SALLY GATT
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​Stages of Relationship Difficulties and Growth

Relationships usually evolve through various stages, starting with limerance and infatuation, then through dificulties then eventual growth. Where is your relationship currently?

Stage 1 – Pursuing and Romance (usually first 6 to 12 months)
-  You are both feeling exciting, feeling loved and supported, and are awakening to new possibilities and potentials in each other
-  Your focus is on enjoyment (dates), intimacy (getting to know each other), and pursuing and/ or impressing each other (showing your best self)
-  Much time is spent on your relationship
-  Your day to day normal life is obscured or slightly forgotten

Stage 2 – Settling in and emerging Shadows
- As you share more and more life together, less effort is made and time allocated to your relationship
- Unconscious patterns begin to emerge in each of you
-  Taken-for-grantedness start to become more of the norm
-  Power struggles begin

Stage 3 – The Struggle or Sad Resignation
-  Stage 2 patterns entrench and escalate
- You tend to polarize as power struggles can worsen
-  You start to feel like strangers and lose that loving feeling
-   Power struggles turn into either arguments and withdrawals, or
    resignation and giving in

Stage 4A – More of the same
-  Duller routines become more of the norm
-  There are more regular or worse arguments or fights, or 
-   One partner avoids by being over-involved in work, hobbies, drinking etc 
-   There is a sense of sad resignation and diminished expectations for the one giving in all the time 

or Stage 4B – End
 -  One partner ends the relationship, or
-  One partner looks elsewhere, has an affair, and then ends the relationship

or Stage 4C – Deep Love emerges  
-  Each of you look at your own patterns, and how you are contributing to the problems
-  Each of your takes action to let go of your patterns and/or adopt new healthier behaviours
-  Each of you takes a stand for those things that are dear to you, and manages the anxiety that goes with this
-  Real respect grows for each other as you witness your partner taking these steps.
-  Real appreciation and love emerge in each other, a far deeper truer form than ever felt before.

Stage 5C – Ease and Flow
-  Each of you begins to appreciate and support the essence of each other, and compassion start to bloom
-  A genuine mutual creativity develops
-  Conflicts may still appear, but become absorbed in a larger version of yourselves.
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