Family matters. It is the first place where we learn how to behave, talk, react, love or even hate. Although we often fail to notice, we repeat the patterns from our family in our relationships and we tend to make the same mistakes. Changing partners won't help. Digging in the childhood, dealing with our parents now when we are adults and re-establishing those boundaries will help.
The book of Harriet Lerner called "The Dance of connection. How To Talk To Someone When When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, Or Desperate" is a gem. It will help you learn how to communicate better and choose better relationship patterns and partners.
The book concentrates around the concept of finding your voice. Your inner true voice. When you manage to do that, you will learn to set boundaries, to calmly tell others how they hurt you, to make requests in a nice way and overall how to lead a happy life. An important aspect is to learn how to put questions and how to actively listen instead of criticising, judging, arguing. An important aspect is to learn to overcome anger and to exclude passive aggresive silence. It is better to calm off and agree to talk later rather than arguing until both people no longer listen and just trash each other.
I find this book of great help if you are single or you are in a relationship/marriage/friendship. Learning to deal better with our emotions and express what we desire, what we feel and what we will not accept in a relationship is of paramount importance. The quality of our relationships is a factor in the quality of our lives.
Never choose a relationship where you lose your self esteem and bury your individuality. Choose yourself, even if it means losing that relationship. If you are not happy with yourself and you keep on breaking your principles to make others happy, you will be miserable.
I strongly recommend this book not only as an instrument of dealing with emotions, but also for personal development.
I have an almost 2 hour long video where I talk about it. I tried uploading yesterday to 3speak, but it is a strange error, I can't type in the boxes to write and it does not upload? Strange. So I uploaded it on my channel. Watch it here
Have a peaceful day and toodle loo!