I’ve worked with many people as their coach and seen the insecurity in their relationships. But I’m an expert on that insecurity inside my young self and I can now tell you where it came from and how it showed up.

It came from the lack of security I had with my parents. I was yelled at, compared in a losing way to other girls and criticized unmercifully and often – by my mother. I was always afraid my girlfriends would think I was a loser – so insecurity in relationships with peers showed up first.

Then there was the pressure to be popular, date and marry – all, for me, fraught with insecurity and self-doubt. Imagine you were looking at this beautiful young woman who thought she was a loser – who probably tried too hard and took almost any little attention by a male as good enough. She gets asked out by a good looking boy in her freshman history class. She’ll never have to worry about not having a date again. And so it went. And so we married and stayed together in our really lousy relationship for 19 years.

Some of the reasons for insecurity in relationships lay in childhood as they did in mine. Until I began to gain some self esteem and learned that I was important enough to say what was bothering me and how I felt about another’s behavior toward me, I would continuously experience insecurity in relationships. So will you.

Solution: good self esteem and good communication tools. YOU University is the best place I know of to findthose solutions. The tools you learn are useful now or for life. Consider joining our journaling community so you can get to know us and see how we handle insecurity in relationships.

Husband Wife Relationship #1

We were 18 when we met, 22 when we married and we didn’t have a clue who we were or how to have a functional relationship – with ourselves or each other. I came from what is politely called a dysfunctional family and I wore all the hallmarks – low self esteem, poor self image on a physical and personality level. I thought I was defective and not good at anything and so would never find another partner. That’s why I married who I did. By the time we were dating for 6 months I already experienced his mean and controlling ways. He experienced my victimy and wimpy emotional untruth. I never stood up for what I thought or felt. I was too damaged and immature. This mess that we created together lasted for a total of 19 years. We split a couple of months before our 15^th anniversary.

Husband Wife Relationship #2

By this time, a short 2 ½ years a nice man who I had been dating asked me to marry him. He was nice; not scary in any way and had built in grandparents and family for my four children. I can’t say I particularly cared about being married but he was nice…..

I had had a couple of years of 12-Step programs and had figured out that I could at least support me and my family and there was no longer abuse in my life so why not?

Six months later I ended it. I had become  bitten by the personal growth bug and was choosing to live a very different way then I had ever before – one with me telling myself the emotional truth – stepping out of denial and finding that I couldn’t give another chunk of my life to another albeit milder form of dysfunction in a husband wife relationship.

Husband Wife Relationship #3

We met in a personal growth workshop where we learned and practiced emotional healing and telling the emotional truth. We were friends for two and half years and knew each other very well before we began our relationship. We had relationship tools that I never knew existed and that worked to keep us from ever harboring resentments and being inauthentic or dragging our past into our present relationship. For 25 years and counting we have a wildly successful and happy husband wife relationship.

We had a nice little chat before the Martian and I sat down for work. He explained why he will have to do some work during his time off for the next 8 weeks and I understand – although I want us both to take a break. Anyway, then it dawned on me. We have a happy marriage (hence the title of the blog) entry. And happy marriages don’t often have a lot of drama – passion not drama. Which in this case translates into - WE GET TO SPEND SOME RELAXING TIME TOGETHER!

So I’m looking forward to the next many mornings when we don’t have to get up and prepare for him leaving for work. by 6am. We can snuggle in bed, have time and energy for sex, have time and relaxation to speak together about our own growth, goals and obstacles and just plain play. Lots of movies and dvds, walks, coffee and breakfast out, family visits – all the makings of a happy marriage.

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Boundaries. You hear people talking about them but maybe you aren’t sure what they mean. A boundary around a piece of property is the outer limit or can be a wall or fence that is there to keep others out. For you, personal boundaries are your limits for other people in relationship to you. It is the key to building healthy relationships.

Boundaries are an important part of life for everyone. If you do not set boundaries in your personal life, you may find yourself unhappy and resentful. Learn to say no when your boundaries are being pushed too far. For example, your friend often wants you to pick up her kids from school and do a little shopping for her but today you had planned to do your own shopping in a different part of town. It is within your rights to say no. Don’t allow anyone to take advantage of you. That doesn’t mean you’d never do a favor for your friend. It doesn’t mean your boundaries can’t be flexible. But unless her need is based on serious circumstances of incapacity of some sort, allow yourself to feel uncomfortable with no , but say it anyway.

Don’t let yourself be one of those who time and time again are taken advantage of by the people in their lives. It is unhealthy. You must love yourself and realize that you can’t do everything and although you may not like saying no to someone, you have to find a way to get comfortable with saying it. Or maybe you’ll never be totally comfortable but you will train those people in your life to think more carefully before they ask you to take on their responsibilities. Boundaries are an integral way to building healthy relationships.

Some people will try to take advantage of you and push your boundaries to the breaking point anytime you allow them too. Don’t allow them to. Take care of yourself first and the way to do that is to decide what is acceptable to you and be courageous enough to say no when it is in your best interests. You have to do what is right for you, not your mother, not your husband, not your sister or your neighbor, but you. Only then will you truly be able to continue to help others with love and even enjoyment and without hurting yourself. If this is a tremendously problematic area for you, you might ask a life coach for help.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

If you have no way to handle your undermining thoughts and feelings, you will be bringing them all into your relationship with inappropriate behavior and words. On this day I wrote about my path which made me realize that in a very important way I’ve assumed the most important part of what makes a long-term relationship work – fully committed to following my own path.  Which brings me to this past weekend…

On a Friday during the night I developed my very first bladder infection. It is highly uncomfortable. What I’ve learned to do is to deal with it on the spiritual/emotional level and the physical level so I searched on the internet and found out that lots of water and lots of vitamin C would get rid of it and I also looked in a very important little book called Heal Your Body by Louise Hay. It says that bladder problems are about “Anxiety. Holding onto old ideas. Fear of letting go. Being ‘pissed off’.” It also says the positive affirmation to use is “I comfortably and easily let go the old and welcome the new in my life. I am safe.”

At the time I wrote about here there was much new in my life: someone else living with me and the Martian, being 65, having an old client quit, dealing with foods that don’t work for me constantly around and often calling to me because someone else was living here, etc. So I was consciously repeating that affirmation and watching my thoughts about all of these new things. And by the way, the infection was gone in 24 hours! I am blessed.

Then there was the day before I wrote this. My step-daughter seemed to be having some feelings that she didn’t express. It may be my imagination but I believe I have always been quite susceptible to picking up others feelings and I have had a fairly easy time of it recently because I’ve been alone a lot and my husband is pretty good at expressing and taking responsibility for his. Well, we now had a new person who is emotionally built differently than I and whose process is different. I can’t ask or expect her to do it my way. I invited her here knowing full well that there would be personal challenges for me. When I have these unidentified feelings which seem to build up into a kind of pressure that wants to be alleviated by eating (or overeating), I often eat and now there are things like brownies and lasagna in the house – all of which don’t work for this carbohydrate sensitive person that I am. New challenge!

It was apparently time for me to finally work all of these things out but if I didn’t do them myself I would soon be a self-critical bitch who took her bad feelings out on her partner. Whew! But I didn’t do that.

I am fully committed to my own path – the 11th Secret.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

]]> http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/anxiety-bladderinfection/feed 2 http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/why-do-we-always-fight-when http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/why-do-we-always-fight-when#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:00:06 +0000 allaboutlifecoaching http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/?p=1573 Why do we always fight when…?

One of the things I love to help transform in a client’s life, is the way of their intimate relationship. The relationship advice  I give is based on  my experience. My own path wound through a 19-year first relationship which produced much pain and 4 kids, a short 1 1/2 year relationship which taught me what I didn’t know about what a relationship could be but wasn’t and, 25 years ago, the one that has it all.

My husband and I have an amazing intimate  relationship – amazing if it was the only one we ever had but most amazing because it is a 3rd marriage for us both. “The Martian”,  aka  my  husband, promises to comment on my entries on this topic. We’re calling him Martian because he’s a high school teacher and doesn’t want his students to find him on the internet and we have all that background in the Mars Venus world of John Gray too.

I haven’t fully figured it out but almost every time there’s a weekend or a vacation, the first thing that happens is – we have a fight – small and dumb – but a fight nonetheless. Somebody wrote a song that says something like, “why do we always fight when I ……. something? “

Relationship advice:  Maybe we feel safe enough to bring our frazzled energy picked up from the rest of our lives to each other to dump out so we can refill it with the love that we share the rest of the time. It’s like removing the sediment of life so pure, fresh love has room to flow.

I always thought we’d get over it but we’ve been together for 28 years and we did  it yesterday as soon as the Martian got home from work at the beginning of his 11 days off. But, as always, we got over it and now things are “normal” again.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

]]> http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/why-do-we-always-fight-when/feed 3 http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/change-walked-in-the-door http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/change-walked-in-the-door#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:00:20 +0000 allaboutlifecoaching http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/?p=1577 Change Walked in the Door

So as you have read some of my other articles, I do have some  relationship  advice. Here is  the one most implemented in my life. People get old because they become inflexible – in their bodies, in their behaviors, in their minds. The Martian and I don’t want to become inflexible. We invite change.

So change came in through our door because we invited the Martian’s daughter, who wanted to make major change happen in her life – job, move near family, etc. – to live with us while she got her changes in place. We all knew it would involve major change in our lives but knowing and experiencing are two different things.

With someone else in our space, more than ever the Martian and I worked to carve out sacred time together so our relationship stays “working happily ever after”. Three people in the same house is very different than two. So we took early morning walks and maybe went away for a couple of days. Whatever we did, I knew we would continue being aware – probably more aware – that sacred time together was one of the things we needed to do for ourselves.

So my pearls of wisdom for today are the following:

• Take time for yourself and your loved one.
• Embrace change – you will learn something.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!