Mousumi Sabina-
We all are born with a beautiful, meaningful, and complex aspect of life known as ‘relationship’. We build relationships with our parents in our early years and with the age, we learn to develop relationships with the people surrounding us. When it comes to bringing any change in any of our relationships, we always tend to change others more than change ourselves. Many people visit therapists with their relationship issues. The most common is relationship conflict with significant others or anyone who has some impact on their lives.
This kind of conflict is a source of frustration, anger, and later depression in many cases. And as Therapists, we hear a lot that people want others to be less critical, more attentive, more affectionate, more responsible, less demanding, and many more, rather than changing self a bit. It turns out to be an impossible expectation from therapy.
Our relationships do not always stay the same. As time passes by, sometimes these grow positively or sometimes neutrally or negatively. But whatever direction these go, we must accept the fact that it is not possible to change others. The human brain is designed to see the way we want to see it. For example, we always have some expectation from others and our expectation is true to us, not to others, because that may not be their expectations. It is very rare to find a common expectation from both sides if you are in a relationship.
Sometimes we become very unsatisfied with our relationships. It can be relationships with our family members, co-workers, friends, etc. For example, you are very angry or unsatisfied with a family member because he/she does not listen to you, or you feel he/she failed you in many ways by not listening to you whom you wanted to just be like you. Let me give a more detailed example: some people hold power in the family. They often help others more than others do any favor to them. Such family members are very kind and helpful people. They want others to take their help and acknowledge it. Thus, they become quite robotic by doing or saying what they want you to say.
Therefore, we need to understand that improving any relationship is accepting the fact that an individual may have many reasons to maintain a strong relationship with another individual, but it cannot happen the way one expects all the time. Though we have many connections, we may also have differences. Each person learns things differently and does things differently in his/her mind. Accepting the fact that we all have different ways of feeling and thoughts will make us flexible. We need to understand that the more we want to hold and impose our reasons or logic on others, the more the chance of not getting the expected behaviors from others.
Let us practice accepting things as it is and celebrating the differences to minimize conflicts.
Mousumi Sabina is a Bangladeshi Counselling Psychologist, M.Sc., and American Board of Examiners Certified Practitioner in Psychodrama, Sociometry, and Group Psychotherapy. At present, she resides in New York, USA.
