How Personal Growth Can be Measured

Using relationships to recognize how we are changing and growing.

Change is not easy. We tend to forget that when we are changing, it isn't only hard on us, it is also hard on our loved ones and friends. Changing relationship patterns is necessary in personal transformation. The way we interact with others is a result of our patterns. This means that the way we love, attach, care, and inhabit our relationships are all part of our deeper patterns. When we change these patterns, our relationships have to change with them.

Riding out the Discomfort Into Something New

Photo Credit: Joseph Rothstein

The first way to know that you are actually changing patterns in their lives is when relationships get uncomfortable. Our comfort zone of interacting includes patterns that are not healthy for us. These patterns are abundant and often intermingle within our method of relating. We might avoid stating needs, hold unstated demands on our friends, attach with either a detachment or an engulfment, care take, enable, withdraw, withhold emotions, avoid boundaries. The …