It can be hard to know what relationship advice to listen to.
Especially if levels of self-trust are low, deciding if your opinion or someone else's is more trustworthy is no easy feat—especially in our culture today where you can easily Google expert's advice.
Ultimately, building more self-trust so you can learn to choose your voice over others' is a valuable life skill—something I'm still very much working on—but in the meantime as you work to build self trust, how do you decide what relationship advice to follow?
I have a seemingly simple solution.
You may think it's TOO simple when you read it, but I'm going to give this a go anyways...
When you hear relationship advice, ask yourself:
Does this make me feel good?
If the answer is yes…it may be worth following! (although, there's still an option to question it...)
If the answer is no…you have a decision to make: do you want to continue to believe this advice, knowing it does not make you feel good—OR, do you want to consider that there are potentially other alternates you could explore, and some nuance missing here?
Let me give a few examples to illustrate this point further.
ADVICE: when deciding about a future partner..."trust your gut"
Does this make you feel good? No. My gut sometimes lurches when I think about a future with my partner.
Is this absolute truth, or could there be nuance missing? There could be nuance missing. I'm not sure this is absolute truth, it may be or it may just be advice from people who don't experience anxiety. Maybe there is some nuance missing...I wonder if my gut is lurching specifically as a result of my partner or something else?
ADVICE: you should be with your "soulmate"
Does this make you feel good? No. It makes me question if I've found my one true soulmate.
Is this absolute truth, or could there be nuance missing? There could be nuance missing. I'm not sure this is absolute truth, perhaps I could get behind the idea that you continue to grow more with a partner and become more connected, vs. being instantly connected as soulmates and just 'knowing' they're 'my person.'
ADVICE: "if you feel anxious, they're not The One"
Does this make you feel good? No. I really want this relationship to work, despite the anxiety that creeps in. I'm not even sure why the heck I have this anxiety, I love my partner.
Is this absolute truth, or could there be nuance missing? There could be nuance missing. I'm not sure this is absolute truth, the anxiety feels so real but I'm also anxious about other things in my life—so maybe there is another reason for this
It takes some practice to get into this routine of questioning advice, and it may take some mindset shifts before you stop listening to people's advice right away, but this is such an important part of healing from relationship anxiety: learning to think for yourself about what makes you feel good, not what other people say.
When you question other people's advice—you don't need to come up with other advice that makes you feel better necessarily, but you do want to explore other possibilities. You want to explore the idea the advice you're hearing is not 100% truth—because I hate to break it to you, most things in life are not absolute truths, and yet we often accept one-size-fits-all advice thinking the advice applies to every person on the planet.
Before I finish on this topic, I'm going to go out on a limb here and dive even deeper. This is not meant to create anxiety, but rather address additional context I think is relevant.
There is absolutely some nuance to the question "does it make me feel good?"
For example, you could hear advice that doesn't make you feel great because you don't want it to be true, but from a clear-headed place you know it's true.
Example: a best friend telling you that your partner is showing signs of emotional abuse, and giving you advice to leave—you just didn't want to admit it to yourself. That may not feel good to hear initially, but ultimately could be important advice to listen to.
Example: a coach telling you that in order to foster a more vulnerable connection with your partner, you should express your needs and/or share your relationship anxiety story. For someone who's scared to open up, that may not feel good, but they know that its advice that may actually serve them.
Example: a coach telling you that your relationship anxiety is not related to your partner but related to you may not feel good initially to hear, because it means you have some work to do, but it's also very empowering advice.
One of the beautiful parts about being human is we get to choose our belief system.
It takes work to consciously adjust our belief system if we have old beliefs that are no longer serving us, but we do have that power.
With that power comes the responsibility of deciding what advice to follow (aka, what do we believe is true), and what not to follow (what we don't believe is true), as well as advice we're not so sure whether or not to follow and want to find other points of view on. That is also available to us.
The key here I want you to take away is that just because someone gives you advice, myself included, does not mean you need to follow that advice without first deciding if it's making you feel good to do so.
I hope this helps you feel empowered when you hear advice moving forward!
xx
Sending love!
