Characteristics of a Healthy Intimate Relationship
The goal in an intimate relationship is to feel calm, centered and focused. The intimacy needs to be safe, supportive, respectful, nonpunitive and peaceful. You feel taken care of, wanted, unconditionally accepted and loved just for existing and being alive in a healthy intimate relationship. You feel part of something and not alone in such a relationship. You experience forgiving and being forgiven with little revenge or reminding of past offenses. You find yourself giving thanks for just being alive in this relationship. A healthy intimate relationship has a sense of directedness with plan and order. You experience being free to be who you are rather than who you think you need to be for the other. This relationship makes you free from the "paralysis of analysis" needing to analyze every minute detail of what goes on in it. An intimate relationship has its priorities in order, with people's feelings and process of the relationship coming before things and money. A healthy intimate relationship encourages your personal growth and supports your individuality. This relationship does not result in you or your relationship partner becoming emotionally, physically or intellectually dependent on one another. An intimate relationship encourages the spiritual growth of both relationship partners ~ James J Messina, PhD
www.livestrong.com/article/14688-establishing-healthy-boundaries-in-relationships/
So, considering that boundaries have a core purpose in civilization, an individual’s lack of personal, psychological boundaries isn’t really a true lack—at least, it’s not a lack in the philosophical sense of something “missing.” Instead, this apparent lack is really a refusal to defend one’s own dignity. And it’s a refusal based on hatred. That’s right. Hatred: a hatred of the self that results from living always in fear because of having been abused as a child. Unable to make sense of senseless abuse, a child, using the full effort of imperfect childhood logic, arrives at the only “logical” conclusion: “It must be my fault. I’m just a worthless person. I deserve condemnation.” And there you have it: self-hatred engendered by fear that is engendered by abuse.
Now, if you didn’t hate yourself, you would be able to take proper care of yourself—and that includes having healthy boundaries to protect your dignity. And if you had healthy boundaries to protect your dignity, you could, like in the example of the oxygen mask, take proper care of others. And taking proper care of others is an aspect of love.
To re-establish healthy boundaries, then, endeavor to stop refusing to defend boundaries. You can do this simply by starting to refuse to hate—and that includes refusing to hate yourself. ~ Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D.
www.guidetopsychology.com/boundaries.htm
I was wondering if anyone can tell me what this quote is from, which book? It is like foreign to me, I have never had a healthy intimate relationship, I don't even know how to. Reading through this thread was very helpful, I made a list of my core values and realised that my uBPDex has none of these core values. We had much in common as far as interests but I think one major problem was the lack of similar values. Yet early on in our relationship I thought he did have the same core values. Either I was projecting or he was mirroring, probably both.
