Common Roadblocks to Healthy Relationships
Emotional barriers are common. Almost everyone has some kind of emotional barrier, although some have more than others. These roadblocks to healthy relationships can affect your relations in unknown ways, impacting your friendships, relationships with partners, and more.
Components of a Relationship
Every relationship has three components: person one, person two, and the relationship itself. All three must grow, evolve, and change over the course of the relationship. The people in the relationship must learn to manage the past, present, and future, through growth and understanding.
Often, we enter relationships with attitudes, mindsets, and habits shaped by our past. These mindsets can themselves be roadblocks, because they influence our perceptions of what is happening to us in the present – and not always for the better.
Knowing the common reasons for these roadblocks can help you overcome them. Once you’ve identified your emotional roadblock (or roadblocks), you can take steps to overcome this problem for yourself.
Common Emotional Roadblocks to Healthy Relationships
1. Fear of Rejection
Rejection isn’t fun, but for some people, fear of rejection can be crippling. For people with a fear of rejection, it feels safer to avoid relationships than to take the risk of being rejected. They may want to have a relationship, but not at the price of feeling rejected.
Communicating with others is the key to navigating this difficult problem. Talking to your partner about your fears can establish expectations for the relationship, and ensure that both parties are looking for the same thing.
Establishing an understanding about the fear can help you both recognize when fear of rejection is getting in the way of a rewarding relationship, thus allowing you both to navigate around the problem.
2. Avoiding Change
Everyone changes with time, but sometimes when that change happens while in a relationship, it can be frightening for the other party. Some people fear change, and fear that their partner or significant other is moving on without them.
Sustaining a relationship through change means that both parties must have the courage to change together. Once again, communication is key.
Discussing the change as it’s taking place, and embracing the change on both sides can help the relationship last throughout this challenging time. All long-lasting partnerships go through this problem, but only partners that communicate can come out on the other side.
3. Low Sense of Self Worth
People who have a low sense of self-worth can easily find themselves in a toxic relationship. This is often the case with people who have experienced hardship in previous relationships. Having been torn down in the past, they begin to believe that no one worthwhile would want to be with them.
Ultimately, it’s crucial to establish a good sense of self-worth before finding a partner. People who value themselves are more likely to partner with someone who treats them well.
4. Your Background or Childhood
We learn concepts like love, compromise, respect, and honor from our families at an early age. Your partner may have different ideals and values when entering the relationship.
Those who grow up without a healthy example of love may find it far more difficult to feel confident in a relationship. Working through childhood traumas can help establish perspective, thus making it much easier and more likely that your relationships will be successful.
5. Letting Past Negative Relationships Affect Current Ones
In the same way that we learn from our families growing up, we also learn from our previous relationships. If we have a negative experience in a previous relationship, we’re more likely to learn bad lessons from that relationship. This can establish a poor precedent, and thus complicate newer, more promising relationships.
It’s vitally important to go into your new relationships with an open mind, without fear of the past repeating itself. Don’t prejudge new potential partners based on old partners that are now long gone.
6. You Want Different Things
Misaligned expectations build emotional walls. An example of this may be when one person is looking for marriage, but the other is not. It’s easy to enter a relationship believing you are on the same page, only to realize later that you want different things.
Communicating with your potential partners from the beginning can help prevent this problem. Another way to avoid this problem is to know your goals and expectations for your relationship.
Get Help. Work Through Emotional Roadblocks.
Find happiness in relationships. Focus on your mental health. Conquer the roadblocks to healthy relationships. Contact the professionals at Jonas Hill Hospitals & Clinic.
Jonas Hill Hospital & Clinic, a division of Caldwell Memorial Hospital provides our community with safe, dignified and integrated care for adult patients experiencing an acute mental health need. We provide hope, treatment, and healing through a holistic program of evidence-based psychiatric treatment, team-based medical care, and education provided by engaging and dedicated professionals in a safe and healing environment. Contact us today for more information. A safe space to heal.