Relationships are the most important and complicated human endeavor. Two people who bring their Personality Type, Instinctual Subtype, Neediness, Emotional Reactivity and difficulties with Boundaries to a dialogue that goes on twenty-four hours per day are going to have conflict. In addition, we have cultural differences, different childhood environments and perhaps different nationalities. All of this is mixed into a combustible interaction that is not fully conscious for either partner. It is easy to see why relationships are so difficult to navigate and why it’s sometimes not so easy to resolve the conflicts.
So how can you MYELW (See previous article on Making Yourself Easier to Live With) and benefit yourself, your partner and your relationship? Of paramount importance is acknowledging and addressing your own personal issues. By studying the Enneagram, you can identify your fears and motivations.
Once you define who you are, then you can find who you are not, (those aspects stored in your Shadow). Example, for type 3 the belief “I am competent”, means that incompetency is in shadow. You may find yourself emotionally reactive to your partner and others when you define their behavior as “incompetent”. Identifying these parts of ourselves that we have disowned is a great place to begin recognizing what the driver is for our emotional reactivity. Self Observation is key to the discovery of our Shadow side.
You also need other tools in order to access your unconsciousness. Inner Child and Shadow work are the best tools that I have found, to identify this largely unexplored world that is US. We are not just the persona that we present to the world; we are much more.
Our personal work is a lifetime adventure and we are almost always concomitantly in a relationship. The question then becomes: what can we gift to the relationship while still doing our personal work? There are a few guidelines:
First – This needs to be a gift with no expectations and no attachments
Second – We need to understand that resolving our partner’s emotional issues is not our job but that we can provide an environment that feels safe and supportive.
Third – We can modify our behavior and our language so that both are more readily received.
And Fourth – We need to be careful that we don’t extend support and understanding to the point of enabling or manipulation. Sometimes this can be a fine line.
Please join me on October 4, 2018 for a discussion on how to best support our partners and our relationships.