How to Minimise Relationship Breakup, Part 5
Personal Change
When we talk about change in relationships, we often imagine dramatic transformation.
But real change is usually quieter and more uncomfortable.
It doesn’t start with fixing your partner. You can only change yourself.
It starts with noticing yourself in the moment you want to withdraw, defend, or shut down.
Change can look like staying emotionally present when your instinct is to create distance.
Or allowing closeness without scanning for the moment it might disappear.
For someone with avoidant attachment, change might mean learning that needing others doesn’t equal losing yourself.
For someone with anxious attachment, it can mean discovering that distance doesn’t always mean abandonment.
Virginia Woolf wrote,
‘The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.’
Many of us learned early to organise ourselves around other people’s emotions or to disappear to stay safe. Change begins when we stop letting those old rules run the present.
This doesn’t mean forcing yourself to feel differently.
It means slowing down enough to notice when the past is speaking louder than the present.
James Baldwin said,
‘Nothing can be changed until it is faced.’
Facing it can look like:
naming your needs instead of hoping they’ll be noticed.
Sitting with discomfort instead of escaping it.
Letting your partner see you are unsure, learning, imperfect.
It also means recognising that growth happens in relationship.
Not in isolation.
And that learning to love safely often requires being loved patiently while you practice. Is your partner holding that space for you?
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
‘Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’
Healthy love doesn’t erase your defenses overnight.
It respects them, while gently teaching you they’re no longer needed.
Change is not becoming someone else. It’s becoming less governed by fear (which is the topic of my next series of videos), and more guided by choice. It is also getting a greater balance of both male and female energies in all of us.
And over time,
those small, uncomfortable moments of choosing differently
are what turn avoidable breakups into relationships that grow instead of fracture.”
