What Does a Healthy Relationship or Friendship Look Like?

You’ve likely found yourself going down a rabbit hole of identifying some really unhealthy patterns in your relationships and are left with one big question: What does a healthy relationship actually look like? I’m sharing some ideas of what health looks like in relationships and how it can transform your daily experience. 

✨ Healthy boundaries are honored with both parties. 

You may have already heard a lot about boundaries but they are essentially limits that each person in a relationship has a right to expressing. This allows both parties in the relational dynamic to know what the other person can manage and how each party might be able to honor the needs of the other. It’s important that both members of the relationship have the right to healthy boundaries. This means that there must be support and acknowledgement of distress or needs when necessary, and also a feeling of freedom to have a limit, address something at a later time, or take care of one’s mental health. 

Here’s some questions you can ask yourself if you are wondering if you have healthy boundaries: 

• Am I able to I express if I’m tired or overwhelmed and need to come back to a topic at a different time? 

• When I say “I need a break for a moment”, is that honored? 

• Do I feel the freedom to not answer the phone when I’m focused on another meaningful task? 

• Do I honor the boundaries that my friend or partner expresses to me? 

• Does it feel loving when people express their boundaries or do I feel slighted or rejected?

   

✨ Support is easily given between parties.

This might feel like a weird statement after we just covered boundaries, but hear me out. Boundaries are about expressing limits when overwhelmed, overextended or in need of a break so that you can freely and easily offer support during other times. 

Boundaries are meant to allow you to restore some energy and take care of yourself, so that you can show up and support your people when it matters.

It’s also important that there is a balance in support. Both parties should be contributing to the supportive structure. If one party requires more support more often, and the other party is emotionally neglected, then there’s likely a problematic dynamic at play.

✨ Freedom to explore and play.   

Healthy relationships encourage each individual member to explore their wants, needs, and emotions. That can happen in small, yet significant, moments throughout the day (e.g. a discussion about feelings, experiences, or stresses over morning coffee) or through bigger adventures (e.g. someone exploring a new interest or activity outside of the relationship).  

One helpful question to ask is: do all parties feel the freedom to explore their needs and discuss them with each other? Is there a sense of openness and acceptance when feelings, experiences, and interests are expressed? 

If not, this is a really powerful way that you can move the relational dynamic back towards health. Invite conversation, check your own defensiveness, and allow all folks to express themselves and their needs. 

✨ Compassion is the relational norm.

Lastly, let’s talk about compassion. Compassion is a balm to most relational dynamics in need of change or growth. One of the measurements for healthy relational dynamics is whether compassion is normal in interactions, conversations, and responses to stressful situations.  

Some of the questions you might ask yourself are:

• How often do I show compassion to myself?

• How often is compassion extended to me?

• How often do I react with compassion and search for a deeper understanding of the stressor, feeling, or situation? 

If the answer to these questions is “not very often” then we have some work to do. This is a wonderful and helpful way to start moving towards healthy dynamics in any type of relationship. 

How well did you do? Do you think your relationships could use some help in getting to a healthy place? Are you stuck in codependent patterns that keep you from really reaching your true healthy potential? 

Survivors: If you are nodding your head "yes" to wanting your relationships to feel a little less chaotic and a little more grounded, I'd suggest our codependency workbook, Healing Codependency. It's a 10-week, step-by-step process of looking at your codependent patterns and finding realistic ways to manage your people-pleasing impulses. If you find that you are struggling with codependency in the aftermath of religious trauma, we have a curated education experience to help you create healthy relationship patterns again.  Join us for A Year of Non-Magical Thinking for Survivors!