If there was anything you could do to mend your relationship, would you? Find out why your relationship may be failing and how to fix it.
You should know that the biggest cause of relationship failure is self-abandonment.
When you surrender emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, relational, and/or organizationally, your partner automatically becomes responsible for you.
When you hold another person responsible for your feelings of self-worth and well-being, you then try to manipulate them into loving you, approving you, and giving you what you want. The controlling behavior that results from self-surrender leads to great relationship problems.
Here are 6 types of self-abandonment and how it can affect your relationship:
1 Relational self-abandonment.
When you surrender to another through conformity or resistance, you create a lack of trust that creates conflict, disconnection, and resentment.
2 Spiritual surrender.
When your intention in a relationship is to get love rather than share it, you are unfairly relying on your partner for their attention, approval, or time. When you don’t take responsibility for learning to connect to a spiritual source of your own, your urge can create relationship problems.
3 emotional abandonment
Growing up, many of us suffered from loneliness, grief, and helplessness. These are very important feelings and, unless we had loving parents who were there to help us, we had to find strategies to avoid them.
We’ve learned four ways to avoid these painful, basic feelings, and they now create our feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, and anger, as well as our relationship issues:
a) We judge ourselves instead of accepting ourselves.
The self-judgment creates a lot of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, and emptiness, and can lead to many dependencies to avoid these feelings.
b) We ignore our feelings by leaving them in our head instead of being present in our body.
When you haven’t learned to deal with your feelings, you want to avoid them. Do you find yourself focused on your head rather than your body, more or less oblivious to your feelings?
When you stay in your head to avoid responsibility for your feelings, you cannot emotionally connect with your partner.
c) We look to various addictions to numb the anxiety, depression, emptiness, guilt, shame, and anger that develop when we judge ourselves and ignore our feelings.
Addiction like too much alcohol, drugs, food, television, gambling, overspending, work, etc. can create a lot of conflicts and distancing in relationships.
d) We hold our partner or others responsible for our feelings.
Many relationships fall into a dysfunctional system, such as when one person gets angry and the other pulls out or resists, or both get angry or pull out. In some systems, one is angry and the other is compliant, which seems to work until the compliant partner holds a grudge. In all of these systems, each person is emotionally surrendering, which is the root cause of the dysfunctional relationship.
4 Financial abandonment.
If you refuse to take responsibility for yourself financially, and you wait for your partner to do so, it can cause problems. It is okay if your partner agrees to take financial responsibility for you and you fully accept how he or she takes that responsibility. But if you choose to be financially irresponsible, such as overspending, or trying to control how your partner makes or manages money, it can create a lot of conflicts.
5 Organizational self-abandonment.
If you are unwilling to take responsibility for your time and space and are always late and / or busy and your partner is punctual and / or neat, it can create huge power struggles and resentment in your relationship.
6 Physical abandonment.
If you refuse to take care of yourself physically by eating poorly and not exercising, which could lead to serious health problems, your partner may feel resentful in taking care of you. Your physical abandonment not only has negative consequences for your health and well-being, but also for your partner, which can lead to conflicts and power struggles.
Learn to love yourself instead of letting go.
Learning to love yourself is the key to a loving relationship because self-abandonment creates an inner void that relies on others to fill you, self-love creates inner fullness. Self-love fills your heart and soul with love, thus enabling you to share your love with your partner.
