Relationships require deep sense of connection and vulnerability. To stay in love with another you constantly need to fall in love with all your imperfections. Self-compassion and self-work helps in giving space and dealing with conflicts with maturity in couple relationships.
In couple relationships, conflicts are inevitable; how you stay through the conflicts and navigate through them it will help you understand yourself and your partner. When conflicts take place between couples- there is hurt, pain and distance. These uncomfortable feelings emerge as a way of coping with the pain of separation. This could be because of an early childhood trauma or even the trauma of love. Receiving and giving love may be difficult for some people due to traumatic events in one’s life. When a partner hurts, and the other has the trauma of love, he/she could be afraid of attachment to the partner and may look upto the partner as a parent to resolve the conflict. The dance of hurt carries on to cover up the wound of love. One could come up with constant faults of partner to deal with the conflict and the conflict is never resolved.
How could you resolve the couple conflicts effectively?
Safety of connection- Understand that when conflict takes place in a couple relationship the partners want the other to reassure about the safety of the connection. It is also important to understand that more the conflict at hand, the partners could be responding from their own inner child wounds. Self work on healing the inner child wounds can help the couple immensely.
Taking responsibility- The partners in couple relationships are equal, it is not a parent child relationship. Remembering your individual strengths as a person and your capacity to love could help in resolving the issue at hand.
Love grows- Bert Hellinger, founder of family constellation spoke about how love grows in the connection. When the partner in the relationship hurts, you hurt them a little less than how much they have hurt you and when they give love, you give them more love. This helps in maintaining balance in the relationships and love grows deeper.
Include all- what if you accept and include that conflict does cause pain, it does cause distance and that’s the way love still stays between the couple. There is no need to judge the feelings of hurt, distance as bad. Acknowledging this is also part of love and will you move closer to your partner and excluding these uncomfortable feelings will only create distance between the couple.
Acknowledging- if you acknowledge and honor the sacredness of these feelings and be kind to our human experiences the relationship can grow and evolve.
Seek support- seeking support and relying on your personal resources could help. Reaching out to qualified therapists might help people resolve their conflicts.
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