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While the need for human connection appears to be innate, the ability to form quality, strong healthy, loving and compassionate relationships however, is learned.
The ability to form a stable relationship starts to form in infancy, in a child’s earliest experiences with a caregiver who reliably meets the infant’s needs for food, care, warmth, protection, stimulation, and social contact.
Such relationships establish deeply ingrained patterns of relating to others. These patterns continue over time, and even if they can change through personal growth, therapy, coaching and through relationships themselves, they are the base for people’s behaviors, relationship dynamics and communication patterns.
If quality relationships are essential for our health and wellbeing but they do not depend on Love, then, what are the true ingredients, for quality, compassionate and connected relationships?
We are always communicating. It is impossible to not-communicate.
Every interaction, every facial expression, every movement, tone of voice and even silence is communication.
In every communication there’s an underlying message that is being expressed.
The person expressing the message is often unaware of the message they are sending. Underlying messages are usually not obvious to the listeners either.
If the effect the message has feels like a threat the listener will get triggered and automatically react with discomfort and thus become defensive.
Do you know that the way your messages are getting across has a direct effect on how people are reacting to you?
Becoming aware of the message that is really getting across when you express yourself combined with learning to speak from the heart in a compassionate way will radically heal and transform your communication and your relationships.
Our relationships play a big role in how our brain develops
Experience plays a big role in how the brain develops, even in the face of same or other risk factors. We can look at genes and other important variables as some of the many factors that contribute to a larger picture of brain growth. Genes may influence some aspects of neural growth, but there is a much fuller set of factors that contribute to our well-being than genetics alone.
How the mind unfolds, how relationships are supportive, how people feel a sense of belonging to a larger group all influence how the brain achieves and maintains integrative development at the root of our pathway toward health.
Especially influential in terms of how the brain develops—and, in turn, how we learn to calm our emotions, how we understand ourselves, and how we relate to others and the larger world—are our experiences during infancy. The relationships we have with our parents and other people who care for us when we are very young most directly shape who we become.
Our efforts as human beings are motivated by our underlying yearning for happiness and the feeling of being loved.
As humans, we have an underlying belief that it is possible to relate to others in ways that will consistently bring Love and therefore happiness into our lives.
“We strive to attain material things (money, possessions, etc.) in the hope that we will then be in a better position to attract the love and thus the feeling of happiness that we are seeking”.
Interestingly, even though Humans are biologically built to Love, and Love connects us to each other, relationships do not thrive on love alone. Love is one of the most profound emotions known to human beings and connects us to each other, but it is the quality of relationships and not just the Love, that are essential for health and well-being. Quality and healthy relationships are essential for humans to feel happy and to feel loved. However, quality and healthy connections and relationships need to be learned.