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Relationships: repeating your mistakes?

08 February, 2012 05:32:00 Suzanne Styles

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You CAN avoid repeating the mistakes you made in your last relationship: you just need to examine and change your relationship paradigms.

How many times have you sat sobbing into your tissues, wondering what you did wrong, and how you could have been so stupid? I know that we’ve all been there more than once, searching for that elusive relationship, looking for the magical one, your “Mr Right”.

From birth we are brought up to live from the outside in

Everything we are and everything we feel is programmed into us through our five senses; sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. The environment in which we grow up, conditions us, creates our paradigms [habits], our paradigms create our behaviours and our behaviours give us our results.

Why do we repeat mistakes in relationships?

Have you ever wondered why someone who comes from an abusive home often finds that they end up in abusive relationships?
It’s their paradigm, their norm, to them, that’s how relationships are supposed to be. The same often occurs in the case of parents with partners who are unfaithful, and you wonder, why do you always meet men that cheat?

Then you start to generalise that all men are the same, but that’s not the case, you just keep attracting the same type of men to you that match your paradigm.

Examine what went wrong in your last relationship

Do you know what your relationship paradigms and behaviours are; do you know what you are thinking about all the time when it comes to relationships?

Look at the result of your last relationship, what went wrong, who did what, whose behaviour caused what reaction and you will begin to identify the cycle of actions that started the rot, and contributed to not only that relationship, but many of your other relationships failing.

Don’t carry baggage into new relationships

When you look at these paradigms, look at them in the context of how they impacted on your last partner, what were his paradigms, the no go areas between you both? The older we are in the dating game, the more important it is to really understand where we’re coming from.

Post 30 we have scars, bad experiences and baggage, and it’s essential that we don’t keep carrying this over and over into new relationships.

You can change your paradigms, even if they’re entrenched in you from your childhood

You can design new paradigms, behaviours that serve you in a far more positive way going into your next relationship. Take some time to sit and think about all your positive attributes, everything that is good about you and write them down in a list on the left hand side of a piece of paper.

Then on the right hand side write down all the bad attributes you have, the negative behaviours that have caused you to attract the wrong partner for you. It doesn’t matter how many you have on your list, just write them all down.

When you have finished cut the piece of paper in half and burn the piece with all the negative and bad attributes written on it, watch all that negativity go up in flames, it is so cathartic.

Don’t forget your positive attributes

After doing this take some time to review your positive attributes, are there any that you might like to add? Add them all on to your list until you can’t think of anymore.

Then take a fresh piece of paper and write the following;

I am so happy and grateful now that I am; and write down all the attributes you want to have that you can connect with, that you can feel deep inside. When you have written them all down read that piece of paper. Read it every day, because they are your thoughts.

Reading them every day elicits a feeling from you, this feeling causes an action and in turn, your actions cause results - different results because you’re changing your paradigms. Try it; you’ll be amazed at the outcome.

About the author:

Suzanne Styles is a certified Thinking Into Results Facilitator, Master Life Coach and Entrepreneur with extensive business and life experience. She works with individuals, couples and companies in order to extract the very best results for them in that which they are invested. Suzanne together with her husband Chris Styles founded Makes You Think in 2011, Suzanne and Chris host Relationship, Self Esteem and ‘Breaking Through the Terror Barrier’ workshops countrywide, for more information please view our website www.makesyouthink.co.za

You can contact Suzanne by email suzanne@makesyouthink.co.za or on her mobile +27 (0)71 360 8656 and Chris by email chris@makesyouthink.co.za or on his mobile +27 (0) 83 625 6844.

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