Improving the way we relate: an Integral Relationship Model

How we relate to others is linked to how we relate to ourselves.

We are relational beings, and the essence of our relationships is love.. Problems arise when we relate from fear or other disturbing emotions. Jealousy, pride or anger take us away from ourselves, hiding our relationships in dissatisfaction and isolation.

Observing our mind and its internal dynamics reveals the integrated mechanisms that we mobilize when we relate to each other. Exploring our interpersonal relationship, our experiences, will lead us to understand the relationship we establish with others, and extensively with others.and, extensively, with the different systems: family, educational, social, peer groups...

Knowing our relational dimension

Immersing ourselves in our relational world is a process that needs time and large doses of love to observe, accept and heal it.. If we feel that something is not working well and we want to initiate a process of change, it is important to be willing to start with three steps:

• Awareness: observe and be honest with us to know where we are starting from.
• Motivation: it is the engine to move forward. Trust that transformation is possible.
• Integration: incorporate what we are learning into our mental continuum. Create new routes to replace those that hurt us.

Let's look at some keys to discover how we relate.

The relationship with oneself (intrapersonal)

We tend to put little awareness on ourselves and a lot on what the other person does or says.. The way in which we let ourselves be dragged by what goes on in our mind, how we think our thoughts, how we live our emotions, what we deny, allow, boycott... all of this reveals how we relate to ourselves, reveals how we relate to ourselves..

Often thoughts "think us", "emotions live us", "the mind chains us", and so we go through "a life that lives us" instead of living it with fullness and openness. We are great strangers to ourselvesand most of the time our worst enemies.

The mental dynamics are rooted in our early years of life. We incorporate beliefs, fears or mandates that shape our bonding frame of reference. If we grew up in a safe and reliable system, we will experience relationships in an open and positive way. A hostile or uncertain environment will keep us on alert in a threatening and insecure world that will lead us to be suspicious and minimize contact with others for fear of being hurt.

If we have decided to improve our relationships, we can broaden our vision and trust in our ability to transform them.

Richard Davidson, PhD in Neuropsychology, points out that "the basis of a healthy brain is kindness, and it can be trained." As human beings we know that the only way we feel fulfilled is through love. This brings us closer to the certainty that only through benevolent love, as an inherent quality, we will be able to create antidotes to deactivate that which hurts us and enhance the qualities that bring us closer to relating from the heart.

Self-demanding, internal judgment, criticism, are mechanisms that take us away from the intrapersonal connection and, coemergently, from the intrapersonal connection. and in a co-emergent way from others. Identifying when and how these internal tendencies arise will allow us to deactivate them and replace them with other more pleasant ones.

The relationship with our experience

Psychological and spiritual traditions bring us different perspectives to facilitate encountering our experiences in a more healing and loving way. If we have decided to change the way we relate to each other, we will have to integrate our experiences in the best way possible.. As Aldous Huxley refers, "Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you".

Taking into account the way in which we relate to our experiences and their intensity we can highlight three different approaches and two different positions, as victims of circumstances or as learners from experience.

Turning our experiences into mere narratives with little emotional involvement.

The observer mentally constructs his own story with all the learned mechanisms to avoid the painful and inappropriate. As conceptual observers we live and experience, but we miss out on the deep we miss the deep transformation that can come from the intimate connection with our reality..

By keeping energy in the cognitive and behavioral areas, analyzing and reflecting, experiences will remain shallow and poor. As if a part of our life slips away so that we do not allow it to "sink in" at a deep level. We can make it difficult for love to enter, we can put obstacles in the way of what makes us feel good, or we can even reject any interesting life experience. This posture is conditioned by fear and will keep us away from situations that can be stimulating..

Fear protects us from what we do not want, but does not bring us closer to what we want. The excess of defensive mechanisms, if they are not worked and transformed, can isolate us emotionally and relationally.

When painful experiences become entrenched, they can turn us into victims. We can exaggerate our experience in a dramatic way through a character or minimize the consequences by minimizing the importance of traumatic events..

Likewise, if we fall into the role of victim we will be devitalized and without energy to face our conflicts. We disconnect from ourselves and live from a false self, a false self that we adopt to survive by adapting to the environment in the least painful way possible.

Observing from our disidentified witness the felt experience.

Through this process, we allow ourselves to learn from what we have experienced; we become disidentified observers of what is happening.. We open ourselves to what spontaneously guides us to find answers.

At this stage it is important to allow ourselves to be in touch with our bodily sensations and learn to decode what they hold in a more recondite space. If we are permeable to our experience and let our consciousness explore at a deeper level, our Heart will be open and receptive, feeling free and awake, our heart will be open and receptive, feeling free and awakened..

This is a way of opening ourselves to a healthy relationship. We empower the presence of the purest part of our being in every moment of our existence. For example, we feel anger at a bad answer; instead of throwing it at "the other", we focus on the impact of the emotion on us. We deploy our inner disidentified witness. We observe how it affects our body: it generates heat, tension, the desire to scream, itching....

This will allow us to give a less reactive and more reflective response to what has happened.. It is based on not feeding the disturbing emotion in our mind, stopping before provoking an escalation of consequences and letting it go; if it is a pleasant experience, being able to live it by paying conscious attention to the sensations and integrating it in our mental continuum as something positive. This will allow us to incorporate seeds related to pleasant and benevolent feelings towards ourselves, which we can then pass on to others.

Traumatic situations require a more specialized and cautious approach.. The body keeps an emotional memory, and professional accompaniment is necessary to be able to release the accumulated pain. The experience is fragmented and it is necessary to recover the unity, the integration of the experience within our mental continuum.

We allow ourselves to accept the experience without rejecting or judging it.

We open ourselves to it fully in an intimate connection, without maintaining any distance, and in this step we merge with the experience as it is..

If we go further, we will notice how we look for a culprit for our anger, a target to direct it at. If we stop and allow ourselves to "experience" these sensations openly, the emotion will unfold and dissipate, as it will not find any resistance in us.

We abandon the concept of duality and integrate into unity. We are able to experience, let go and transform. We begin to broaden our vision and unfold a more open and less conditioned mind.. We take responsibility for our experiences and work with them to release and transform them into opportunities for personal growth.

This step is the one that requires the most training and awareness, and at the same time is the most enriching, because it allows us to learn and sublimate our experiences, no matter how painful they may be.

Conclusion

These three stages show us how we are learning to relate to each other in a holistic way.. Which doors we open or close depending on our fears, resistances or dependencies. The freedom or difficulty with which we move between them gives us information about what we need to integrate or compensate.

We move from one to the other depending on the capacity for openness and trust we have in each situation and the moment we are in emotionally. Openness requires a process in which we have identified our defenses we have identified our defenses and we can transform them when we are ready for it..

Many psychopathological problems are related to the fixation in the way we relate to our experiences and the ability to integrate, avoid or seek them. On an everyday level, it is interesting to observe how we select them. We mobilize a great deal of energy influenced by internal dynamics that lead us to contact some and reject others, and we do not necessarily seek the healthiest ones.and we do not necessarily seek out the healthiest ones.

When we feel vulnerable, we can reduce our experiential world to limited environments and without realizing it, our space becomes smaller and smaller and more and more constricted. Sometimes we are drawn to people who immerse us in scenarios where we re-traumatize old, unresolved wounds. We become silent victims again.

To the extent that we begin to know ourselves and relate better with ourselves, from affection, respect and strength, trust and friendship will give way to accepting that vulnerability. will give way to accepting that vulnerability that allows us to remain open to the experience of the world as it is..

Allowing ourselves to be present with our experience, feeling it directly and without filters, will reveal unknown facets and a fresher and renewed vision of ourselves. We become co-creators of our life.