0 A Special Relationship

How heart warming it is for us all to see our leader greeted by the American President with such friendship and camaraderie. By extension this friendship is for our country and all of us, for you and for me. Now doesn't that make you feel warm inside. Often times we see couples out for a drink or meal or we see friends together and we think "What a lovely couple, they must have a great relationship. I wish I had a relationship like that." What we see on the surface isn't always what is happening in reality behind closed doors. Doing coaching over the years, I have found that people's partner relationship is a recurring theme, closely intertwined with general happiness and well being or lack ther.

I heard once that you should marry your best friend. Well he's already married, he snores worse than me and no offence mate, but I don't find him particularly attractive. Thinking about your relationship in that way is a good place to start though. There are many books and tips about having a successful relationship, and I strongly believe that there isn't just one way of achieving what you want in a relationship. One thing that I think helps a lot is having values which are aligned with your partner. To what extent are the things that are important to you in your life the same things that are important to your partner? You won't get perfect alignment and you probably wouldn't want to. That would be like being married to yourself. But a low level of alignment is probably going to be a problem.

Virginia Satir was one of the people that was modelled during the creation of NLP. She was a very successful family therapist in the USA in the sixties and seventies. She did say that some of the things that caused problems in relationships were, negative anchors, unfulfilled strategies and double binds. A negative anchor is a stimulus which causes a negative response in you or your partner. So every time your partner says a certain word or phrase or topic or looks at you in a certain way you feel negative emotions. An unfulfilled strategy represents something which you want to actualise in your life through the relationship which your partner isn't allowing for or assisting with. A double bind is a nice language pattern which gives the illusion of choice, where in fact there is no choice at all; "Would you like to empty the dishwasher or do the ironing after dinner, dear?"

We have high expectations of partner's, we expect them to make us happy. Maybe because having a good relationship does contribute so much to our happiness. But give your partner a break too. They will never know you as well as you know yourself and the only person that can ever make you happy in life is you. Over a life time people grow and change at different rates, so ask yourself is there space in your relationship for that growth? Of course if you know that you would be happier not in the relationship that you are in already, then change it.

I'm not married to any political faction and my suspicion of Politian's of all brands runs fairly high. All of their arguments and friendships seem just a little too choreographed for me. It's like watching WWE wrestling. In NLP one the most important things to calibrate on is behaviour so judge the decisions of your Politian's by their results. If you have a 'Special Relationship' with someone, you will feel more at ease in asking them to do things for you, but sometimes when someone is being nice to us we know they want something else in return. So what is the real long term effect of the US / UK 'Special Relationship'?

by Ewan Mochrie