Building a Better Relationship with You - The Ripple Effect

The Relationship That Shapes Every Other One - How Building a Better Relationship with You can improve Other Areas of Life and Forge Stronger Bonds

Linda Bignell - FdA : MBACP : Read more here

Loving myself - a woman behind a red heart

People often come to relationship counselling and ask questions like

• “Why do I struggle to have healthy relationships?”

• “Why do my relationships keep failing?”

• “Why do I feel empty even when I’m in a relationship?”

• “Why do I rely so much on other people for validation?”

• “Why do I feel disconnected from myself?”

• "How do you fix a relationship"

A Relationship isn’t just about what happens between two people. The way we listen, communicate, and show up in one connection quietly shapes all the others in our lives. Building a better relationship, a strong and healthy relationship with you, creates a ripple effect, helping you connect more openly, confidently, and honestly with the people around you.

People often come to relationship counselling in Kent and ask "How do you fix a relationship" and sometimes this may result in couples therapy or marriage counselling - but equally, individual therapy can shed light and give you solutions about how to fix a relationship. By exploring and understanding patters of relating and previous experiences, can help you understand more about what may need to change in the future.

There is a quiet kind of strength in choosing yourself after a breakup or before getting in to another relationship. Not the loud, prove-a-point kind. The grounded kind that comes from deciding you do not need to rush into another relationship just to avoid being alone. Learning to be comfortable and at ease alone, can help bring about clarity about what we want from a relationship with someone else.

Miley Cyrus lyrics says in her song Flowers

… I can buy myself flowers

Write my name in the sand

Talk to myself for hours, yeah

Say things you don't understand

I can take myself dancing, yeah

I can hold my own hand

When someone chooses to work on inner peace and gaining self-awareness over jumping back into dating, it often looks misunderstood from the outside. People assume it is avoidance or fear. Done deliberately, it is clarity. It is the realisation that peace feels better than chaos, and that being comfortable with ourselves is worth more than the distraction or 'making-do' just so we are with someone else .

This choice is not about rejecting love. It is about redefining it. Instead of replacing one person with another, you replace unrest with calm. You stop chasing validation and start listening to yourself. That is where real growth begins. Acknowledging who you really are; your truths and values; your strengths and assets can truly build self-esteem and self-worth, or simply provide clarity over what you do and don't really want from a relationship with someone else.

Building a strong relationship with yourself means learning how you move through the world when no one else is shaping your decisions. You discover what drains you, what restores you, and what you actually need rather than what you were taught to want. You begin to understand your boundaries, not as walls, but as guides. Our boundaries tell others that we love and respect ourselves, demonstrate our needs along with defining what we want and what we aren't going to tolerate; those relationship red flags.

When you feel whole on your own, relationships change. You no longer enter them hoping to be saved or completed. You show up grounded, aware of your worth, and unwilling to abandon yourself to keep someone else comfortable. That shift alone changes the quality of every connection you form.

Contentment becomes your baseline. Not perfection, not constant happiness, but stability. You learn how to sit with your emotions without needing someone else to fix them. And from that place, love becomes something you choose, not something you cling to. You can become the sponge, filling and icing of your cake and others can be the cherry on top. If it is the other way round, our cherry doesn't have a firm foundation to sit upon and very much relies upon the ingredients and qualty of cake baking the chef has.

This is how people truly move on. Not by filling the space someone left with another person, but by building a life that feels steady and meaningful on its own. When your happiness is no longer dependent on another person, relationships stop being a source of anxiety and start becoming a place of growth, security and contentment.

If you are looking for answers to questions like

“Help me understand why my relationships feel so hard”

“I want healthier relationships but don’t know where to start”

“I feel like something inside me affects all my relationships”

“Explain why inner work matters in relationships”

“Why do I repeat the same patterns with people?”

"Do I have Separation Anxiety Disorder?"

Strong relationships with others are built on the foundation of a strong relationship with yourself.

Inspired by a passage from R.M. Drake.

Take time this week to invest in your relationship with yourself. If you want to find out how counselling and psychotherapy can help get in touch here and fil out the online form to arrange a free initial consultation with one of our