What Does That Even Mean?

The Relationship To Save Your Relationships... What Does That Even Mean?

Save 1. keep safe or rescue (someone or something) from harm or danger.

Synonyms: rescue, come to someone's rescue, save someone's life; set free, liberate,

deliver, extricate; bail out; preserve, keep safe, keep, protect, safeguard; salvage...reclaim.

The act of saving, (“rescuing; preserving; salvaging”), our relationships, is not synonymous with holding onto them (keeping them close at all costs, controlling, directing). Often the unconscious determination of everything being okay, is for things to be happening as we want them to, for people (oneself included) to be acting, thinking, and feeling in ways that one can tolerate without significant challenge or discomfort.

The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes saving our relationships means digging deep and sticking together to work at forward motion, and sometimes, it means letting go (“to set free, liberate”). Even trickier, there are times when the act of letting go is the only forward motion option available to us.

One of the big challenges then, is to identify times for digging in (actively making efforts, showing up, asking questions, exploring options) and times for letting go (participating by allowing things to be as they are, making no efforts to change or control outcomes). These challenges, waking up to wrestle with core concepts of growth, can be as relevant to the maintenance of our relationships with ourselves as for our relationships with others.

As Buddhist nun Pema Chödron says,

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually

thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to

experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is

to be willing to die over and over again.

Engaging in a coaching process is the safe space that allows for making meaning from otherwise only overwhelming and confusing times. Sometimes people need clinical psychotherapy to address certain challenges. Most often, people need a guide—an educated, consistent, attuned other to connect with while they find answers for themselves about what they feel, what they want, who they have been and may like to become.