Page 54 - Talented Astrologer • Volume 1 Number 2 • October 2016

The Secret of Successful Relationships
Understanding and improving relationships doesn’t need to be that complicated. e context and the form of the relationship matters, but all relationships are human relationships. You’re the same person in your romantic relationships as you are in your friendships, your family relationships, and your workplace relationships.
e secret of successful relationships is that in every relationship, you need the same two things: safety and validation. Your expectations of how you meet those needs vary depending on the context of the relationship, but the needs are constant. All problems in any relationship result from either a lack of safety or a lack of validation. And if you’re feeling safe and validated in a relationship, that relationship is successful. All you need to do to create a successful relationship is to meet your partner’s needs.
Let’s take a closer look at the secret of successful human relationships. We’ll begin with a brief history of needs, and then we’ll explore the di erence between needs and wants. Finally, we’ll address the importance of communication and discover the real source of communication problems in relationships.
A Brief History of Needs
Our story begins in a time of economic strife, political uncertainty, record unemployment, and global unrest, and no, I’m not talking about 2011. is story begins in the 1920s, the rst time Wall Street’s unregulated behavior plunged America into a Great Depression. A psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow was preparing to revolutionize the entire eld of head shrinking (which, at the time, had been around for about 30 years).
Up to this point, psychology assumed
that people were basically screwed up. e main objectives of psychology were a) to gure out exactly how people were screwed up, b) to gure out how to blame it all on the patient’s mother, and c) to gure out how to get patients to pay for a full hour, but only give them 50 minutes.
Maslow approached things from the opposite direction. He wondered what would happen if instead of assuming that people are fundamentally sick, we assumed people were fundamentally healthy. What motivates the behavior of healthy people? And more importantly, how do you get healthy people to pay for a full hour but only give them 50 minutes?
Maslow proposed that we are motivated by our unmet needs. He discovered that all needs are not created
54 Talented Astrologer
RELATIONSHIPS