Resources
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Relationships
What Is Healthy?
- Open and honest communication
- Having friends outside the relationship
- Taking responsibility for the outcome of one’s own life and happiness
- Having one’s own identity
- A balance of time together and time apart
- Emotional intimacy that is built without drugs or alcohol
- Appropriate level of commitment in the relationship
- Flexibility in the relationship
- Knowing what one needs
- Asking for what one needs
What Is Unhealthy?
- Game-playing and manipulative communication
- Having few friends outside the relationship
- Making others responsible for one’s happiness
- Feeling complete only when involved with someone else
- Too much time together or too much time alone
- Use of alcohol or drugs to achieve false connection
- Over- or under-commitment (based on the length of the relationship so far)
- Rigidity in the relationship
- Being clueless as to what one needs
- Afraid to express what one needs
The above material was taken from Sandra Brown, How to Spot a Dangerous Man before You Get Involved, Page 204, ©2005 Hunter House, Inc., Alameda, CA.
