When people seek a better relationship with the person within, I have found that what happens to us is not as important as how we process what has happened. As children, our parents and other adults naturally tell us white-lies or keep secrets from us in order to protect us. This creates confusion between what we feel inside in response to a given experience and what we are being told on the outside. What ends up occurring is a struggle between keeping ourselves safe and letting ourselves be vulnerable, so we can love. This dichotomy leads to not trusting our reactions and feelings and therefore looking to others for validation and approval.

Paradoxically, while you are looking for other people to validate and approve of you, they are looking to you for the same validation and approval. This is a viscous cycle since most of us have not learned how to validate ourselves and therefore we can not validate others. The only solution to this is to learn self-validation. This requires taking a good, hard, honest look at who you are and how you have processed (or not) what has happened to you. "They" say that "love is blind", and they are right and the rest of your emotions are blind too! Since we are emotionally involved in our own life, we are not the most objective person to help take this hard honest look at ourselves. Fear, poor boundaries, a lack of a better relationship, and low self-esteem become our filters preventing us from having the objectivity we need to make the necessary changes in our lives.

It is important to learn how to reflect back the distortions and discrepancies based on perceptions a person has learned to help them negotiate the world. Once you are able to get that clarity, discover your own potential and validate yourself, the world becomes an exciting playground. The fear, confusion and emptiness dries up as you learn to validate and approve of your own choices, goals and desires. From here all else flows. Becoming a better "you" does not take anything from other people, in fact, just the opposite is true. The better you are, the easier it is to create a better relationship in all facets of your life.