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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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