By: Jaira Rael
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO- Relationships with others can have a positive or negative impact on your life. Everything is up to you and who you chose to have relationships with. Just because there might be a connection between you and another person doesn’t automatically mean it is healthy. What is a healthy relationship?
Healthy Relationships/Friendships
What makes a relationship healthy is trust, boundaries, openness and communication. When both people are putting in equal amounts of effort into a relationship or friendship there is no imbalance of power. Many teens struggle with relationships because of the lack of experience; they have little to no knowledge on how a healthy relationship works. It is important to feel comfortable around the people that surround you. It is equally important to make others around you feel comfortable.
A friendship could be a reciprocity to a relationship. Northwestern Medicine states, “A positive relationship can be shared between any two people who support, encourage and help each other practically as well as emotional.” When there is no reciprocity in a relationship, most people settle for the bare minimum. Feelings and attention are being taken for granted if there is an absence of reciprocity. Although the person that you have a relationship with keeps sending mixed signals, what could this be called?
Love Bomb!
Love bombing is a form of emotional abuse. When someone is love bombing another, the initial goal is to gain control over another person. Signs of a love bomb are excessive praise or flattery, over-communication of feelings, unneeded gifts, and intense talk about the future together. The reason why one might be love bombing is because of insecurities or the inability to depend or trust another person. The three stages of love bombing are the idealization phase, the devaluation phase, and the discard phase. The Cleveland Clinic states, “When you confront them about their harmful behavior or try to reset healthy boundaries, your partner may avoid accountability by refusing to cooperate and compromise or by abandoning the relationship. This can leave you feeling confused, disoriented or like you somehow failed to fix things.”
Self-Relationship
Maybe a relationship or friendship with someone is not your thing. That is completely okay! “Your relationship with yourself is one of the most important ones you’ll ever have,” says PyschCentral. When there is a bad self-relationship it can hold you back from doing simple tasks or from reaching short-term goals, much less, even thinking of long-term goals. Just like there should be boundaries between you and another person there should also be boundaries within yourself. You matter and deserve happiness!
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