Healthy relationships of any kind need one important thing: authenticity. Picture a healthy relationship with yourself, where you honour who you truly are and express your authenticity from a strong centre as you go about your life, interact with others, and attract those who are doing the same. Without this strong centre of authenticity, your relationships with others risk being built on shaky ground as they play out ego patterns and fail to effectively embody your authentic needs and values. A healthy relationship is built on the awareness of each other’s authentic needs and values and the embodiment of these in the relationship, coupled with a sacred, conscious connection of true self to true self. Join me on a journey of self-discovery, where the spotlight is on authenticity in healthy relationships.
Authenticity and its Importance
Authenticity involves expressing your true self and embodying your authentic needs and values in the things you do and the relationships you engage in. Your authentic needs and values are your compass for your life journey and relationships. By staying true to yourself in this way, you avoid conflicting with yourself and build the best life that aligns with your true needs and values. This maximises your fulfilment and therefore your wellbeing in all aspects of your life, including your relationships.
Your authenticity and the accurate perception of your needs and values depend on you having an accurate sense of your true self. Without sufficient awareness of your true self, it’s easy to confuse it with your personality or ego. Your personality is in fact not your true self; it is only the psychological interface of your true self with the world. Your true self is who you really are as a centre of pure being. Your spiritual purpose is to model your personality on the successful integration of your true self with the physical world. I explain this in more detail in The True Self. To grow in authenticity, seek out and embrace who you really are beyond your personality.
Challenges to Authenticity
There are various challenges that can limit your authenticity and even cause you to repress your true self:
- Social pressures and societal norms: encourage your conformity and adaptation to mainstream society.
- Conformity bias: exacerbates your conformity, pulling you even further away from your authenticity.
- Cultural conditioning, media messages, and psychological nudging: encourage your adaptation to mainstream society.
- Ego defences: act as barriers, shielding you from the vulnerability your authenticity demands.
- Entanglement in automatic thoughts and emotions: keep you in your head rather than your true self.
- External distractions: take your attention away from your true self.
Mastering these challenges requires your conscious effort and unwavering dedication to your authenticity. Consistently practise Mindfulness each day to take control of your attention, disengage from the contents of your mind and the pull of distractions, and question cultural and societal influences.
Authentic Relationships are Healthy Relationships
Authentic relating involves consciously connecting from your true self to the true self of another. It requires both of you to be present on all levels and to embody your true selves. In authentic relationships, you both attract each other for who you genuinely are and safeguard the sanctity of your authentic needs and values with Healthy Boundaries and mutual respect.
The healthiest relationships are not measured by their duration or their fulfilment of reactive desires, but by how effectively two individuals stay present to each other from their true selves and support each other to embody their authentic values, meet their authentic needs, and be their true selves.
If you don’t choose your relationships based on your authentic needs and values, or you base your relationships on reactive impulses rather than on a connection between true selves, you may have an interesting honeymoon period but drift passively through the relationship, sacrificing yourself by not acknowledging and meeting your true needs. And very soon, frustration, anger, resentment, and conflicts may erupt in your previously glowing but shallow relationship.
How to Build Authentic, Healthy Relationships
The start of an authentic, healthy relationship begins with you honouring your true self and mastering the challenges to your authenticity. Support this with a consistent daily mindfulness practice and a continuous focus on your self-development. But remember, you won’t build an authentic relationship if you only honour your authenticity up until the moment you meet somebody, and then sacrifice yourself to please them and win their love.
Working on your emotional growth and healing is essential to prevent unprocessed patterns and unconscious impulses from sabotaging your authenticity in this way. Such impulses can be a reaction to low self-worth, loneliness, or frustration. If you experience these impulses, they may automatically drive you into relationships to get your self-worth affirmed, to feel wanted, and to experience basic intimacy. The sexual chemistry may be the charming wallpaper that temporarily covers the cracks of your incompatible personalities and estranged true selves. Make addressing these unconscious impulses part of a mindfulness practice that incorporates Self-Inquiry, builds Emotional Intelligence, and helps you discover and embody your True Self.
Select, grow, and transform your romantic relationships based on a solid foundation of compatible authentic needs and values, along with a healthy desire for full intimacy supported by openness, respect, and true love. As I reveal in the 3 Keys to True Love, true love is a multidimensional experience that can only unfold through a sacred heart connection between the true selves of two people. You can nurture this by being present to each other on all levels and using the three keys of compassion, gratitude, and healing.
Create a list of authentic needs and values, and share these lists with each other. Set goals for embodying them, identify shared goals, and explore ways to support each other in fulfilling them. Whenever you are together, seize the opportunity to truly connect with full presence and explore your true selves together. Take off your masks and explore the sacred heart connection between you, from true self to true self. Try holding hands and breathing together while maintaining eye contact with full, heart-centred presence. Read and discuss my posts Finding Your True Self, The Skill of Mindful Relating, and The 3 Keys to True Love. Together, become more yourselves in the relationship and more yourselves because of it.
Your relationships are one of the fastest vehicles for personal growth, and require compassion, understanding, and support from each other for this. Whenever challenging experiences come up and old patterns and wounds are triggered, stay mindful to master your reactivity and take full responsibility for your own experience without projecting onto the other person or engaging in blame-shifting (blaming the other person for your behaviour). Personal responsibility and respect for the other person will protect the relationship. Mindfulness and Self-Inquiry can make you more conscious of your thoughts, emotions, and reactions, as well as the patterns that drive them, enabling you to better process and release them.
Next step: Ready to grow in mindfulness, release limiting patterns, and co-create healthy relationships aligned with your true self? Book a personalised, empowering Guidance Call.
