5 Reasons Couples Fight and Breakup and What you Can Do About It

by Susie and Otto Collins, Relationship Coaches

Nearly everyone has experienced a relationship breakup or divorce and it can be one of the most painful periods in your life as you try to heal your broken heart. What we have discovered in our relationship coaching practice, many breakups don't have to happen.

So, if breakups don't have to occur, what causes them and how can you prevent them?

Here are four ideas to help you better understand why breakups happen and what you can do to prevent them in your relationship.

1. Old Fears Surface.

It's to be expected that being in an intimate relationship will inevitable bring up fears and challenges from the past. These might include fearing not being good enough, attractive enough, wealthy enough or even feelings of abandonment. If fears are not expected, looked at and healed, they interfere in some way or another with the health of every relationship. Take some time to notice when the fears surface, be loving with
yourself but look inward instead of outward blaming your partner for what clearly is your issue.

Ask yourself if your fears are "true" or are you just making "stories" up in your head. If you are creating those "stories" and there's no basis of truth to them, then change your thinking. It's not always easy to do and it takes moment by moment monitoring of your
thoughts. If you need help and support to make the changes you want in your life, be courageous enough to get it.

You may not have healed your broken heart from past relationships that ended and you find it very difficult to trust your current partner or open your heart completely to him or her. We suggest that you stop living from the hurt of those past relationships and bring yourself into the present moment, without continuing the "stories" of the past. Commit to starting over, allowing your fears to be there but reminding yourself that this is a new day.

2. Not Feeling Understood, Valued, Loved and Appreciated.
Everyone wants to feel understood, valued, loved and appreciated and when we're not, we tend to either withdraw or attack the other person for not meeting our needs. If you want to be appreciated, start appreciating the other people in your life. Sounds simplistic but it really works!

If you are not feeling loved, start being open to seeing and feeling love and appreciation that people are giving you that you may not be aware of in your daily life. It may be that someone allows you to go ahead of them in traffic or tells you to go ahead in a grocery line. Send some appreciation back to them and to everyone around you and watch love snowball in your life.

3. Not Making their Relationship a Priority.
Many couples take each other for granted and don't give their relationship the attention it needs most of the time. The lack of closeness and connection can be overwhelming and can cause great loneliness. Make your relationship a priority in your life. Set aside time everyday to connect with your partner.

We believe that sex happens long before the bedroom. It starts all day long when you have thoughts about your partner--Are these thoughts positive or negative? It continues when you come together--Are you happy to see each other and express love and appreciation or do you great each other with a laundry list of chores, things to be done or grievances?

These are just a couple of ways we make our relationship a priority. Try them in yours!

4. One or Both People are Made to Feel They are "Wrong."
One of the biggest mistakes people make is that they make each other wrong. As soon as critical words are said, defenses and walls go up and suddenly that person who you love and they love you becomes an "enemy."

Before you jump into blaming and judging your partner, stop and take a moment to breathe. Ask yourself if making your partner wrong will drive you further apart or move you closer toward healing. Open your heart to understanding the dynamics of what's going on between the two of you. Understand the full story before you start making someone wrong. So often we assume to know what is in someone's heart and we really don't. Take the time to find out!

5. Not healing your heart after a previous relationship breakup
Many people go from relationship to relationship without truly healing their hearts. They never discover what went wrong in their previous relationship and what they could have done differently. They keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again and always expect a different outcome.

We suggest that you take the time to heal your broken heart and your attachment to being a victim, in being right or whatever holds you to a previous relationship. Spend some energy in taking responsibility for what happened, forgiving yourself and your previous partner, and deciding what you want to change in your life.

If you are interested in more information to help you heal from a relationship breakup, visit www.howtohealyourbrokenheart.com

Coping with Loss

This Article comes from the Relationship Institute

Of all of life's multifaceted teachings, the experience of loss is among our most powerful vehicles for awakening. As much as we resist its sting, loss is omnipresent in the universe. The poet Yeats reminded us that no matter how solid anything appears, ultimately ''...things fall apart.'' In a similar vein, modern physics' Law of Entropy proves that over time, everything loses coherence and tends toward disorder. In all forms of relationship, at some point in the future we will have to say good-bye to the physical form of everyone we now know.

With intimate relationships, we see loss everywhere around us in every possible form: passionate, seemingly transcendent romances suddenly crashing to the ground; old, distant, lifeless relationships finally acknowledging what has been obvious for a long time; unfulfilled lovers paralyzed by fear, unable to break through to deeper levels of intimacy; fragile new budding relationships that don't survive even the first disagreement; and friendships ending when one person never returns the call. And when a relationship ends, there are losses on many levels. We lose contact with the person, of course and all the gratification, real or imagined, that they brought to our lives. But even more painfully, we lose the vision of what this relationship has meant to us in the past and present and the hope of what it might mean for us in the future. We lose the story and the myth that embodied the relationship and for many of us this is the most difficult loss of all.

How do we react in the face of impending loss? We have several choices. If we are attached to a particular form of this relationship, by virtue of a belief we have about what should or must be rather than what is, we can hold on tightly, hoping to control a process that we intuitively know is out of our control. Holding on tightly usually only hastens our journey to aloneness by scaring off our partner with our rigid, suffocating energy.

We can also choose to prematurely let go, to check out, to disengage emotionally, preparing for the loss before it even happens, protecting our soft underbelly from the pain that lies ahead, numbing or distracting ourselves from the uncomfortable sensations surging through our hearts and minds through work, addictions or a new warm body. We can also retreat to victimhood, reassuring ourselves that this other person wasn't so great to begin with, that ''we can do better'' and that we have been treated poorly or unfairly, through no fault of our own.

But there is another path, the path of consciously being with and embracing our loss, responsibly, without judgment toward ourselves or our partner, being fully present with our feelings of sadness, despair, loneliness, grief, anger or whatever else comes up. There may be profound sadness that something beautiful or hopeful has died or was never even given a chance to live. There may be anger that we didn't try harder or that they didn't either. There may be fear that we will always be alone or despair that it seems too hard to connect with others. Regardless of what comes up, we can choose to be present with all of our feelings, lying in the rubble of our shattered dreams, perhaps confused and not sure what to do next. There is nothing we have to ''do'' other than allow our feelings to move within and through us at their own pace and time.

We can honor the process by not needing to change or distract or distort or numb what is happening within us. And if we can stay with this process mindfully, eventually we will get to a place of acceptance and even understanding, where we can look back with gratitude at what was once a beautiful thing. We can honor the connection that allowed our spirit to soar and our loving presence to expand. We can review what we have learned from this journey and make notes about how we will do it differently the next time around.

Although we may initially be horrified at our losses, they aren't going to go away, ever. Nor would we want them to. Regular losses are essential throughout our life spans for all growth to occur. Every loss creates a space for something new to be born: a new hope, a new beginning, a new vision, a new opening to loving ourselves and others more deeply. It is only when we fully embrace a loss, that we can truly gain.