Relationship Coach Blog

You know that your relationship has taken a turn for the worse. The end of the road is before you and it doesn’t look pretty.  What’s more, you seem to be coming to that end faster and faster every day.  Rather than steering a different course, however, you remain paralyzed with inaction.  Your every thought is, “I’ve got to do something,” but you don’t.  What is it that keeps so many on such a collision course?

Unless something drastic has happened in your relationship, your relationship problems started gradually.  And since things had been good, your natural tendency was to wait for things to get back to normal.  Everyone has bad days, after all.  No relationship is perfect–right?  Unfortunately, though, things did not get back to normal.  The little feeling of distance grew bigger.  At that point, you probably started to look for answers.  Maybe you consulted the all knowing Google.

If you have done your research well, then you have found a lot of advice-much of it contradictory.  Having found it, though, has not gotten your relationship back on course.  Maps show you how to go-they don’t drive for you.  Neither do all those people giving advice on the internet come to your home and straighten things out for you.  The information falls into three categories:  1) give up on your relationship; 2) quick fixes; and 3) get professional help.  You never need to choose the first one-just doing nothing will accomplish that.

Some of the quick fix answers you found sound like they might work. Getting professional help, although the most promising, feels like admitting that your problem is really big. And that is hard to face.  But you know that you had better do something.  Your desire to take action however is met with an equal and opposite force not to take action.  That force comes from your fears.  Fear of choosing the wrong solution, fear of failure, fear of conflict, or just a foreboding fear.  Fear is the great roadblock to all destinations-good and bad.  Listening to our fears does prevent some pretty nasty things, but also some pretty good ones.  Like fixing your relationship.

Unable to take action, you continue to do what you are able to-look for more answers. There is no fear in that.  Our minds do not stop us from gathering information-just from applying it.  Our self help libraries grow big while our relationships grow cold.

Getting to action and putting an end to chronic contemplation is possible as demonstrated by the number of successful people who do just that.  How do they do it?  They do it by getting out of their heads.  Just thinking about a problem accomplishes nothing.  We get out of our heads by using tools.  This is true whether we are building a birdhouse or fixing a relationship.  There is no one on earth who can make anything just by using their heads.  At the point tools are applied, things start to happen.

A tool to get you out of chronic contemplation is the deadline. Mark on the calendar (a great tool with many uses) when the last day of your solution search will be.  Mark another date, after that, when you will commit to the best solution you have.  On that day, you will choose from your list of options (lists are wonderful tools) the action you will take.  Either that, or on that day you will write on a piece of paper (another wonderful tool), “Today, I have chosen to do nothing about my relationship and just let it die.”  Doing nothing, after all, is a choice.  Making it tangible by writing it down often leads to either action, or piece of mind.  It gets you out of the in-between.

One piece of advice for you in your search for solutions-don’t order pizza in a French restaurant. A friend once told me that if you want a good steak, go to a steakhouse; if you want pizza, go to a pizza restaurant.  Get your relationship information from someone who specializes in helping people with relationship problems.  You can get it elsewhere, but it won’t be as good.