2774 Glen Avenue Altadena, CA 91001

Greetings. In my last blog, I asked you to sit down and consider what you want and what do you not want when it comes to healthy relationships. What are the traits and features that you would want for a healthy relationship? What are the unhealthy features and traits for you that you would not like?

In my last post, I used the illustration of a plant to drive home my point of what is healthy. Healthy plants need soil, light, water, and pruning. When one participates in taking care of a plant you purchase from your local garden center and take care of the plant making sure you plants receive these four ingredients, than you plant is on the way to growing healthy. And the benefits of a healthy plant are growing strong leaves, beautiful fruit or flower, and the evidence over time that the plant is getting bigger.

In the same way, unhealthy plants are not growing. So going back to my plant illustration, your initial intention is to go to your local garden center and buy a plant for either indoors or maybe a plant for your outside porch. Your initial intentions are good and your goal and desires are good.

But over time, life gets busy, other things demand your attention, events you never planned happen, and soon your plant is starting to not look so good. Your plant starts to feel neglected and the evidence of this is dry soil, little to no water, not enough light and little time to give to pruning it.

As your days go by, you pass by this plant and the leaves are starting to drop, the branches are starting to droop over, you had expected some type of flower or fruit from it and nothing appears, and overall the plant just starts to look sick and unhealthy. Maybe you start to see some bugs or critters are in the plant, and maybe the plant overall just looks sick due to lack of attention or the busyness of life in which it got neglected.
In the same way that healthy plants grow and give you fruit and flowers, the same can be true for healthy relationships. All people and healthy relationships need love, respect, freedom and trust. And the benefits of these four needs is intimacy, laughter, enjoying each other’s company, and over a sense of peace and security in knowing and feeling loved.

But when unhealthy plants do not constantly get the right type of ingredients and you do not see the benefits of growth and fruit, the same can be said for unhealthy relationships. If you give jealousy, meanness, disrespect, control, mistrust, lying, cheating, and neglect to your relationships, you will not receive the benefits of what a healthy relationship will produce but instead you will feel insecure, accused, blamed, unhappy, worry and anxiety, and a general sense the other person is just not into you.

Healthy relationships grow and produce fruit. Unhealthy relationships do not grow and do not produce fruit. Healthy relationships do take an investment, attention, constantly giving the right amount of ingredients, and looking for ways to experience the benefits and joys of this love relationship. If you want unhealthy relationships, look for ways to neglect the other person, finds ways to be selfish, do things that sabotage trust, and overall only give the very least of your time to the relationship. Allow busyness, career first, making money, and building your reputation for yourself, and you will be experiencing an unhealthy relationship due to your neglect and lack of interest.

My hope from this four part series is that you will pursue healthy relationships and quickly figure out how to get out or avoid unhealthy relationships. Value and seek the benefits of healthy relationships and avoid and be done with unhealthy relationship so as to experience a happy and successful life. Be and grow healthy relationships as best you can and I promise you, life will be better. Thanks for reading and if there is anything I can do to help, please give me a call.