Some of the following suggestions might seem overwhelming. Many people have found them useful in getting relationships into a healthier state:

1. Try to stop “engineering” relationships. Allow a natural flow to develop. Avoid restricting or restraining what has natural development. Try not to push what has no natural development. In other words, allow and trust natural process.

2. If a relationship has life it will grow without pushing. There is a difference between attending to a relationship (all relationships need attention) and forcing a relationship.

3. Allow others room to move toward, and away from you. Forced closeness is not closeness. Forced space is not space.

4. Cutting off from a person or a relationship is seldom helpful. A cut-off is still reactive behavior and the person from whom you have cut-off is still in a powerful and influential position in your life.

5. Offer forgiveness quickly and freely, before it is asked of you and even if it is not.

6. Tell people about the good feelings you have for them.

7. Thank people who positively impacted you.

8. Try to see the world through the eyes of others. Try to see the world through the eyes of your children.

9. Try to listen more than talk. Define yourself and not others.

10. Try not to do things for people they can do for themselves.

11. Try to develop an early detection mechanism and speak out clearly when you see things going awry in relationships. Remember that “big problems” play hide and seek with us before they arrive.

12. Try not to live from a platform of guilt. Recognize how guilt has found expression in your life and deal with it in more appropriate ways.

13. Try to remove “you need” and “you should” from all conversations. Assuming any person knows what someone else needs or should do is usually fundamentally disrespectful. Allow others to be free of your unsolicited advice. Relinquish any agenda for others, especially those closest to you. THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO PARENTS REARING YOUNG CHILDREN.

Copyright,1998 / Rod Smith, MSMFT

Desperation, hunting down romantic love as if it is the most important thing on Earth, makes you live bait for unhealthy attachment. It will propel you to seek love for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong places. The person who is desperate for romantic love is unlikely to be able to identify healthy love and get it confused with one of love’s many counterfeits.

The desperate for romance ought to not go looking for it.

Desperation fuels unhealthy connection.

The anxious, hyper-aware vibe produced by your vigilant search will attract he or she whose attention you really don’t want.

Desperate people attract equally desperate people. Despite the whirlwind excitement and romance that might ensue, the relationship will self-destruct leaving both people worse off than before they met.

The desperate person is encouraged to immerse him or herself in a community of honest, healthy friends (and remain cautious about frequently verbalizing the pangs of his or her romantic dilemma for this can wear very thin). Then, having become less desperate about finding a partner, less anxious about being alone, less “need driven,” a healthy potential partner may walk through the door seeking little more than high quality friendship only to find your healthy disinterest very appealing.

“Sorry to trouble you, I have been hurt so badly I have forgotten how to love. Can you help?” (Letter printed in full from a woman reader).

In several years of writing this column, and consequently receiving thousands of emails with all manner of situations described, your brief letter might be the saddest I have received.

Your growth will begin when you are ready to assess your role in your own hurt condition. Do not think I am blaming you for your own hurt. I am not.

Rather, I am challenging you to see that you did perhaps enter a relationship somewhat blindly. You probably offered too much, too soon, and you probably inappropriately trusted someone without sufficiently searching your own head and heart.

Troubled relationships almost always offer warnings along the way and avoiding these warning signs is often very costly. While you are indeed hurt, I’d suggest you are probably not too damaged to love again.

Before you embark on trying to love again, I’d suggest you take long-leave from intimate relationships for at least a year. In the meantime, send me much more information about what you have endured for it might be that everything I have said thus far, could prove to be totally incorrect.