7 Top Tips to Stop Relationship Stress

By Sandra Hillawi, Emotional Energy Expert and Author of The Love Clinic

When love hurts, when we aren’t getting the love we want from our relationships, when it seems that we are always rowing or tired and emotional, or we are drifting apart we need some new strategies to create changes in our relationships, to help us to start moving in new directions, towards more love and happiness.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 1: Stop Talking and Start Listening

Do you ever feel that you are not being heard? That no-one understands you?

Do you feel frustrated that you are just not getting through?

As much as we need to be heard and have our feelings recognised and understood, so does the other person in our relationship.

When we give this attention, and really listen and understand someone else, we can see where they are coming from and give that recognition that they need. This usually diffuses their emotional state if they are stressed and allows you to then have good communication, to be able to talk things out better. Even if your partner is not stressed, it will make them feel really good to be accepted and appreciated by you.

The good feelings they have inside are then reflected back to you. It’s easier for them to now listen to you and to hear you.

• It only takes one person to change for the relationship dynamics to change.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 2: Give Recognition Show Appreciation and Be Kind

For most of us, our relationships are the source of our greatest joy and nourishment in life.

When we have the attention of another human being, when we feel cared for by another, when we receive acts of kindness from another our hearts are fed, we feel good, we feel loved, we are happy in our whole body. This happiness shines out into our lives and back to those who make us feel happy through our own words, actions and affection.

They feel good. A perpetual cycle of feeding each other’s hearts can start to grow, leading to deep appreciation, gratitude and love for one another. We can get out of the habit of paying attention. But it’s an easy thing to start again.

So spend some time to really pay attention to your partner, to listen well, to recognise the things about them that you admire, to notice the things they do and appreciate them, to really see in your heart who they are. Express this recognition through your words, through acts of kindness and through physical affection. Your partner will feel happy.

A happy partner reflects their happiness back to you in their words and actions for you to enjoy.

The cycle begins and so love grows and blossoms.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 3: Understand Your own Emotional Behaviour

If you are feeling angry, hurt or disappointed or unloved on a regular basis in your relationship, start to become aware of your own behaviour. Start to pay attention to the feelings in your body that accompany your emotions. These feelings show where the pressures of life are building up inside your body, where you are not handling life so well. It can be in the stomach, in the chest, in the head, in fact it can be anywhere. It’s possible to release this pressure and create more relaxation and ease within, to restore your own inner flow, independent of your partner, and bring back your clarity your inner calm and ability to act rationally.

We start simply by paying attention to the physical sensations accompanying our emotions, breathing deeply into the feeling and thinking of that pressure or pain softening and relaxing. Amazingly it does, and with calm restored we once again see more clearly and can communicate in a more considerate way. Communication from a calm state is a lot more easily received and understood by others than an angry state. It becomes easier to be able to talk things through in your relationship.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 4: Learn to Let Go

Raking up the past again and again doesn’t help your relationship grow. Things happen. Life happens. Things are said and done in moments of stress, tiredness or weakness, when though we are doing our best we just don’t have the resources to do it better. Realise that what has happened has happened and cannot be undone.

Holding on to the past is only hurting you.

The pain is in your body and it’s stopping you from feeling love. Accept what happened. Recognise that you had the right to feel this pain and anger at the time, but that now, there is no logical reason to hold onto the pain so long afterwards. Give some attention to these old injuries.

Notice where you feel this pain, pressure or emotional energy in your body. Breathe into the pain and allow it to soften and release now. Forgiving others doesn’t mean you condone their actions, but it releases you from the pain their actions have caused you and allows you to feel love again. With this love can come greater understanding of why and how things went the way they did. And now you become free to respond to the present, and not have your responses today effected by what is past.

Your relationship can start to move forwards.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 5: Learn to Love Yourself

Many of us become dependent on our partner to make us feel loved and happy through their actions words and affection. When our partner doesn’t have the energy available, because of their own tiredness or stress we get disappointed, we feel unloved and become unhappy.

This unhappiness reflects back into our relationships and our tired or stressed partner doesn’t find it easy to be around us, avoiding us even, our hunger for affection increases. The pattern perpetuates. When we learn to love ourselves we have love and happiness independent of our partner’s emotional state, independent of what they are giving or not giving to us. We then can give understanding and support when our partner is low, instead of disappointed that we are not getting what we need.

A person who is happy inside is attractive as people enjoy being around that energy. Learning to love ourselves takes time and attention just like it takes time and attention to grow love in any relationship.

So make a decision to start making time for you. Start to recognise yourself and your great qualities, talents and the things you do instead of seeking recognition from others. Allow yourself the time to feel that appreciation for yourself. Spend time doing things you enjoy, that feed your spirit, that express your creativity. Spend time in deep connection with yourself, through meditation and heart healing or prayer.

When you no longer need that attention and recognition, because you feel so good inside anyway, it’s amazing how much starts coming your way.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 6: Learn to Receive

Some of us are surrounded by people that love us, yet we don’t feel loved. They say ‘I do all these things for you and you don’t appreciate it’. It’s true. ‘I tell you I love you but you don’t believe me’. It’s also true. What’s going on is we are not opening up and letting people in. We don’t trust. Our reasons are fear. Fear of pain, maybe because we were hurt before, or maybe we just don’t know how receive. We have undeveloped love circuits. Maybe we never had love and attention before so we are not used to receiving it, and it hurts if we try to open up. Or maybe we just get too emotional if we open up, and we certainly aren’t comfortable being emotional. So, far safer to stay closed. We don’t feel the pain, but neither do we feel the love joy and happiness.

As we are not receiving, we are not being fed by life and relationships.

Our hearts are hungry for love and our behaviour can become needy or demanding. T

he only way forward towards love is to begin to open up and let people in. In fact, you will never feel love unless you do open up and learn to receive, to feel and to release. So make a start. Dare to feel your emotions. It can be scary, unless you know that all that emotion, all the pain, all the fear... that you also feel in your body... is just emotional energy that you have started to allow in, but have not yet managed to process through and release yet. But you can learn to handle it and let it go, and to do that well so that it becomes also safe to be open.

Then we start to feel again, to feel alive, to feel the flow of life’s energy within. We can now feel the feelings of joy, love and happiness when someone appreciates us and shows us an act of kindness. Our spirit blossoms. Our new happiness radiates back into our relationships.

It’s all about energy. In fact it’s only about energy and about energy flow.

Relationships Stress Tip No. 7: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Sometimes we just have a lot to handle in life. Sometimes we have to deal with big life events, or big changes and we just aren’t coping well. Our relationships suffer because we are not at our best. We are easily brought to anger or impatience. We have little attention to spare to give to people around us.

In such times, it’s ok to reach out for help.

That may be simply phoning a friend who has time to listen and let you vent off some steam. It might be to ask your partner if they can just sit and listen, let you talk, to hear you and let you get things off your chest. It may be time to call professional help to release the pressure within, to help you heal and restore your inner flow that you feel yourself again, and able to cope and be available to your family.

The process of paying attention to your emotions and feelings in your body, and helping the emotional energy to soften and release and to flow again is known as EMO. Practitioners of EMO understand well how to help you release and transform your emotional energy and can teach you this simple technique which you can use for yourself to help you in your relationships and life.

A directory of international practitioners can be found at www.emotrance.com

• More real life stories of how to stop relationship stress and to find the love that you want in your relationship can be found in Sandra Hillawi’s best selling book ‘The Love Clinic’ published by DragonRising. Makes a great wedding gift!
• More interesting and helpful information about emotions and feelings can be found at http://emotionsandfeelings.com

• 👉 Further Information: Relationship Stress - Top 7 Tips For Having Stress Free Relationships