After the First Kiss by Chantal Heide

Author:Chantal Heide [Heide, Chantal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chantal Heide
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

I Get You

One of the most connecting factors in a relationship is feeling like you’re understood. It seems the more we think someone sees us for who we are, the closer we feel to them.

“We seek to be understood,” I often say, and it truly is a seeking when it comes to coupling. We want to be with someone who’s with us for all of who we are. None of us are perfect, but most of us are striving to be someone who can make those we love happy. If we can be recognized as good people despite our ever changing and evolving faults, if we can be recognized as fundamentally okay and don’t constantly feel misunderstood; our minds relax and we can focus on decisions that will make us better every day.

It’s not fair to ask for what you’re not willing to give first. You’re going to hear me say this often when it comes to relationship advice, and it’s an important factor when addressing the complaint that “He just doesn’t understand me!” If you’re feeling misunderstood in your love relationship, the question is: How hard are you trying to understand him? If you’re feeling he doesn’t get how to be a great partner, have you looked at his upbringing to see if he had good role models? Are you trying to understand where his behaviour comes from before bashing him for it?

If you do, you’ll start to inject compassion into your relationship. Oh, I get that you have trouble coming up with a functional way of settling fights because you grew up with a fighting mom and dad who never modeled a different way of being. I get that you have trouble knowing how much attention to give to your relationship because you had an absentee father, and nobody showed you what being a great partner is.

If every time you look at his unwanted behaviour and try to find the source rather than fight it out of him, two things are going to happen. One, he’s going to love you more for wanting to understand rather than fight, and two, your compassion will feed your insight on how to functionally change his behaviours.

Show him what connecting is on a spirit level by listening to him talk about his upbringing and anything else that conditioned his behaviours, like exes. My first husband taught me how to not fight by showing me that angry behaviour didn’t have a place in our relationship. The first three times I reverted to yelling and explosive anger he simply left the room, leaving me standing by myself in stunned silence. Who was I going to fight with if there was nobody else around? I quickly learned that this was ideal, that once the initial storm of emotions wore down I was in a better frame of mind to evaluate and recognize where responsibility lay. Apologies were quick to follow, and voila! We were rolling along smoothly again.

I brought this insight and methodology to

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