Two weekends ago my boyfriend and I went to a Harville Hendrix relationship workshop to gather more tools to relate to each other.  It was truly a wonderful experience.  Ever since I can remember I have been on a path of self development to achieve the self love necessary to maintain an open heart to create safety for myself and others.

This was one of the first workshops that I have been to that their theories were based on, a relationship with your primary partner was a platform to do your inner child work and you where responsible for your partners safety.  Now, I’ve been doing partnership work to heal childhood wounds  for a while, but not with the twist that we were responsible for each others safety.  What does this mean? I have been taught all my life that I am responsible for my own growth, healing and safety.  What I got out of it, wasn’t that your partner is completely responsible for how you feel, but there is a responsibility there.

If you are doing something to your partner that triggers him or her, and touches on one of their childhood wounds and you know that this triggers them, why wouldn’t you make the effort to stop triggering them, showing up differently, so they could heal that wound.  This is where the responsibility lays.  When we change our behavior around our partners wounds, we aide in the healing process instead of wounding them more by ignoring their needs.

So, with this information, I thought how is this  different with our children. The only differnece is we might be the ones creating the wounds in the first place, that they will spend their entire adult years trying to overcome.

The most critical information I got out of the workshop was how to listen, validate and have empathy for my partner and realize he is his own person and he is not me.  If we listen to our teens, validate their feelings, and have empathy for them and really get that they are not us, they are their own person on their own journey through life, this behavior alone changes the dynamic of the relationship.

We all want to be heard, validated and of course loved in all of our relationships; friendships, partners,  and children, this is an amazing gift we can give to our kids and anyone in our life.

Integrity is having an uprightness of character or action. It implies trustworthiness.

We know our code of honor; we know when we show a lack of integrity–in other words, when we are not trustworthy.

Do we like people who don’t have Integrity? When our friends lie to us, do we think it is okay?  This seems like a very basic quality we should learn when we are younger, but somehow it misses the boat.

It is very important to develop integrity within oneself. When we lie, cheat, steal or deceive, we hurt ourselves. We damage our self esteem. We never want to do something that makes us view our self as someone without integrity.  How can we like people who lack integrity? You, yourself, don’t like those kinds of people, so make sure that you aren’t one.  Everything always comes down to liking yourself, so you can love yourself, so you can have confidence and be happy.

People treat us differently when they can not trust us.  They don’t open up to us, therefore we prevent close relationships from happening in our lives.  People are afraid of sharing personal information with us, so this only allows a very shallow friendship.

It is so much nicer to be able to have close relationships that we can share our dreams, our upsets and our fears with, knowing that they will honor us, by keeping that information to themselves and not sharing or gossiping with others about it.

If we want friendship with people that have integrity, we have to have integrity, that is just the way the world works.  If you lie to your friends, they will never believe your words, again it will be impossible to trust you, therefore limiting your
relationship.

If we are doing things that hurt other people, and yes lying, cheating, and being dishonest indeed hurts others, and guess what, it hurts us too.  When we are people we don’t like, it damages our self esteem.  We become people we don’t like and if we are people we don’t like, our sense of self suffers.

When we have low self esteem, we tend to make everyday decisions in our life through that space instead of a confident place.  Can you see how that could affect our life?  Because the decisions we make, create the life we live.  So, if we are out there making bad decisions, how do you think our life will look?  Take a moment and think about it.

It’s safe to say that having Integrity is important, it is a part of who you are.  So, in looking at who you are or who you want to be, think about: do you have integrity?