Relationships - Collateral Patterns I

Healing Relationships

These relationships depict a period of stress, mourning, loss and struggle. The people in this relationship tend to feel fearful, dejected and wounded from inside. They do not have to be present at the same time and the same place for their mutual growth and development and quite rightly, they are not. They badly long for love and care from their partners and at the same time, they should retrospect their relation and assess themselves. These people are generally completely mismatched and do not share much in common. Their lack of fit includes their age difference which can be up to twenty years as well. These differences also involve the intelligence levels like I.Q., where a brilliant surgeon paired up with a ski instructor who is not very intelligent. The differences can also involve sexual behaviors and experiences or traumatic events in one’s past etc.

In these kinds of relationships, physical and emotional distance from each other can prove to a healing remedy. A person who gets divorced after fifteen years of marriage marries a person whose spouse had died prematurely. At that particular time, these two people needed each other very badly and wanted to be together, opposed to the contradicting views of their family and friends. Both these people got along well because they needed to be away from their traumas and also wanted each other’s comfort. Couples in the healing relationships want to talk about their previous experiences and about the difficult times they had to face along with struggles and losses. They try to repeat these events and relive the different levels when they try to understand each other and develop a sense of compassion. Instead of passion, support, kindness and gentleness are the healing weapons in this relationship. People involved in this relationship go for plenty of trips for recreation purposes and indulge with each other. It can be said that these relationships are more play oriented rather than being work oriented. Even if this relationship comes to an abrupt end, the ending is not painful and traumatic but supportive. It is possible for people to have two or even three healing relationships at the same time. In this case, one person is going through a healing stage where as the other is going through a transitioning stage.

Transitional relationships

In the transitional relationships, there is a cross between the new and the old, between the patterns that people were trying to change. This helps them in handling old conflicts and issues in a better way without causing any harm to the older relationship. The people involved in this relationship can also try to find out improved ways of relating to each other and developing their characters. It is a good way of practicing for a long term relationship which is much healthier than the older one, and can sometimes even evolve into a new relationship.

In case one of the members in the relationship gets deeply attached to the patterns of the older relationship or falls back into the same habits which led to the failure of the previous relationship, then the transitional relationship faces problems. Sometimes it even turns out to be like the relationship which led to this new relationship. This is called a transference relationship which is described later on. When the people involved in the transitional relationship have achieved their aims and worked out their problems, they can end it in a more efficient and caring manner.