how are feelings of discomfort part of any relationship?
We have been told time and time again that there is no relationship without conflict. That conflict can be internal within you, within your partner or obvious between you too. The conflict that comes out in relationships is due to many things.
I am going to go ahead and generalize to make a point. When we fight with the people around us is because we are fighting to keep the relationship that we have working. Because we still trust that there is something there to save and to love.
Stating the obvious: relationships are not easy and they are not meant to be easy (unfortunately).
They consist of two (or more) complex beings that interact in the most intimate way. And I am not talking about being physically vulnerable, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
The openness that we offer the other person when we are in a relationship can bring a lot of fear. Fear for the future because we fear our past. We fear that history might repeat itself because of something that happened with a past partner or even childhood trauma playing out in our relationships.
Also because as we learn to love another person we are also learning to allow ourselves to be loved and that can be scary as well.
Expectations in relationships
Relationships also come with a lot of expectations on how people are supposed to behave, unwritten contracts, and unspoken hopes and needs.
Most of the time these things are not communicated, because there is also a deep fear of abandonment.
And rightly so.
No one wants to tell another person that they love their deepest desires for that relationship. Only to have the expectations of the other person be completely different. Or worse yet, speaking them out and having them not fulfilled.
The world has slowly backed away from relationships, not only because in heterosexual relationships women have realized that their time is better spent by themselves than making relationships with men that are emotionally unavailable work.
But also because of the fear I mentioned above of experiencing any type of unnecessary discomfort.
Avoiding discomfort in our world
We seek pleasure even more in this decade. If things don’t bring us an instant joy we discard them. Don’t get me wrong I am all for letting go of things that no longer serve us. The problem is that we often expect things that need patience and some discomfort to function to work instantly.
Relationships come with discomfort included. Whether it is a partner, a friend or a family member. Unless they are an exact copy of you there will be disagreement (I mean there is even disagreement in a relationship with yourself).
There are hard conversations, different beliefs, pride to keep safe, reactions to trauma, human mistakes and many other things that are bound to cause discomfort in a relationship.
What I want to get across is that we need to destigmatize the discomfort and expand our discomfort edge.
This is the blog post that goes a little bit more into expanding your discomfort edge.
This is a topic that requires a lot of thought and if I am honest it is not something that is solved overnight.
I know the internet is about quick results and if you found this post you were searching for one.
And the result that I offer you is a new thought process to include in your life. To open up more to discomfort and to try to sit with the uncomfortable.
If you want to go deeper into these thoughts here are some prompts specific to relationships and discomfort. If you want prompts on learning more about the discomfort edge itself go here.
- How much effect do your relationships have on your well-being?
- Choose a relationship that you want to dig into today. How do you react to conflict in that relationship?
- What are the things that are often triggered in that relationship, for both you and the other person?
- How does this conflict feel in your body? Do you try to escape the feeling, or do you want to solve it instantly?
- The way you deal with discomfort is connected to your attachment style. An anxious attachment tries to press to solve the conflict and make everything okay again, while an avoidant attachment often escapes the conflict and moves away physically and mentally from it to avoid discomfort.
- What would happen if instead of fearing that discomfort you would accept it and welcomed it as a way of expanding your relationship?
- Next time you experience conflict I invite you to sit with the feelings that come up instead of wanting to “fix” them or escape from them. Before trying to understand them to try to feel them.
Feeling discomfort is not an easy task, it is something that we learn to do as time goes by. The effort that we have to put to allow that space to the uncomfortable is immense, but once we do it we open up for so much more.
