We all have relationships that are important to us. While relationships can be life’s biggest blessings, they can also be life’s biggest challenges. Fortunately, NLP gives us many ways to improve relationships.
What Are Relationship Issues?
Here are some examples of patterns that can make relationships difficult:
- competitiveness
- jealousy
- fear of abandonment
- mistrust
- inappropriate trust
- lack of boundaries
- insisting on being right
- blame
- difficulty with forgiveness
- people-pleasing
- dishonesty
- attention seeking
- difficulty with commitment
- difficulty saying “no”
- dependence
- co-dependence
- feeling unloved
- self-centeredness
- greed, stinginess
- difficulty expressing feelings
- judging others
- lack of authenticity
- feeling defensive
We’ve probably all experienced more than one of these in our relationships. Fortunately, NLP can help us transform all of these patterns. Whether we are experiencing issues with people we work with, or in our family communications, we can transform the behaviors and responses that have stopped us from having happy, fulfilling relationships.
For example, we may feel afraid to give trust to people who deserve it, or find that we’ve been trusting untrustworthy people. We may have learned these patterns when we were children, from the family dynamics we were born into. As children, we may have gotten confusing messages about whom to trust. This may make it difficult, today, to have healthy communications with a range of people.
To transform our relationships, a good place to start is with a combination of Core Transformation and Aligning Perceptual Positions.
Core Transformation is great for transforming all of the limiting behaviors, feelings, and patterns of thinking that can stop us from having the fulfilling, satisfying relationships that we desire.
Aligning Perceptual Positions is very useful for transforming our relationships. It helps us develop healthy boundaries, let go of judgment, and be fully present in relationship to others. It helps us understand our relationships better, gaining wisdom and resourcefulness.
The Wholeness Work also includes some wonderful formats to transform our experience in relationships, especially when using the full system of Wholeness Work. For example, sometimes a sense of emptiness or lack can cause an unhealthy dependency, fear of abandonment, or jealousy. A format that’s taught in the Foundation Wholeness Work course specifically addresses this, and allows us to be more whole in relationship to others.
Example of a couple sharing Core Transformation: “My husband and I have both been using Core Transformation independently since before we got married, and we’ve found it to be foundational for having a happy, loving, peaceful marriage. In fact, it’s become a part of the core vocabulary of our marriage. “Is that coming from a core place? Are you out of your Core States? How can I support you?” And just having that vocabulary of really being able to help provide that sense of peace and oneness has really been transformational. We’ve done sessions separately, we’ve done sessions together. On the morning of our wedding, we both did CT sessions, and that was a really special way to start our wedding day! And we just consistently come back to it for all of life’s major milestones. We wish it for every couple!”
Example of relationships improving when doing Core Transformation with something else: “Core Transformation has changed my life! After many years of talk therapy that did nothing, I am amazed at the dramatic shift I’ve had not only in the areas you and I worked on, but other areas of my life as well. I am finding troubled relationships suddenly improving. It has been an empowering experience….”
Skills for Improving Communications
NLP also teaches a range of communication techniques, to help us get our desired messages across. These can be extremely useful. However, if we’re in a reactive state, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to use a communication technique effectively. That’s why we normally recommend learning a transformational methodology such as Core Transformation, Aligning Perceptual Positions, or the Wholeness Work first, even before learning what to say to be effective.
