Signs You Are Struggling With Healthy Relationships

It is easy to point the finger at the other person in a relationship and blame them for the challenges in creating a healthy partnership. Almost everyone has experienced a bad relationship due to another person's actions, thoughts, or behaviors, which is often a part of dating.

If you constantly struggle to create or maintain a healthy relationship, it may not be the other person. It may be something within you that limits your ability to engage fully and in a healthy, positive, and balanced way.

Assessing Your Relationship Style

A good starting point in assessing your ability to enter into and create a healthy relationship is to look for repeating patterns of thought around relationships, people, and your beliefs.

This can be an eye-opening introspection, but it provides you with the opportunity to identify where you need to focus on your own personal growth. Working with a therapist or life coach can help to recognize these patterns of thinking and develop the internal change needed to stop struggling and to find a healthy relationship.

There are five different thoughts or ways of being that make it difficult to be comfortable in a relationship. These include:

• Distrustful—in this thought pattern, you see everyone as damaged or "leftover" with all the good partners taken or not interested in you. This limits your ability to trust a person interested in you is a good person interested in the good in you. This can also be a place of fear of others.
• Over-the-top pleaser—sometimes called the people-pleaser, this pattern includes thinking the only way to keep people loving you is to exceed their expectations on every level. You see yourself as having to constantly do everything the other person wants in order to "earn" their love.
• Keep back—in this avoidant type of pattern, you keep partners at a safe distance, and if they begin to feel too connected or too close, you back off to a new distance.
• Always worried—you are always waiting for the shoe to drop and your partner to reject you or leave. This creates a constant sense of worry about the state of the relationship. This may also be called an anxious type of pattern.
• Back and forth—in this pattern, you are sometimes very much attached and needy of the other partner, while in other relationships, you push away emotionally from the partner.

It can be difficult to see yourself in these patterns, or you may see yourself in more than one. The key point to remember is any of these patterns of attachment can change if you are willing to acknowledge the issue and work towards a healthier pattern of thinking and behaving.

Read more in Love Smacked: How to Stop the Cycle of Relationship Addiction and Codependency to Find Everlasting Love and Wake Up Recovery for Codependents.