect your no and honor your boundaries.
How Do You Apply This to Dating?</
You might tell me, “That’s all well and good, Sandy, but that kind of setup never happens to me, so what do I do?”
These conditions need to become your non-negotiables, not only in a relationship but also in the dating process, in a “make it or break it” way, meaning you need to assess, through actions (not just words), whether the person in front of you is capable of offering you that framework.
This also means paying attention to what you personally bring to the relationship, in particular (I talk about this in episode 93, What If You Were the Red Flag?):
- Honestly assess your impact on the relationship. To do this, ask yourself: “What’s it like to be in a relationship with me?” or “How would I react if my partner behaved the way I do?”, and also take your partner’s feedback into account, while knowing that this feedback is also shaped by their own vulnerabilities.
- Take care to regulate yourself so you’re able to have a conversation without being triggered into a survival mechanism.
- Work on the skills you’re missing in order to be a partner capable of building a healthy relationship.
Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
And if you need help learning all this, you can join my program Opening up to love, the result of my 8 years of practice. You can choose the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: a psycho-body practice designed to deprogram the nervous system’s automatic responses and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour”, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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