Asking Forgiveness to Keep Your Love Burning Strong!!!
Asking for forgiveness is super hard for many people. It is the epitome of vulnerability. It means that you have to be super humble, shrink down to your most ego free self and admit that you made a mistake, even if you don’t feel you did.
What makes asking for forgiveness so hard?
What gets so many people in a twist about asking for forgiveness is the very fact that they don’t believe they did anything wrong. Your intentions and your heart were in the right place, you just misunderstood how your actions might affect the person who’s most important to you.
Also, many people haven’t been taught forgiveness. When your parents made mistakes, they may not have asked you for forgiveness. Or they might have held grudges against one another. For people who haven’t experienced the concept of forgiveness firsthand, or for those who’ve even been punished for admitting they made a mistake, asking forgiveness is definitely not on their radar.
The biggest fear people have about asking for forgiveness from a loved one is that rather than feeling grateful for recognizing an error has been made they instead will blame and shame.
Years ago a couple I’ll refer to as Martha and Sam had an issue with forgiveness. Martha through a 30th birthday party for Sam not long after they got married. Little did she know that Sam wasn’t big on birthdays, but even more than that she didn’t realize he didn’t like big parties with lots of attention.
While Sam managed to suck up his disappointment for the majority of the evening, Martha knew he wasn’t being himself. As soon as the last guest left the party Sam told Martha he doesn’t enjoy birthday parties and to never throw him a birthday party again.
No One Owns Real Estate on Pain!
Martha was super hurt, obviously as she had gone to such efforts to make this a really fun party for him and all of his friends. Not only did she not receive a thank you, but she also got a slap in the face.
Both Sam and Martha were left feeling very raw after this event, that should have been a fun and momentous occasion.
Asking for forgiveness was definitely not on their radar!
Neither of them could come down from their feelings to apologize to the other. Martha felt not only did she not deserve a telling off, but more-over she deserved high praise. Sam felt upset that Martha didn’t know him well enough to know this was not something that would make him happy.
Each felt their pain was greater than the other and neither was willing to admit their actions had caused the other pain. Even though it was unintentionally.
As time work on they stopped enjoying each other’s company because they held a grudge they weren’t willing to let go of.
Letting Go is Essential to Seeing someone else’s pain
It wasn’t until they finally came to therapy that they were willing to see things from a different perspective and willing to let go of their bruised egos and apologize and ask forgiveness from one another.
Once they asked for forgiveness and genuinely were able to understand one another’s perspectives were they willing to let things go and allow one another back into their hearts.
They both endured a lot of unnecessary suffering, however this experience taught them that by taking a step back, seeing their partner’s perspective and letting go they could build their love much better than before.
To check out more on building your love and keeping it alive check out my other blogs, vlogs and podcasts on www.mickilavinpell.co.il
Why Invest in Relationship Skills Before Finding Love?
No one wants to live with a feeling that disaster can strike at any time. However, we all take precautions to make sure that in the event that something bad does happen, we’re covered for major, albeit unlikely or seldom occurrences. Invest time in learning about who we are and what makes some partners more right for you than others is essential.
Many of us take precautions to make sure that we can live with peace of mind. Those of us with valuables have home and contents insurance, in the event a thief invades our home and takes off with our precious belongings.
Prevention
Those of us who have a car take it in for a regular service so that it’ll drive more smoothly, so that we feel safe and protected when we’re on the road.
We don’t wait for our teeth to go rotten before seeing a dentist. Therefore, we visit a dental hygienist from time to time.
For some reason, when it comes to general health, even though we may have health insurance, many of us tend to utilize it only once disaster has struck as opposed to taking advantages of its preventative services to keep us as healthy as possible.
Similarly, when it comes to our relationships, many simply rely on fate. They think they should just suffer and face the music when the time comes. For now we love each other, and they hope and pray things will carry on that way.
Given the divorce rate is very nearly 50%, it seems like throwing caution to the wind may be a dangerous way to run our lives. To just hope for the best, rather than take actual preventative measures to ensure our marriage runs as smoothly as possible doesn’t sound like much of an insurance policy.
One of the reasons many people don’t avail themselves of preventative relationship services is a lack of awareness. There are several health prevention programs around, yet still most marriage therapists focus on helping marriages in crises. Few are trained in preventative approaches.
Many read self-help books about how to keep their relationships healthy and think that alone will ward off all gloom and doom in their marriage.
While self-help books can help a lot with encouraging healthy behavior patterns, they do little to help a couple who have, for example, experienced challenging relationships in the past. Moreover, people can have all the information at their fingertips about what they need to do to create a more loving relationship, but applying the information in real time when faced with a partner that looks and sounds like a wild dragon spewing fire out of its nostrils, is another story entirely.
Dr Sue Johnson, an acclaimed expert on love and relationships, says that when we feel triggered by something our partner does, even if their intentions are good, this can make us feel like they are against us. When we feel threatened and our sensors are down and we’re not expecting it, we react badly.
Self-help books don’t give couples awareness about their past and knowledge about how this may influence their future relationship dynamics.
Awareness is Key
The more aware we are of what we bring into a relationship the better able we will be to choose a partner who will trigger us less and with whom we can be our most real and vulnerable selves.
Furthermore, the more aware we are of our past relationship wounds, the more we can heal these and become more reflective as opposed to reactive, the better able we will be to withstand relationship challenges.
Click here to read more:
https://gethelpisrael.com/why-invest-in-your-relationship-skills-before-you-even-find-love/
Book Review: Marry Him: Case for Settling…
Does the idea of Settling for love petrify you? Lori Gottleib knows all too well, as she is a 45 year old single Mom at the time of writing this book. She thoroughly researches what makes women run away from a potentially good man…She makes an excellent case to Marry Mr. Good Enough.
A soundtrack to #MeToo – ‘Toy’ by Netta
While Toy, the female empowerment song is great for helping women feeling stronger. It begs the question, where do men fit in?
Make the Facebook Dating App work for you!
The best dating apps can suggest the best person for you, but if your relationships skills suck you may blow your chances for finding true love…
Make your Relationship Feel more Free?
The more aware Daniel and Rebecca became of their emotions that were fueling their dynamic, the better able they were to calm down and not feel afraid they were losing themselves in this relationship. The more they felt they understood themselves, the better they were able to express what they needed from one another.
They couldn’t always get things exactly the way they wanted it, but at least they felt their partner wanted the best for them, which was even more important.
When we feel we’re in a relationship where our partner has our back, this feeling of safety and security gives us the greatest feeling of FREEDOM!
Should You Stay Together for the Sake of the Kids?
Tammy was torn about what to do. She was married for fifteen years and had three children with her husband, Tom. As a couple, Tammy and her husband had many ups and downs. Getting married young and having made Aliyah on their own shortly before they met, they found comfort in knowing that someone had their back. Early on in their marriage they used to turn to one another during hard times. Once the kids came around and work demands increased along with strains on their budget, they began to share less emotionally. Tom found himself with longer hours at work, needing to unwind before coming home. He knew once he walked through the door, the kids would jump on him and Tammy would expect him to help out.
Tammy became increasingly more resentful as her interior design career took off. She had many challenging clients that expected her to always be available during every building hiccough. This combined with having to tend to the needs of her three demanding children meant that her “me time” was scant and precious. But Tammy never wanted to rock the boat so she suffered in silence.
Slowly the couple began doing things more independently and while the household continued to function, they felt less connected. Neither wanted to talk to the other about how they felt as each feared hurting the other.
(To read more continue here:)
Why Staying Together for the Kids Isn’t Doing Anyone Any Favours
Top Tips on How to Consciously Create Love
By consciously coupling and considering carefully how you want to connect with your partner, you can create a lifelong loving relationship.
Top 5 Ways to Upgrade Your Relationship
When we upgrade our devices we expect a newer better functioning system that works with similar parameters. Upgrading our relationship is no different. We needn’t throw away what we have to get the upgrade we require. By acknowledging new realizations and awareness about what we need from a relationship, we don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater and start from scratch. We can just reboot, and incorporate the changes by acknowledging what we need from ourselves and gingerly yet directly, communicate what we need from our partner.
Book Review for Hold Me Tight, by Dr. Sue Johnson
When most couples first get married, they believe that their job is done. The hard part is behind them. They have met the love of their life and now they can happily breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that they have found the ONE.
Of course, the bubble usually pops at some point, usually after the marriage. Couples realize new things about their partners that they never noticed before. Raw spots get triggered. Often painful and lonely moments creep in. Feelings of hurt and abandonment arise as our dream partner says or does the wrong thing, hits a raw nerve, behaves less than perfectly.
In Sue Johnson’s seminal book, Hold Me Tight, she describes these painful moments as she vividly describes couples who were just about ready to throw in the towel thinking they must have married the WRONG ONE! She vividly illustrates how our early childhood attachment wounds (a theory developed by 1950’s psychologist John Bowlby) remain with us as we choose partners in hopes of healing those wounds. Yet instead despite all of our best efforts, we reach for partners who trigger those same wounds, for the simple reason that we are attracted to that which we know.
http://amzn.to/2tI6hb1
Hold Me Tight is an attempt to offer couples a window into a better understanding about how our connection with our partners can sometimes go awry. She also explains how our demon dialogues – those pesky conversations we replay time and again with the love of our life – can be transformed to Hold Me Tight moments.
In this book, Sue Johnson uses seven primary examples of where most couples will go wrong. She eloquently demonstrates how rewriting these pain inducing conversations, by hearing one another’s deepest fears and seeing our partner in a new light using the attachment goggles, can help bring couples together as they gain a better understanding and appreciation for the other’s wounds.
Hold Me Tight and the theory that underpins the book, “Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy” (EFT), represents a groundbreaking approach to couples therapy. EFT has 20 years of research to back it up. While most schools of couples therapy yields results as low as 35%, EFT touts results as high as 75%.
The EFT approach is so groundbreaking that creators of other well-known programs including John Gottman (the Gottman Method) and Harville Hendrix (Imago Therapy) support the use of this technique for first line treatment in order to heal the couple’s wounds.
Click here to purchase a copy of the book.