I Didn’t Use To Be Good At Relationships

Last updated on November 19th, 2023 at 11:57 am

I remember as a kid being upset and walking away from our home. Thoughts swirled around in my head. Never get married, never have kids. Never get married, never have kids.  Over and over like a mantra.  I don’t remember the incident, but ours was a violent household where fighting was frequent, and empathy rare. I was a sad and depressed child.

When I eventually grew up, I began to realize I didn’t know how to have a functioning relationship. A pattern developed. Fall in love. Have a great six months. Problems emerged. Struggle for a while. A new love interest arose. Break up the old relationship and start over.  Falling in love was easy but working through the difficulties that emerged in all those relationships were not. 

I did get married in my mid 30’s, after a series of relationships. It was a difficult marriage. Fortunately, we never had children. After years of both individual and couples therapy, it ended in a divorce.

In the meantime, I became a psychotherapist. I had to unravel so much of my trauma, meaning-making, and psyche. I came to understand emotionally the imprints left on me by my parents. No longer was I in an unconscious relationship with them, compensating for their deficits. No longer was the imprint of being a caretaker to an angry father deforming my ability to speak up for myself. I reformed and reclaimed myself. The wrinkles of my life smoothed out.  I studied psychology and relationships and participated in training after training. I lived and breathed self-understanding and therapeutic process. I found I loved sitting with a person or a couple and seeing the patterns of their lives. I loved seeing the images of how they interacted. I loved helping them untangle the knots of their lives.

For me, there has been a long journey between those two places – beginning with despair and hopelessness, evolving to appreciation, wonder, and joy.

I’m in a fantastic marriage now. One I could never have envisioned in my youth. I found ‘the one,’ my soulmate. A concept I never believed in, and certainly never thought would happen in my life. Today, I am married to a man I adore. Sure, we get into arguments sometimes. But 10 minutes later, we’ve figured out what triggered us and moved back into our safe connection. Gone are days of long-lasting hurt and a confused distance between us.

Part of that journey is my creating WeConcile® – an app for couples. I started writing WeConcile in 2009. And while I was writing it, my now husband and I lived it. It seeped into our flesh, migrated into the very cells of our bones. The spaces within both our psyches that had been filled with trauma, doubt, and misunderstandings, slowly became infused with understanding, healing, and trust. We became different people. We became humans capable of listening to each other. We changed our behaviors. We reacted less.

I didn’t know that as over the years I created this program, I would also be living it. I only knew it became my life’s mission – to help others escape what I had escaped; the pain of the past, the pain of wounded relationships and broken dreams.

We all have our unique abilities and talents. Mine has been living at the interface of unwinding trauma and healing, of crossing the bridge of unrelating to relating, of being a writer and a healer, a student and a teacher. If you had asked me as a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would never have said, help people understand themselves, help people relate in healthy happy ways. In my youth I would have said, I want to save the planet, help the animals (and I still do). But life had other ideas for me on how I would contribute to this world. I have been guided. The fertile roots of my life have reached downward and anchored me in this particular journey of teaching others how they can better relate, how they can make their relationships beautiful.

This was first published on Medium.com

https://medium.com/@jenniferlehrmft.com/i-didnt-use-to-be-good-at-relationships-53091c695e74

Check out my more detailed article on my relational journey here:

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/when-the-journey-is-abundance/

My book, The Magic Cake: The Seven Ingredients of a Relationship-Ready Person,” helps you understand how to become a person who can attract in a great relationship, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TBMWQX2.

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