Healthy relationships

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Healthy Relationships

Relationships have four key elements that can range from healthy to unhealthy. They are:

Self-worth — Your sense of who you are in a relationship and as an individual can range from high to low. Your sense of your own worth directly affects you, your partner, and the relationship.

Communication — We all communicate through what we say, what we don’t say, how we say it, our body language, our eyes. What we communicate or fail to communicate shapes the level of honesty, directness, and clarity in our relationships.

Rules or agreements — Understanding what the rules or agreements in relationships are enables them to work with some order. This can range from agreeing that it’s all right for your mate to share your french fries to agreeing to have a designated driver. When rules aren’t communicated clearly, confusion exists and expectations often aren’t met.

Link to others — Individuals and couples do not exist in isolation. When they try to isolate themselves, to operate separately from the rest of the world, they create serious problems for themselves as individuals and as a couple.

Feeling good, feeling worthy in a relationship can only happen when “individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible.” (1)

There are three parts to a couple: ME, YOU, AND US. Each has a life of its own, and, in healthy relationships, each contributes to each of the others. (2) If any one of the three dominates, the relationship falls out of balance.

The questions to ask yourself are as follows:

1. Is my (other person’s) feeling of self-worth positive or negative?

2. How do I (s/he and we) communicate, and what happens as a result?

3. What kinds of rules do I (s/he and we) follow, and how well do they work for me (us)?

4. How am I (s/he and we) linked to others, and what are the results?

(1) Source: Virginia Satir, Peoplemaking, Science and Behavior Books, Palo Alto, CA (1972), p.26.
(2) Source: Gerald Walker Smith and Alice J. Phillips, Me, You and Us, Peter Wyden. Inc., New York (1971).