WHEN YOU GET YOUR PARTNER STRAIGHTENED OUT
[CHAPTER 3]
Many of you still have this childlike notion that you don't have to take too much responsibility for finding your own happiness. You still believe the fairy tale that falling in love means finding someone who is going to make you live happily ever after.
And when that fairy tale turns out to be untrue, you want to point the finger, to blame, to believe that all the unpleasant things you are experiencing in your relationship are being caused by your partner. Your unhappiness, you believe, is the result of your partner's deeds. Your life would be so much better, you say to yourself, if your partner would just change. As a result, you conclude, there's little you can do until your partner shapes up his or her act.
You assume that if you could just modify your partner's thinking, feeling and behavior, your relationship would be so much better.
That's a myth. The most important person for you to influence is yourself. You are the most important person in this relationship, and you must be the focus of your beginning efforts to change this relationship. You must rediscover your own dignity and self-esteem - your own personal power. You cannot reconnect with your partner if you are not reconnectable.
Understand that I am not saying you are to blame for the problems that my exist in your relationship. But I am saying that you are, at the very least, jointly accountable for the current state of your relationship.
If your relationship is not everything that you want it to be, then it's your thinking, your attitudes, and your emotions that need challenging. You have flaws, fallacies and characteristics that either destructively stimulate your partner, or through which you destructively respond to your partner.
As I have said, you have chose to live a lifestyle that leads to a bad relationship.
You have chosen these behaviors, thoughts and feelings because at some level they work for you. At some level these characteristics or interactive patterns have provided you with a payoff that has reinforced the recurrence of these behaviors. If you find the payoffs, you have found the lifeline that keeps the destructive behaviors alive and recurring. Once you identify the payoffs, you can shut them off and remove them from your life. Once the behavior no longer works for you, once it rails to generate you some payoff, it will cease to occur.
Instead of waiting for your partner to change, you can and will serve yourself much better by looking at yourself instead of your partner. What kind of payoffs are you affording yourself that are keeping these destructive patterns alive?
So you can either stay self-centered and keep blaming your partner, or you can make the choice to be self-directed and start working for real change. You either can fill yourself up with impotent anger at your partner, or you can choose to get busy and stimulate your relationship to get headed in the right direction. You can either let your partner dictate your behavior, or you can own your own thoughts and attitudes, both of which will be chosen with a clear objective in mind.
I guarantee you by the end of this book, you will inspire your partner to behave and think and feel in different ways. But never think you can control your partner. And never think that it's up to your partner to make your life better. You are in charge of yourself.