We all crave love, affection, belonging, warmth, and connection. We are emotional creatures, and life becomes very black and white and incredibly unbearable for us in the absence of love. Some of us are lucky to have great relationships, while others struggle to find true love. For those who either struggle to find a healthy relationship or struggle to maintain it, help is always available. Babita Spinelli, an award-winning psychotherapist, executive coach, and relationship expert, helps people find and maintain healthy and nurturing relationships. She helps people examine and redefine their relationships in a healthy way. She is the CEO of the Babita Spinelli Group and the founder of Opening the Doors Psychotherapy.
The key question is, how can you find a healthy relationship? As a relationship expert and life coach, Babita Spinelli truly believes that you cannot find a healthy relationship without working on your own self-awareness and growth. You cannot expect to find a healthy relationship if you don’t examine your own relationship patterns, educate yourself about what is healthy and understand your needs and wants.
For Babita, no one thing can ensure a healthy relationship. According to her, healthy relationships are multi-faceted. However, she emphasizes the following six key factors that she believes are significant markers of truly healthy relationships.
- Trust
Security, stability, and trust are the hallmarks of a healthy relationship. No relationship can thrive in the absence of trust. Babita says:
“Trust is not just about being faithful; it’s also about looking out for each other’s best interests, feeling safe to express things that bother you, and feeling comfortable in expressing all your needs, fears, and desires without filtering them.”
- Effective and Voluntary Communication
As a psychotherapist who also coaches couples, Babita believes in the importance of communication in all relationships. Her advice is to never lose sight of working on communication with your partner. Often, we think we know what our partner is thinking or feeling, but we could be creating a narrative that doesn’t exist, which can lead to unnecessary arguments. She also says:
“Don’t assume that your partner will have a revelation about what you are thinking or feeling! Just communicate with him/her whatever it is that’s on your mind.”
- Work Through Conflicts Gently and Positively
No relationship is free from conflicts. Babita believes that one significant difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships is that healthy relationships are able to work through conflicts in a gentle and positive way. She says:
“Agreeing on everything is not possible, but navigating through conflicts in a healthy way is.”
- Empathy
Babita regards empathy as a precursor to intimacy, trust, and connection. She teaches her clients to look at things from their partners’ perspectives, even when agreeing with them is hard. Empathy, she says, is about understanding that your partner is unique in his/her own way and making an effort to better understand their subjective experience. It’s also about putting yourself in their shoes.
- Respect Boundaries
Babita believes that life as a couple has three components: yourself, your partners, and the unit. Each of these three parts needs to be respected, cared for, and nourished. A healthy relationship gives space for autonomy and avoids co-dependency. According to her:
“Just because you are partners doesn’t mean you are without consent or respect for boundaries.”
- Connection
Emotional connection is not just about spending time together, but as Babita Spinelli says, it is investing in the relationship’s emotional bank account. As people get comfortable in their relationship, they may lose sight of the importance of connection. Healthy relationships ensure that they incorporate being present during even simple activities like breakfast together or an evening walk while sharing about their day. Babita says:
A strong emotional connection is integral to a healthy relationship. Life gets full of things like careers, parenting, and work stressors, and maintaining a strong emotional connection through the chaos helps a couple to navigate life’s challenges.
Now that you know how what a healthy relationship looks like and how to find it, it’s time to understand how to maintain it. Many people enter into healthy relationships, and then unhealthy patterns and behaviors ruin them after some time. Babita says:
If you want to maintain the healthy status of your relationship, you must be intentional from your heart in nourishing it and prioritizing it.”
Take the time to invest in your relationship and never lose sight of it. Babita constantly reminds her clients and followers that we are continuously evolving, and so are our partners. For her, maintaining a healthy relationship requires working on communication, demonstrating gratitude, affection, empathy, and care, and taking the time to pay attention to intimacy and connection. If your life gets off the rails, remember that you can always seek help from a relationship coach or therapist to get it back on track.