Showing all posts tagged healthy patterns

Cultivating Emotional Connectedness in Your Relationships

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Cultivating Emotional Connectedness in Your Relationships

How often do you find yourself thinking, “We’re just not as close as I wish we were,”? You might have this wish about any relationship, a partner, a friend, a family member.  When you don’t feel as connected as you’d like to be to someone you love, it can feel destabilizing and incredibly dissatisfying. If you’ve had this particular conversation with said loved one, expressing your desire to be more connected and you’re still not experiencing the closeness you desire, it can begin to feel hopeless.

Sometimes the two of you can have conversations about this that feel helpful. It allows you to feel that you’re working together to shift this, to deepen the relationship. Other times, you feel as though your conversations go nowhere and you’re on your own. You’re both dissatisfied with the level of emotional connectedness, but it feels as though the other member of your relationship is unwilling to put in the work.

Whichever less-than-ideal situation you find yourself, there are things you can do to empower yourself which will help you to take active steps toward cultivating the emotional connected you seek.

An important place to start is by showing up for yourself. Showing up for yourself allows you to feel self-supporting, nurtured, and in touch with your resilience. This might look different for each person, but there are some basics. Taking care of your health is an essential target that many people miss. Balancing the time you need for sleep, exercise, work, and play doesn’t always feel like a choice. It helps if you look at how you choose to spend your days. Whether you are going to school, pursuing a dream of starting your own business, or working two or three jobs. Ask yourself if this is your choice. If it’s not then the next question you might want to ask yourself is “why am I doing this?” If you answered, “because I have to,” take some time to check in with yourself about why. Most of us have more choices than immediately occur to us. Showing up for yourself also looks like employing thoughtful and nonreactive self-advocacy when you don’t like the way you are being spoken to or treated. You can show up for yourself by being protective of your time and ensuring that you provide down time for yourself. Showing up for yourself also means not taking on more in a relationship than you what you genuinely feel comfortable. This means emotional, financial, household, and any other type of responsibility. When you show up for yourself you are less likely to martyr yourself in relationship, more likely to show up fully for others, and less likely to experience feelings of resentment.

A second strength you can exercise to cultivate emotional connection is finding compassionate curiosity in yourself about the other person. Why does this person do what they do, say what they say, react the way they react? What is their experience in their relationship with you? You’ll notice that I put the words “compassionate” and curiosity” right next to one another. This curiosity is something that will benefit you and your quest the more genuine it is so, be sure to practice it freely and often. Ask your loved one how they experienced what you’ve just said that’s gotten them so upset. Allow yourself to be open to their feelings. This isn’t the time to defend yourself; you want to know why they’re upset, not how you can get yourself off the hook. I get that it can be difficult to feel compassionately curious about anything when you’re arguing with someone or engaged in an escalating conversation. Try it out when you are feeling calm or only mildly irritated. When you allow yourself to be genuinely and compassionately curious about someone you love the conversation can become about understanding and less about arguing and yelling over one another.

Another great way to work toward emotional connectedness is by exercising active listening. (This can also be used while you are compassionately curious!) When you are actively listening to someone with whom you are trying to build your emotional connection, you are not seeking convenient places to jump in to argue your case, set up your next defense, or find inconsistencies in their statements. You are trying to find out how they are feeling, what they are thinking, what their experience is, and what has caused them to think, feel, and experience these things. How can you find out this valuable information when you are preparing what you’re doing to say next? (The answer is: you cannot.) You want this person to hear you, right? They want you to hear them, too. Start by slowing down these interactions and give them your full attention. It will catch on.

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Learn How to Take Control of Your Fear

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Learn How to Take Control of Your Fear

If you’ve ever had that uneasy feeling of insecurity creep in while you’re working on a project or sitting in a meeting, you’re not alone. Maybe you’ve had thoughts like, “Do I even know what I’m doing? Am I good enough at this?” or “Everyone else sounds like they know what they’re talking about. They’re going to think I look stupid.” This is an incredibly painful and scary place to be.

You might do all sorts of things to avoid letting people see how insecure you are.  Maybe you keep quiet when you want to share an idea. Perhaps you don’t ask for clarification about something when you know you need it. Maybe keeping quiet isn’t your style and instead, you speak your mind, but not about the relevant issue at hand; you joke or talk in circles about the issue. You might take on a lot more responsibility than you can handle to prove your competence to others (and to yourself). There are a lot of different ways to hide insecurity.

Why is it so compelling to go to these lengths of protection against allowing others to see your self-doubt? Well, when you’re insecure about your ability, your skill, or your worth you’ve usually been comparing yourself to other people, generally in your group or cohort. Chances are, your cohort is important to you (as it is for most of us), and so is their acceptance and opinion. You fear their judgment, appearing one-dimensional, being misunderstood. You begin to feel that losing your membership to this group is a real possibility, that you could be excluded. As a human, you are a social being, driven to connect; you are motivated by relationships so, the threat of losing them is terrifying. You avoid exclusion and isolation from your group at all cost.

But when you’re focused on protecting yourself from pain and rejection, you’re not authentic which means you’re not being seen for who you are. Your group doesn’t get to see the real you and your bonds are not as strong as they might be. You’re trading one type of isolation for another. It can be easy to lose yourself in this and begin to develop more feelings of fear and loneliness.

What can you do? You don’t want to feel like this, but you don’t want them to find out you’re not as good as they think you are. There are many things you can do, but here are just a few. Here is the first recommendation:

 

-You’re going to have to stop thinking of yourself as, “not as good as they think you are.” That sounds like a substantial change in thought habit and it is, but it’s necessary. We can talk more about it. I’m not saying you don’t ever get to feel insecure again- it’s still an option (if you want it). Start slowly at first. For 10 or 15 minutes a day you will allow yourself to do something that gets you in touch with feeling your talent, worth, and expertise, on your way to becoming even more skilled. You can increase this time as you get the hang of it. This will build your confidence and increase your comfort with thinking more highly of yourself.

 

-Next, you have to allow yourself to say, “I don’t know.” You have to be able to say it to yourself and others. This will allow you to see that a) the earth doesn’t swallow you up if you don’t know everything and b) you can increase genuine self -confidence without knowing all the answers. I guarantee that you will find a sense of freedom the more you allow yourself to say, “I don’t know.”

-Finally, when someone compliments you or your work, start taking it in. Don’t push it aside. Don’t intellectualize it away until it’s meaningless. Allow yourself to feel positivity in it, however slight. Feel free to ask for specific feedback on the compliment, too, so that you can hold onto concrete examples of what someone appreciated about you or your work.

 

These are a few things that are helpful in getting the ball rolling away from your “fear of being found out,” toward the satisfaction and peace of living more authentically, enjoying increased self-confidence and more genuine relationships. People get to interact with you, not your defenses.

 

Love and Be Loved,

Natalie