With your new marriage, you’ve blended your families together to form a new one. A blended family, like any other family, has its ups and its downs. Keeping the relationships healthy takes work. Evaluate yourself on how well you work at keeping healthy relationships within your blended family with these ideas in mind.
- Keep communication open. This is vital to any relationship you care about. It’s important to communicate your feelings and ideas to people you love. It’s also important for you to listen and acknowledge their feelings and ideas when they open up. This is especially true when you have conflict. Don’t let the lack of communication ruin a great thing.
- Be responsible for your feelings and actions. Don’t blame others. Make it a priority to tell yourself that no one has control over your emotions or actions, except for you. Blaming others only results in unnecessary conflict and possibly a dissolved relationship.
- Acceptance in relationships is unconditional love. It’s not based on what a person does or doesn’t do, but loving them no matter what, which might also require the next action for keeping your relationship healthy.
- Forgiveness is a hard pill to swallow sometimes. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you get taken advantage of. It means you’re willing to let go of bitterness, anger, or sadness that you might be harboring against someone. It doesn’t mean that what that person did is acceptable. It just means that you are willing to rise above the pain.
- Love Languages are a great way to show that the relationship is important to you. Do you say kind and loving things? Are you willing to do things to help? Do you show your love with gifts? Is spending time together important to you? Do you give hugs or friendly pats on shoulders? Take time to think about how you show love to others so that they know without a doubt how you feel.
- And finally, make your relationships a priority in your life by re-evaluating these ideas often. If you are lacking in any of them, be willing to make a change.
So, how did you do? Were you able to say you do a pretty good job of those things? Contact us for more ideas on keeping your relationships healthy and keep up the hard work.