Your relationship is not the product of what you do; it's a manifestation of what you believe about yourself. So the only effective strategy for transforming a relationship is to transform yourself. Otherwise, it's like shuffling around the furniture in a house with a foundation built on shifting sands.
Most people live and die entirely by their assumptions, without ever really questioning their origins. You are a fluid constellation of stories. Refine the stories so that you are the hero rather than the victim. From this space, healing happens, love deepens creativity blossoms. It can't be otherwise. This is why incremental changes are sometimes harder to make than massive ones.
The constant permutations of reality can get uncomfortable, to say the least, in proportion to how adamantly we cling to the familiar. What we cling to is completely arbitrary, by the way. The more you think about the more you'll realize that every tradition is the product of its times, just as our times are birthing other traditions. Think of a father or a grandfather wearing the same style of shoes or dress for their entire lives. There's nothing inherently wrong with groping for certainly, unless it limits your life experience.
We're indoctrinated into rhythms that repeat, the same yet different. Sea waves, seasons, moons, classes, etc. And through those experiences, we eventually learn that “The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change ", as Heraclitus put it. Most people don't fathom it as a visceral reality. They sort of intellectually waft around it, still blindly clinging to the things they refuse to change.
It is liberating to know that countless cells are dying and being reborn every second; that we are literally showing up to a new moment, and certainly a new year, with a body that is mostly new. And yet we think we are one way because we showed up that way in the past. Or maybe someone told us we were one way, though we've never set foot in that way of being, and we take it on as part of our identity.
Free yourself.
You are a constellation of stories, nothing more or less. What you believe is what you see. On some level, we've all experienced this. We manifest our reality. What we believe about our physiology, or organs, our cells, our blood, can dramatically impact our world. A belief that is erroneous, as in the case of accepting a diagnosis of diseases, can be fatal.
I wanted to give a little overview of some of the considerations that I feel are pertinent, so you can test them out in their own lives. It's imperative to test every concept against life experience, so that you don't wind up lead astray by blindly following leaders.