Relationships are complex and reach of joy and challenges, but, while everybody talks about love, there is little attention paid to honesty and freedom.

When I was learning Nonviolent Communication, I watched a video by its founder, Marshal Rosenberg, in which he gave an unexpected answer to the question “Do you love me?”. Instead of giving the immediate “Yes, of course” answer, he understood how he was been pushed to feel responsible for “hurting” someone by telling them the truth. He gave the most honest answer of all “I love you at times, and I do not love you at other times”.

I was in awe… he was modelling something for me, and only recently I have made sense of it. He was modelling honesty and freedom over feeling responsible for what we are not.

When it comes to love, we do not always feel it in the same way and intensity towards the same people. We do not have full control over our inner world, nor we are fully responsible for how people react to our feelings.

Can we feel love without honesty and freedom?

Think of the opposite of honesty… can we be dishonest and feel love at the same time?

Think of the opposite of freedom… can we love when we are forced to?

The answer, to me, is obvious; we can feel love only if we can be honest about our own feelings and we give ourself freedom to feel whatever we feel, without changing it or pushing it away.

I would go as far as saying that being honest with ourselves and allowing ourselves the freedom to feel is an act that increases the love that we feel. If we can love ourselves, we can also love others.

But fears come in…

We are so not used to being honest with ourselves and others, and we are so accustomed to fight and scrutinise our feelings, that this is what is likely going on in our anxious heads

“Can I really be honest with myself? What if I find out that I am angry at my partner(s)? What if I discover that I do not love some of my friends?”

And the next step is even scarier… do I give myself the freedom to feel these feelings I am not happy about? What would happen if I really felt the discomfort I have when I am with certain people? Would it lead to the end of that relationship? Will I be rejected for what I feel?

Establishing Honesty and Freedom as the foundation of relationships

Whether we are talking about romantic relationships or friendly relationships, it is important to understand that, while we always have the choice of being honest and free to feel, we do not always get to choose what we feel.

When we build a strong, loving relationship with someone, we can choose to make honesty and freedom the foundation of that relationship. It is a conversation that, unfortunately, needs to be explicit because, otherwise, we use the default rules that society imposes… and every culture has very precise rules on how relationships should go. They are so precise, that people coming from different cultures inevitably clash!

As a matter of fact, virtually all cultures assume that a relationship is monogamous and, therefore, any feelings of love, fascination, attraction towards anybody other than the partner is considered betrayal. It is something that should not be felt (guilt) and something that would hurt the partner who is being “cheated on”.

The moment we have feelings that clash with our cultural programming of what a relationship should be like, we struggle internally and with our partner. How can we love our partner if we are flooded by guilt and if we need to keep secrets? And how much courage do we need to start accepting all that happens inside of us?

Negotiating Boundaries in relationships

Boundaries are, ultimately, what allows relationships to go in one direction or another.

While it is difficult enough to allow ourselves to be honest and free, it is even more difficult to respect honesty and freedom of the people we are in relationship with. This is a two-way road, and it only works well if both lanes are well-functioning.

Whenever I see couples in my consultations, I always invite both parties to check what they are doing with those feelings they would rather not have. Paradoxically, it after these difficult feelings are acknowledged by one person and expressed to the other, that feelings of love and joy reappear.

The presence of the therapist offers boundaries of safety and respect that, usually, are not present in the couple. Virtually all couples that go to therapy enter a journey to create and agree on boundaries around the extent to which they can be honest with each other when difficult feelings emerge.

A couple, thought, can only be as strong as the strength that each individual brings and the journey to improve any relationship with others starts from within. It starts from understanding how each person deals with their own emotions and how they respond to the emotions of others. It is counterintuitive and unfamiliar in our culture, but it is definitely doable and worth trying.

One final note…

I hope this article has given you some insight into the IFS method. I personally write these articles and they are freely available on my website. I kindly ask that you reference them by quoting this webpage if you use them for personal, professional or educational purposes.

If there are topics you would like to know more about, please let me know.