148. You Grow with Every Relationship

You Grow with Every Relationship

You may have accumulated several romantic failures and feel like you’re doing everything wrong.

You’ve suffered greatly in your last relationship(s) and blame yourself for not ending things sooner.

This episode aims to help you gain perspective and transform this sense of failure into an opportunity for growth.

If you feel the need to rebuild confidence in your judgment after several romantic setbacks, you can listen to episode 115 of the podcast.

You Learn from Your Mistakes

Unfortunately, it’s through experience that you truly understand what works for you and what doesn’t:
  • What values are important to you in a relationship?
  • What is your love language?
  • What do you need to share with your partner?
It’s also through this experience that you’ll discover which relational skills are hardest for you:
  • Is it partner selection?
  • Is it assessing your partner?
  • Is it how you communicate?
  • Is it your ability to empathize?
  • Is it your capacity for constructive conflict?
  • Is it your emotional independence?
  • Is it the thoughts you hold about the relationship?
  • Is it your ability to open up to another person?
I know this sounds like a very “personal development” cliché, and you might think Sandy, I’ve already heard this, it doesn’t mean I’ll feel better or have fewer feelings of failure. I understand, because I repeated the same betrayal pattern for 7 years, and I can tell you that when I caught some partners in the act, I struggled to see the progress I’d made in that relationship. Once the emotional waves following a breakup have passed, I invite you to take stock and draw lessons from this last relationship. For me personally, this allowed me to realize I had an issue with partner selection and assessment, and also that I didn’t dare ask for the other person’s clear commitment.

Understand What Each Relationship Reveals About You

Often, the relationships that stir the most uncomfortable emotions reactivate past wounds, and are themselves healing opportunities you can pursue either within the relationship or by working on those past wounds in therapy.

If you want to learn more about how your past influences your relationships and why this healing work must go through the body, I invite you to watch my free webinar “How to break free from love patterns to finally be happy in love?”

For you

FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"

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So even if this last relationship hurt, try listing all the moments when you had a strong emotional reaction, and ask yourself which past wound it might be reactivating.

The Difference Between Growing and Failing

Failing is a form of assessment in which you judge yourself unsuccessful and end the evaluation there. It’s oriented toward the past, toward what happened, and it ignores the growth opportunity.

Conversely, growing means turning toward the future, seeing your mistakes as growth opportunities that help you correct the behaviors holding you back.

In both cases you make mistakes; it’s simply the stance you take toward those mistakes that determines whether you change the results in your life.

It Wasn’t Just a Failure

Sometimes the difficulty, when we question ourselves too much, when we over-analyze our mistakes, is that we forget there wasn’t only negativity in the relationship, that we didn’t only make mistakes.

So taking time to acknowledge what went well, the areas where you felt you made personal progress, recognizing what this relationship taught you — that’s really important to realize that you truly grow with every relationship.

To give you my own example, I saw progress because I communicated my needs better; I saw progress because I got over breakups faster, because I understood the repetition of past wounds; I saw progress because I could express my emotions and speak my truth. My relationships still ended in betrayal, but this progress showed me I was moving in the right direction.

Going Further

Learning to draw lessons from every relationship, understanding your past’s influence on your romantic relationships and changing it, seeing your progress and staying motivated in your dating process, this can be learned. This is what I offer in the program Opening up to love. You can opt for the Day of the Past , a day of Somatic Deprogramming: a mind-body practice designed to deprogram the nervous system’s automatic responses and reprogram new relational reflexes.

Opening up to love

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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