Why a Relationship with Yourself is Just as Important as Relationships with Others
‘Wedding season’ has been upon us since the summer and isn’t looking to die down until after the autumn months have given way to the colder winter ones – June through early-November consistently holds the title for Most Popular when it comes to weddings. It’s not uncommon for people to find themselves in the audience time and again, watching their friends tie the knot as you think about what gift you’ll get the next couple in your life, and it could be a time that exacerbates loneliness. Afterall, the couple is happy and thriving and in love – all things that some of us find ourselves yearning for.
That might not be a big deal for some, but others struggle with this feeling and finding healthy ways to combat it. This could be from lack of experience making new friends or seeking out romantic relationships, or it could be due to underlying issues that have been pushed to the wayside.
Unresolved trauma can be a large contributor to a perceived inability to create lasting and meaningful connections with others, and you might benefit from individual therapy if you’ve:
Found it difficult to keep a relationship alive due to arguments or quickly-fading attraction
Shied away from relationships due to fear
Never been able to see eye-to-eye with a partner or resolve issues
Had more problems crop up once you establish a relationship
Individual therapy is a great way to explore parts of who you are, uncover the roots of trauma, and learn more about what makes you tick – think of it as taking yourself out on a date: the more time you spend with yourself, even if it’s facilitated by a mental health professional, the more you’ll learn!
Getting to Know Yourself
Trauma can develop from just about anything, and some forms manifest in our ability to create and maintain relationships. Sometimes, you might not know what’s causing you to have an aversion to relationships. In other situations, loneliness might be a painful reminder of unhealed or currently-healing wounds, which might cause us to view ourselves or others in a negative light, keep us from forming connections, or cause rifts in the ones we’ve already established.
This can make it difficult to dive deeper into yourself – without knowing of or having a support system that will encourage you to keep up healthy coping habits, it’s easy to push our emotions and trauma down and hope that by ignoring it, it’ll go away on its own. We can become so accustomed to living with it that complacency takes over and we don’t deem it necessary to change. But complacency leads to stagnation, and while getting to know yourself might mean having to face the parts of you that you’d rather leave buried, confronting your trauma is the first step to growth.
Finding Your Own Validation
Loneliness often goes hand-in-hand with feeling invisible, which can be the result of plenty of different situations: you feel that your parents have always favored a sibling; you have a best friend but, ironically, feel that you are no one’s best friend in return; you always tried to be the best and win the awards, but they always went to someone else – you just can’t shake the feeling that you went through life without anyone looking your way, really seeing you, and telling you that it’s okay to feel the way you do. This lack of emotional validation can make it difficult to fully accept the way you feel, because there’s always a part of you that might question, “What if I’m overreacting? What if it’s my fault?”
Drawing from a source of internal validation to know who you are, what your values are, how you feel about certain things – it’s a wonderful characteristic to have, and it’s one that builds self-esteem, confidence, respect, and other foundational elements that help you to have a good relationship with yourself. Without validation from an external source, however, sometimes our foundation can feel empty.
Taking yourself on therapy dates allows you to build your foundation up while talking through issues that have felt unseen and discarded. You know that you’ll have an ear that’s listening and a professional who’s trained to help you work through those emotions. Finding your own validation is a critical step in establishing a relationship with yourself, and mental health professionals are a wonderful medium to accomplish that.
Cultivating Healthy Behaviors
Imagine that you were in a relationship, be it platonic or romantic or otherwise. Would you let the person or people in the relationship treat you badly? Criticize you, treat you with disgust, or without compassion and understanding? Or, alternatively, would you let them treat themselves that way?
Hopefully, the answer is a resounding “no.”
It’s easy to over-analyze and over-criticize ourselves, because we know intimately when we mess up, what our flaws are, and what we could have done for things to have turned out differently. By building a relationship with ourselves, we aim to become more mindful of who we are by shifting our perception of self to something that’s much more positive than how we might unconsciously view ourselves regularly. We want to have a healthy, compassionate internal view so that we’re able to forgive the things we cannot change and make conscious choices to develop those that we can. And, in the process of creating healthy behaviors with ourselves, we also gain a foundation of what it means to have a conscious relationship with others.
Therapy helps to accomplish this by fostering healthy behaviors that start within ourselves, including:
Emotional management
Identifying and addressing behaviors that stop growth
Formulating clearer goals
Increasing our happiness and satisfaction with life
Feelings of empowerment
Managing and coping with trauma
Cultivating healthy behaviors inspires us to see the best version of ourselves – one that we’re proud of and are willing to put out there for others to see so that we can begin forming healthy relationships with them, as well.
Contact Dawn Pendleton to Start Your Self-Realization Journey Today
Resolving trauma is just one step in reshaping the way we see and approach relationships with others, and once you know more about yourself, identifying healthy relationships and working on social skills can become much easier!
Everyone feels lonely at some point in their lives, but we don’t have to stay lonely. If you’ve identified unhealthy or confusing patterns in the way you form or, alternatively, cannot form relationships with others, then Dawn Pendleton can help. As a trauma therapist based in Louisville, KY, she is accepting new patients from Kentucky and Indiana for both in-person and telehealth appointments that can help you improve the relationship you have with yourself.
If you or someone you love is looking for a reliable, trustworthy counselor with specialties in the LGBTQIA+ community, sports and performance enhancement, and those affected by trauma, Dawn Pendleton of Pendleton Counseling Collaborative, EMDR-certified and Licensed Marriage and Family therapist, is currently accepting new clients. With over 20 years of experience working in both the public and private sectors of the mental health field, Dawn is licensed to provide in-person and telehealth services in both Kentucky and Indiana. Feel free to fill out an inquiry form with any additional questions, call (502) 377-1690, or visit her website to book an appointment.