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Great Relationships: Learning, Loving, and Serving
We come into this world in relationship, first within our mother’s womb, then our immediate families, and then moving out into our social environments. How we were treated and thus shaped within these relationships determine to a large extent how we later create our own adult relationships. Since we are wired with certain dispositions, these become unconscious relationship patterns that get replicated with those we attract. Within these relationships is where we find the keys to our own healing, growth, and a way to serve others in our offering of the same. In thinking about our most meaningful relationships, they inevitably contain opportunities where we can reflect on our own behavior and make changes for the better. Here we also learn more about what real love is (often not what many of us experienced growing up) and how to give it by serving another with the intention of bringing forth their best. This is what has us attach more deeply than the superficial relationships we have with much of the world and to open ourselves more fully so as to take in the nurturing and love that helps us heal. As I often say to my clients, “We were wounded in relationship and it is in relationship where must we heal.” We may wonder why we attract the friends or partners that we do. From both my training and clinical experience, I find it almost always comes down to that we attract people at the same (or very similar) level of emotional maturity or self-differentiation. We learn the most about ourselves with others and we unconsciously choose those who are similar enough so as to reflect those parts of ourselves that we need to tweak, heal or more fully develop. Because of these similarities, usually because they emotionally represent family familiarities, it is in these relationships where we can fully be ourselves, where we can let our hair down, where we can trust our partner with our vulnerabilities. Ideally, it is here where we can be the most real because we get mirrored back who we really are. However it also happens that what we get back can be a distorted mirroring coming from our partner’s own issues and this is where it gets interesting and often sobering. It can turn into high drama deciding whose issue is whose and how to sort out which is which. This is where the art of loving can play a central part, as we step out of our egos (the judgment of right/wrong) and move into our hearts. We can do this by pausing for a moment, taking a few breaths, and asking inside what would be the loving thing to do. Here is where the serving part of relationship emerges, where we give to our partner without thinking of ourselves. And in doing so love is what is often returned. One can only imagine the kind of transformed relationship that becomes possible when this kind of loving and serving becomes a continuing reciprocity. Another way to think about relationships is as part of one’s spiritual path, with the intentionality for mutual learning, loving, and serving. If we each commit to this every day and help each other stay conscious along the way, the rewards of an emotionally connected, vital and passionate relationship are way beyond anything we could have individually imagined or created. Michael Mongno, MFT, Ph.D, LP, is a
licensed psychoanalyst and relationship
counselor in Manhattan. He is the
founder of Present Centered Therapies,
which synthesizes Gestalt and Cognitive
Behavioral therapies, Eastern spirituality,
and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy.
He brings a wealth of successful experience
with a wide range of couples issues as well
as down-to-earth wisdom and modern
sensibility to what it takes to create healthy,
loving, and empowered relationships. Please
visit PresentCenteredTherapies.com or call
(212) 799-0001 for more information. |
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