The Key To Healing Your Relationships Lies In This One Question

Margaret Paul

• Do you see your beautiful essence and deeply value who you are, or do you often judge yourself, telling yourself that you are not good enough or not "something else" enough? Do you loathe yourself instead of value yourself?
• Do you tune into what you want and what is most loving to you and say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no? Do you speak up for yourself, or do you give yourself up, doing what others want you to do, to control how they feel about you, not speaking up for your beautiful self?
• Do you take loving care of your physical body with healthy food, exercise, and enough sleep, or do you eat junk food, resist exercise, and stay up too late?
• Are you expressing your passion and purpose, either in your work or your free time, or do you keep yourself in a job you hate or squash your gifts and talents?
• Do you create a balance between work and play, or do you overwork or resist taking loving action for yourself regarding creativity, play, and rest?

These are just a few examples of actions that indicate whether you're self-loving or self-abandoning. Let's explore this more deeply.

The mirror of relationships.

The thing is, others often treat us the way we treat ourselves—especially in close relationships. So if your current relationship is problematic, instead of focusing on your partner, go inside and see if your partner is mirroring how you treat yourself. Be honest with yourself. If you don’t like how your partner is treating you, take a look at how you are treating yourself. While you are not in control of your partner and you don’t cause him or her to be unloving, how you treat yourself might be having a very large influence on how your partner treats you.
If you are currently not in a relationship and you have been attracting people who are unavailable or controlling, again look within to see how you might actually be unavailable, or how you are judging yourself as a form of control. We tend to attract at our common level of self-love or self-abandonment.

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The good news.

The good news is that it’s much easier to change yourself than to change someone else! In fact, it’s impossible to change someone else, and all the energy people exert to get others to change is a big waste of energy.
We all have free will, so at any moment you can choose to abandon yourself or to take loving care of yourself. You can choose to judge yourself or numb your feelings with addictions, or make someone else responsible for your feelings, or you can choose to open to learning about what is true regarding who you really are and what is in your highest good at the moment.
We all have the ability to ask ourselves each moment, "What is true right now, and what is most loving to myself right now—what is in my highest good?" By asking this question, you take the focus away from self-abandonment and move it toward self-love. The more you behave in ways that support self-value, the more you will see this reflected in how others treat you.
Can you see how loving yourself can heal your relationship or lead to a wonderful new relationship? Can you see that, in fact, learning to love yourself is the only way to improve your relationship or to attract the kind of relationship you want? I thought so.