The Single Guaranteed Way to Have Change in a Relationship

There is a fallacy that any relationship depends on the other person's behavior. In truth, everything depends on us as individuals, on our approach and our attitude to others. We all want to change others, and hope they modify their behaviour to please us, but, if we find it so difficult to change our own attitude, think how difficult it must be for other people to change theirs! The best way of ever getting change is to modify ourselves, value our strengths and acknowledge our weaknesses, not wait for partners to do it. In short, to change OURSELVES. Change will then be guaranteed. It took me a long time to learn that hard lesson while I waited in vain for my ex-husband to change to make our situation better. Everything simply remained the same, or got worse, because he was fearful of any change. I had to change myself to get the results I wanted.

Nobody likes making the first move because they fear the consequences. But doing nothing and living in an unhappy and debilitating way could be even more costly, especially when stress is a killer, unhappiness shortens lives and also damages children's lives too, because they learn from their parents how they should behave as adults. I reluctantly moved out of my long marriage to stop the cycle of retribution, recrimination and revulsion which dogged us like two drug addicts kept high on continuing stress, with a new fix of nastiness almost every day. We alternated between arguing and making up, totally incapable of leaving past mistakes behind or moving forward to a resolution, being fearful of any real action.

With the problems being continually glossed over and ignored, the opportunity for genuine dialogue and examination of our situation, of what each of us really wanted for the rest of our lives, became a hostage to the past, completely lost under the welter of relentless accusations. The frustration and lack of real communication kept us mired in animosity and lurched us from one crisis to the next, while the love still alive between us kept rekindling false hopes of better behaviour which hardly materialised. For example, for eight weeks before I left home, and living under the same roof, we said not one word to each other! That seems so incomprehensible to me now, some years later, but it was par for the course at that time.

Stop Blaming and Start Acting
Again, I lived with something very negative in the relationship for 28 years

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