Whether it’s your kid, your spouse, or your best friend, usually the people we are closest to are the ones with whom we have the most intense conflict with.
Conflict is a normal part of relationships.
And, how you handle conflict ultimately plays a big role in determining the quality of your relationships. 💯
Our brains are programmed to conserve energy and do what is easiest, and what is easiest is often following a familiar pattern.
Unfortunately, shitty familiar thought patterns can cause damage to our relationships. 🙁 The key is to recognize when we are having these crappy automatic thoughts that really aren’t serving us well.
Let’s explore…
Do any of these thoughts sound familiar to you?
“I always have to give the kids a bath, my husband just doesn’t care about me enough to help out.”
“I’ve told my daughter 1,000 times to pick up after herself and she just doesn’t respect me or my time.”
“Every time my best friend and I have plans to go to lunch, she cancels. She must not actually value our friendship that much.”
It’s easy to let these kinds of thoughts invade your brain and fill you with unpleasant emotions. And those unpleasant emotions then lead you to react in ways that you may later regret, often times after damaging the relationship.
What if you could instead start to believe that how your loved ones act in those crappy instances has nothing to do with you? That their behaviors really ARE NOT an attack on you…
What if you got curious about their actions (or non-actions) instead of reacting to them in anger or sadness or disappointment? 🤔
Continued in Comments! ⬇️
