Nedra Tawwab is a truly phenomenal therapist, philanthropist, and expert in the mental health field. It was so exciting to hear her thoughts on love and relationships. I highly suggest watching and following her on Instagram. I jotted some key takeaways below that may help you right now!
Paraphrasing a great metaphor- “Life without boundaries would be hard to navigate. I relate boundaries to traffic lights. Imagine we’re at a busy four way intersection and we look up to see a broken traffic light. Everyone would be looking around, panicked, and asking, ‘what do we do?’ How safe would you feel crossing that intersection? How confident are you that the other person will intuitively know it’s your turn to cross without any signals or cues? Personally, I would rather have a traffic light in place and get to my destination safely. When we don’t have structure in place, there’s higher risk for relationship issues to occur.”
“We can heal relational issues IN a relationship or individually.”
“Opposing love languages can be an opportunity for growth. If you have a child and they have a different love language, would you work to meet their needs? Why is it so much easier to dismiss our partner’s love language?”
“A level of awareness is required to recognize that something is off after experiencing trauma. If we know something is off, but we pretend to be okay- sometimes, this is functional.
Feeling angry is okay. Acting in anger is not.
“Why set boundaries at all? What if we avoid that challenging conversation?” “…It’s a lot of work to not feel all the time. Sometimes that’s harder then setting the boundaries itself. If we repeatedly pretend that we don’t mind things that make us uncomfortable and don’t honor our authentic selves, we end up worse off then if we just had the conversation in the first place.”
There are times where it’s healthy to “Replace “I” with “we’s” in communicating what works best for you AS a couple.
“Healing is awareness; applying the truth consistently is important. Decreasing the hold that the trauma has had on you is true healing. Forgetting the trauma or never getting triggered is not possible- but rewriting our story through healthy, alternative actions, is.”
How do you stay in a relationship for a long time? My answer is accepting them. A relationship is a celebration of differences.”
“Yelling will not get your message across.”
I highly recommend Nedra’s book to anyone interested in learning more about healthy relationships, boundaries, and mental wellness.
Did anything stand out to you when you watched this? Drop a comment below!
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