Self-sacrifice and doing things for your partner is great and it is not a criticism, but ask yourself, are you all give and no take?

Everybody needs a healthy dose of self-love and robust self-esteem so that those ’special’ relationships are positive and balanced in terms of give and take. Too much give and not enough take leads to resentment.

Resentment is the enemy of love as the giver withdraws to nurse the vacuum in their relationship. It does not have to be this way if we take time to appreciate our selves, our achievements and our personality traits.

Love yourself enough and that love can spread outward to everybody around you. Your partner benefits and you can save your relationship with these simple self-esteem builders.

1. Take steps to be physically healthier. Look to your diet and eat more REAL food, especially plants. Real food is anything with five or fewer ingredients or does not come in a package. Refined foods are particularly unhealthy such as white sugar, white bread and saturated fats.

Thirty minutes of vigorous exercise every day, particularly before breakfast, will benefit your system, your body shape, your mental attitude and your sleep pattern.

2. Talk to yourself nicely and get your thoughts down on paper. The mind is a very limited computer. It can only hold one or two ideas at a time in our short-term memory. It is thereby very prone to repetition and circular trapped thinking.

By writing or drawing out your ideas you can exorcise repetitive thoughts and move on to develop your mind and attitude.

If you treat yourself and talk to yourself in the same way you talk to a child just learning the way of the World, then you will have a self-loving attitude.

3. Take time out from all the duties of daily life to meditate and reflect alone and in a calming situation. Reflect upon the modalities of your thoughts. Modalities are things like the color of the images in your mind’s eye, or the soundtrack that goes with your thoughts.

See what happens to your feelings when you deliberately change your modalities. By draining bad memories of color, dissociating from them and making them smaller we can reduce the pain they give us.

4. Be sure to treat yourself both physically and intellectually. You deserve what ever you feel will be good for you.

When you care and promote your own inner joy and good feeling, you will be able to share it with your partner and save your relationship.

Original article published here

Take a moment to think about the difference between talking and communicating. Communicating to save your relationship requires a speaker, a listener and messages passing between the two. Talk is simply the medium of communication.

So many couples talk endlessly AT one another but rarely actually talk TO one another. Have you ever felt that you have been talking a lot together but you can’t remember anything of consequence that was said?

What is it that makes a good message? When you learn to share your thoughts, feelings and motivation you turn talk into real communication. Here is an example as a man turns to his special lady and says.

“Can we for once turn the TV off and go to bed for a cuddle”? His lady responds, “You only ever want me when my favorite show is on. You wouldn’t say that if football was on”.

It is talk for sure but not communication.  Sharing his thoughts, feelings and motivations could sound like this.

“You know, we watch too much TV in these rare times when we have peace together. I feel we are drifting apart. What do you say we switch on the VCR and go get ‘up close and personal’ to make the most of our time”? “Mmm. You do the VCR and I’ll go slip into something more comfortable”.

The big difference between communication and talk is that the focus is not on the outcome you are looking for but rather on the process and the experience of being together. Unless you share what you think, how you feel and why you are suggesting these things your partner will assume negative reasons and become resentful and mistrusting.

You cannot save your relationship with talk alone. You have to reflect upon the messages you send out and add in your thoughts, feelings and motivations. When one partner starts the open communication it is easy to ask for and get it in return.

Original article published here