Personal Power is the Foundation of Relationship Growth

A good relationship is full of compassion, caring, love and investment, but none of those things are the foundation of a good relationship.

The foundation of a good relationship is a sense of personal power and okayness.

Compassion, caring, love and investment are built on top of that sense of personal power.

When the foundation crumbles, the whole structure comes tumbling down.

What is personal power?

Personal power is the sense that you are probably going to be okay, even if your partner doesn't change.

If you are in an unhappy relationship, you probably have the sense that you need your partner to change for you to be okay.

When you feel that way, it makes it a lot harder for you to really open up to your partner with compassion, caring, love and investment.

Your ability to care about your partner will always be limited by your ability to feel like you're probably going to be okay.

What happens when you don't feel powerful?

When you don't feel powerful, or when you don't feel like you're probably going to be okay, your brain goes into survival mode.

When you feel like your partner — instead of you — is the solution to your okayness, you start to see your partner as a problem and not a person.

When you see your partner as a problem and not a person, you lose your capacity for love and caring.

When you lose your capacity for love and caring, it makes it harder for your partner to love you and care about you.

That is how relationships start to crumble.

Why your brain defaults to feeling powerless in your relationship

Your brain is optimized for childhood, not for adulthood. The relational part of your brain is optimized for managing a child-parent relationship, not for managing an adult-to-adult relationship.

You can change this pattern in your brain, but it takes deliberate effort.

There's a special place in your brain that is reserved for the person who's supposed to love you. When you were a child, that place was reserved for your parent or caretaker.

When you were young, you treated that relationship with your parent as a survival relationship because it was.

You were reliant on that person for love, support, caring, food, clothing and shelter.

As an adult, you don't depend on your partner the way you once depended on your parent. But your brain will not automatically update its software to reflect that new reality.

You have to help your brain change if you want to feel more powerful in your adult relationship.

How to feel more powerful in your adult relationship

Self-compassion is the key to feeling more powerful in your adult relationship.

Your brain was focused on getting love and caring from a parent when you were young. That parental investment was the key to your survival as a child.

As an adult, you need to learn how to provide that same kind of warm, loving care internally.

As your brain develops, it adds on new features but doesn't delete the old features that were already there. So the parts of your brain that craved parental care and warmth when you were young are still inside you. We'll call this part of your brain your inner child.

You have also developed another part of your brain that is capable of providing warm, steady reassurance to a child in distress. We'll call this part of your brain your inner adult.

You will feel more powerful in your relationship when you learn to build a stronger connection between the two parts of your brain.

One way to do this is to visualize your younger self in your imagination, and see if you naturally feel compassion towards that child.

You can also imagine how you as an adult would comfort your younger self in a difficult situation. You can revisit memories of difficulty from your childhood, and then imagine you as an adult stepping in to provide comfort and protection to your younger self.

Another way to develop a sense of personal power is to visualize how you will take care of yourself if your partner doesn't change.

As a child, there wasn't much you could do to take care of yourself if your parents didn't offer you the comfort and protection you needed. As an adult, there's a lot you can do to take care of yourself if your partner doesn't love you the way you hope to be loved.

How to handle relationship distress

When you feel pain and loneliness in your relationship, you have the option of treating it as an opportunity to practice self-compassion.

Your instinct will be to try to get your partner to fix the problem for you, but that reinforces your brain's desire to rely on external reassurance instead of learning to comfort yourself.

Creating your own internal emotional fallback is the key to building a better relationship.

In the long run, your ability to comfort yourself makes it more likely that you will receive the kind of warmth and attention you crave from your partner.

When you feel relationship distress, when love hurts, think of it as an opportunity to practice comforting yourself.

As you do this, you will become more capable of offering warmth and compassion and acceptance to your partner. When that happens, it makes it easier for your partner to respond in the same way to you.

Remember the foundation

Personal strength, power and resilience are the foundation of lifelong love.

When you find your compassion and warmth and acceptance of your partner fading, it is usually a sign that your sense of personal power is also eroding.

When you feel powerful and strong, it is so much easier to offer warmth and acceptance to yourself and your partner.

Remember the foundation. Build the bridge between your inner child and your inner adult.

This is the way to create lasting lifelong love.