How to Avoid Making the Same 'Mistakes' All Over Again in your New Relationship

(Excerpts from “How to Heal Your Broken Heart: The Secrets to Getting Over a Relationship Breakup or Divorce.”)

Have you ever wondered —“Why do I keep FAILING in relationships and marriages?”

As Relationship Coaches, this question of why someone seems to continually fail in their relationships and marriages is one of the most common questions we get from people.

While the answer to this question is certainly unique to each individual, in this article, we are going to help you go from where you are to where you want to go in creating a new life and a new relationship filled with love, potential and possibility.

Here are six ideas to help you learn from your past and avoid creating the same patterns over and over again in any new relationship:

1. Make the commitment to openly and honestly look at your past to discover what went wrong and what you want to do differently in your next relationship. Look at your relationship that ended from a place of objective reality. Take responsibility for what you did or didn’t do to create what happened between the two of you. If you are only hanging onto what your partner did to you, ask for some objective feedback from a friend and listen with an open heart to what he or she says about why the two of you broke up.
2. Learn from your previous relationship. We believe that there’s no such thing as failure in relationships, only lessons that you haven’t learned yet. Instead of looking at your relationship that didn’t work out as a failure, we suggest that you appreciate the relationship for what it did bring to your life. Maybe it taught you what you didn’t want, maybe it taught you what you wanted more of—whatever the case, stop and take notice of what it taught you. No relationship was wasted time.
3. Get in touch with your emotions and be committed to total honesty. Don’t ignore your feelings and don’t wallow in self-pity. If you need time and space to grieve your past relationship, do it. Acknowledging your feelings will help you to be present with “what is” and will help you to be more honest with yourself and your future partner.
4. Be committed to empowering yourself now and in your future relationships. To us, empowering yourself means saying “yes” to who you really are, without any pretense or game-playing. Often times in relationships, we get stuck in patterns of being either the “powerful” one or the “vulnerable” one and we neglect what’s truly going on inside us. We recommend that empowering yourself means that you and your partner allow each other to be who you truly are, and that means being both powerful and vulnerable in your relationship.
5. Let go of past relationships and harmful patterns. Although we are always carrying our past into new relationships, you can learn to recognize the signs of when you are going into your old, destructive patterns and learn to “flip the switch” into acting from love and a more empowered place rather than fears from the past. Make sure that you start learning how to forgive yourself and your previous partner.
6. Read and study about how to have great relationships and formulate your own vision for the type of relationship that you want to be in. A couple of questions to ask yourself are-- “What do I want from a relationship when I get it?” “How do I want to be treated by a new partner?” If you don’t clearly know what you want or how you want to be treated, you may simply attract to you the same type of relationship to you that just ended.

To move on to a happier, more fulfilling life, it’s not enough to simply let time pass, but rather to learn from your experience and change your life in empowering ways.

So, our advice is to decide what kind of relationship you want, learn about how to have great relationships and take whatever time it takes for you to recognize and heal your destructive patterns and come into a feeling of possibility for what you want.

We suggest that you choose consciously what you want for your next relationship experience and what you want your future to look like.

(Relationship coaches Susie and Otto Collins, authors of "Should You Stay or Should You Go?" and "No More Jealousy" are experts at helping people get more of the love they really want.)