3 Steps to Healing Your Relationship Stress

Stress affects all aspects of your life and health. It’s a top contributor to many chronic diseases we see today.

And yet, we are so used to living in a state of stress we often become numb to it. We keep moving forward, coping in our own ways, but eventually, it shows up in our lives - even if we try to ignore it.

One of the most common points of stress I see in the women I work with is intimate relationships.

Do any of these sound like you?

• Your partner needs lots of connection, while you need more space, and you feel boxed in.
• You battle for control in your life– including within the relationship itself, and it's become a daily power struggle.
• You feel exhausted by chaos while your partner feeds off it, and you don't know how to set healthy boundaries.

Stress doesn't have to destroy you or your relationships.

Stress is More Than Skin Deep

Just as your DNA and epigenetics influence your health and how you respond to stress, so does your energetic design.

These, in turn, are both influenced by all of your experiences in your lifetime.

Since some of the most influential experiences come from relationships, which are often key vehicles for personal growth and transformation, we can’t avoid them.

But how do you navigate relationships that trigger stress setpoints? Is there a way through or are they doomed from the start?

While the answers are not simple, some of the strategies for uncovering them can be.

Step 1: Start with Awareness

The first step to healing this stress is to look at the energetics of you and your partner.

One of the most common issues I see when couples feel stressed in a relationship, is that they are not feeling seen or heard because they are not respecting the energetic makeup.

We each see the world through our own lens and carry our own beliefs and experiences about relationships. This leads to different expectations, which are unmet because they are often unspoken or even unconscious.

Unaddressed, these unmet expectations can lead to disappointment, anger, and bitterness.

Just as each we each have a unique energetic signature, so does your relationship.

The more consciously you can work with these energetics, the better able you each are to honor your own needs and also those of the relationship.

You learn to acknowledge points of difference without taking it personally, so you can remove the stress and replace it with acceptance.

This is the foundation for untangling what’s actually causing the stress and how to pinpoint the best solutions with amazing accuracy so you can choose the best strategies for you.

Step 2: Understand Each Individual

Sharon’s Transformation

Sharon feels stressed about her need for more freedom in her relationship, while her partner feels threatened by this. Does this mean she doesn’t love me? Am I doing something wrong?

No. Actually, it was clear as day once we looked at their energetic designs - both individually and together.

Sharon needs plenty of space and time alone, and her transformation in this lifetime is all about claiming her freedom to be herself – especially within relationships. Because this is something she is learning in this lifetime, it’s not been an easy path.

But she is now stepping into her power to claim her needs - and it's not always graceful. And it's creating stress for her and her relationship.

Her go-to strategy for dealing with stress is to figure out the answer. If she can find the answer, she’ll have the solution, and all will be okay.

But when she’s out of balance, she fixates on the need to find the answer, and her mind spins. She doesn’t sleep well because her mind is on overdrive, running through various scenarios to devise a solution.

This process never ends because the answers she’s looking for don’t come from her mind – they come from her intuitive knowing. And that requires her to trust and let go, creating the space for new insights to appear in their own timing.

When she understood this, she had a big aha moment and recognized this pattern within herself – and how she often needed to get to the point of exhaustion before letting go.

Now, she could find a different way of coping with her stress. Working together, we mapped out the key markers to recognize when she was out of alignment, and new strategies to help her reset her balance.

Sharon’s Partner’s Transformation

 Her partner needs plenty of space also, but in a way that gives him the freedom to do his own thing without being encumbered. His transformation in this lifetime was to get comfortable facing fear, for his quantum leaps would only come from learning to surrender and embrace it rather than fight against it.

Not easy!

His go-to strategy for dealing with stress was to try to control his environment so that he didn’t have to feel his fear. It helped him feel safe. But as he was becoming more vulnerable in the relationship, his fears kicked up, and he found himself trying to control everyone and everything.

Out of balance, it was a constant battle. The stress was reaching a tipping point. It’s like juggling a bunch of fragile plates and he couldn’t relax for long because one slip and everything would crash.

So this became a never-ending cycle that would leave him exhausted, but it seemed impossible to do what he needed to short-circuit his stress: focus on his inner world.

Ultimately, it is only through controlling his inner world that he finds power, safety, and peace.

It felt so counter-intuitive to stop and face his fears from this place of inner control. But with the right support, he is doing just that, and making progress in identifying when he is out of balance and has strategies to reset.

Step 3: Integrate the Individuals Within the Relationship

Giving each person the gift of self-understanding, along with support in their own growth, enables each person to lower their own stress levels and come to the relationship from a more balanced place.

This then creates a stable foundation for entering into the next step: the energetics of the relationship.

I’ll share what happened next in another post.

Would you like help with healing your stress and your relationship? 

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