Changing the Pattern by Changing Your Part

Relationships can be frustrating. No doubt about it! Your spouse or partner really raises your blood pressure when they do that same old same old. Sometimes you want to throttle your child for pulling that stunt for the umpteenth time. Your parent just doesn’t get it. That one sibling’s superpower is doing exactly the opposite of what you want. And there’s the guy at work who seems to delight in continuing to…

You may not be aggravated with everyone around you, but I’ll bet there’s someone who manages to push your button more often than others do. Obviously, I don’t know the particular dynamics of you and you know who. But I do know that when frustrating, draining, or downright vexing patterns seem to be repeating in any relationship in our lives – we do well to look at our part of the pattern! I’m not blaming you for the ongoing problems. I am saying that if you are repeatedly troubled by the behavior pattern of someone in your life, examining your steps in the dance with a willingness to change your part may well be the most effective thing you can do to bring transformation and increasing peace.

Are you being overbearing? Back off and ease up. Do you regularly watch with quiet annoyance, or even resentment, expecting the other to make the changes they obviously (to you) need to make? Maybe you need to speak up about your expectations, or lean in to be of genuine help to them. Have you warned them over and over about what you’re going to do if they don’t make changes? Well, perhaps it’s time to back that up with the consequences you’ve been dangling as empty threats for a while. Sometimes even just making a simple shift from grumbling and criticizing about unmet expectations to encouraging and recognizing those small improvements that are happening can radically shift the whole pattern of your relationship.

It’s like my graduate school professors were fond of saying as we learned about helping people: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten!”