What Conscious Partners Know – 18 and 19
- Having a healthy relationship is the best thing they can do for their physical and emotional health.
- The quality of their relationship shapes the relational, emotional, and cognitive future of their children, if they have any.
Having a Healthy Relationship
- Having a healthy relationship is the best thing they can do for their physical and emotional health.
There is an eighty-five-year study out of Harvard uncovering what contributes most to one’s well-being and happiness. The study found the most important factors were caring for your health and building loving relationships. Not money, cars, houses, or business success – good relationships keep us happier and healthier. The important thing is connection, having someone trustworthy to rely on. It is the quality of your close relationships that matters; connecting with people who light you up. It is important to make time for the people who matter the most to you.
Harville and Helen add: “The quality of the relationship is determined by how two people steward the Space-Between.” Negativity in the space between causes disconnect, and what you want is connection. Negativity is to your relationship as cancer is to your body. They both kill.
Coming at this statement from a different direction, for years I taught Stress Management courses at St. Clair College. The stress response is an evolutionary response to danger. If the lion attacks, you had better be on full alert or you are lunch. Althouogh, the body cannot sustain being on high alert 24/7. Every molecule in our bodies goes on high alert when there is perceived danger.
Chronic stress has unhealthy physical effects like high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, and strokes. Chronic stress can also have a significant impact on one’s mental health, potentially causing or worsening conditions like anxiety, depression and substance use disorders. That is why safety is so important in an intimate relationship. When you feel safe, you are relaxed, not stressed.
In a healthy relationship, there is no stress. Granted, there are stresses out there – in the workplace, politics, in-laws, out-laws, etc., but home needs to be a place that is stress-free.
Quality of Relationship
- The quality of their relationship shapes the relational, emotional, and cognitive future of their children, if they have any.
When I first studied with Harville in 1979, the mantra of the Imago Community went something like: How do we raise healthier children. Well, who are the primary role models for kids, except their parents? If the parents’ relationship is healthy, they will do less damage to their children, who in turn will do less damage to their children. And we break the cycle of poor parenting and bad relationships that has gone on for far too long in many families. Those of us who have children know how observant youngsters are. They see everything and are impacted on all levels: relational, emotional and cognitive by what they observe. For sure none of us is perfect, but by modeling healthier relationships to our children we are doing them a huge favor.
