Five Signs of Healthy Love.
If we grew up in an environment that didn’t model and show us healthy love, it can be difficult for us to identify what healthy love looks and feels like.
For most of my clients, they have experienced some sort of relationship trauma, which significantly impacts their ability to engage in a healthy relationship and identify what healthy love is - or even if they can intellectually identify what healthy love is, it’s difficult for them to embrace it and experience it. Does that resonate with you at all? If so, please know it doesn’t mean we can’t learn to engage in healthy love, it just means we have to do some work to better understand it and learn how to do healthy love and relationships differently.
If you want to read how our childhood trauma impacts our relationships in more depth, you can click HERE to read a recent blog post I wrote about it. :)
For today, I thought I’d share fives signs of healthy love. Because, if we didn’t see healthy love growing up, it can be hard to know what it looks like now. So here are five signs of what healthy love is and looks like.
Healthy Love says, “I want you, not need you.” Meaning, it’s not desperate for love, acceptance or validation. It doesn’t believe that one person will make us happy and be the key to a good life. When we learn to love and accept ourselves, we learn that we don’t need someone to survive or thrive. It’s more that they are a wonderful addition to our life, that we can learn to lean on and do life with, but we will also be ok if not. This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be sad or upset if something happened or we lost them, but knowing we would be ok and not desperate to make someone love us or have them in our lives, is a healthier mindset with love than coming from a place of need, scarcity, and desperation.
Healthy Love says you “add to me, not complete me.” When we recognize that someone can help add to our lives and bring out the best in us, but not complete us, we have a healthier mindset of what love is. We recognize that we don’t need one person to “complete us”, because no one can do that. Our partner can be a good fit with us and help bring out better parts of ourselves, but they don’t complete us.
Healthy Love isn’t blind, but includes grace, forgiveness and boundaries. No person is perfect, which means, we will all need to repair and ask for forgiveness at some point. However, this does not mean that we excuse ongoing poor behavior and not take ownership of our stuff. It means we recognize when we’ve made a mistake and truly try to own our stuff, apologize/repair, and show up differently. It also means we expect that of other people. It means we have healthy boundaries to protect ourselves and the other person in the relationship. Even marriages, partnerships, and all types of romantic relationships require healthy boundaries to not give too much of ourselves to where we lose sight of who we are in a relationship.
Healthy Love feels consistent, safe, and even boring at times. If we grew up in chaos or have been in a relationship that operated in crisis mode with big highs and deep lows, we can experience boredom in safe and consistent relationships. When someone is emotionally mature and doesn’t argue back, but is able to have a healthy and calm conversation, that can feel like they aren’t showing enough emotion or care deeply. That’s because we have learned that big reactions equate love, which isn’t healthy love - or even love at all. Learning to embrace the mundane of consistent and safe love will help your nervous system find safety in your relationship.
In Healthy Love, the effort is more balanced than not. We can support our partner, but it’s not our job to carry their burdens, manage their emotions, or minimize their distress. They need to learn how to do this for themselves, and we can support them while they are experiencing it. It also means that care, affection, and emotional labor comes from both people. Not one person should carry the emotional load of the relationship.
Obviously this isn’t an exhaustive list… what are other signs of healthy love?
The more we focus on what healthy love is, the more we can put it into practice and expect it in our relationships.
I hope you find hope as you learn what healthy love is, so that you can experience it more than not.
Wishing you a future full of healthy love.
And as always, if you want support with learning how to have a healthy relationship, reach out or reply to this email. I'm here and would love to support you :)