SELF-CARE: How to Love Someone Who Won’t Change & Keep Your Happiness + FREE Self-Care Time Hacker

Being in a relationship with someone who won’t change isn’t easy.

If you’ve ever experienced it, you know that it can be exhausting, frustrating, and painful. It can also make you feel sad—for what your loved one used to be like or could be like, for the lost potential of your relationship, and for what you’re not getting from them.

But do you know what makes it even harder?

Feeling stuck and confused about how to navigate the relationship.

My ex-husband had a drug addiction, and we ended up falling into a codependent relationship as a result.

This would have been a challenging situation under the best of circumstances. But it was even harder for me because there were some things that I didn’t know at the time about how to navigate challenging relationships in a healthy way.

For example, I didn’t know that when I was around my ex, I was better off focusing on what I COULD control than on what I couldn’t. (Read my previous post to learn WHERE to focus your energy when your loved one won’t change.)

But just as importantly, I also didn’t know how to protect and honor myself while navigating the relationship. And this was a big part of why I ended up losing myself in the marriage.

Now, I know that being married to someone with a drug addiction is a more extreme example of having a loved one who won’t change.

But the truth is that even if your loved one’s behavior is “less extreme”—maybe they get annoyed easily, push your boundaries, or struggle to let you in emotionally—it can still take its toll on you and maybe even consume you to the point where you lose sight of what’s important to you and what you need.

That’s why in this blog post, I want to share some key steps you can take to protect and take care of yourself when someone you love won’t change.

Because regardless of whether you want to or have the option of leaving the relationship at some point, you deserve to feel as happy, fulfilled, and centered as possible while you’re in it.

So let’s dive into talking about how to care for yourself when a loved one won’t change.

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Cultivate Self-Love

One of the reasons why we want our loved one to change is because we love them and long to have a happy, healthy relationship with them. But in focusing so much on our love for them and what we so desperately want for our relationship with them, we might not spend much time loving ourselves.

The irony is that although self-love is important at every stage of life, it’s especially handy to cultivate when someone important in our life won’t change. When we’re navigating a relationship like this, we can fall into the trap of believing that what we need more than anything is for our loved one to change. And so we pour all of our energy into doing things that we think will move this change along.

But as I mentioned in my last post, we can’t control our loved one or make them change. We can only control OUR actions and choices. And one of these choices that we can make is to embrace ourselves, recognize our needs, and understand that we’re worthy of having our needs met. In other words, we can choose to make it a priority to love ourselves.

But what actually is self-love?

Self-love isn’t about being a narcissist or self-centered. Instead, it’s about having positive regard for our happiness and well-being. And research shows that it has all sorts of benefits for psychological and physical health.

For example, self-love has been linked to

• greater happiness
• higher life satisfaction
• more optimism
• greater motivation
• less stress
• lower anxiety and depression
• healthier physiological responses to stress

So as you can see, cultivating self-love can help to limit the stress we feel and sustain our happiness and satisfaction when someone we love won’t change.

More importantly, when we love ourselves, it serves as an example of how we want to be treated by our loved one. As poet Rupi Kaur once said, “How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you.” When you love, respect, and honor yourself, you show your loved one how you wish to be treated by others and what you won’t tolerate.

So not only can cultivating self-love protect you from the emotional and physical toll that your relationship might otherwise take on you, but it can also encourage your loved one to express more love and respect toward you.

Prioritize Self-Care

There are many ways to cultivate self-love. But one of my favorite ways is to practice self-care.

When someone you love won’t change, the relationship can eat up a lot of your time and energy—even if you don’t actually spend that much time with them. For example, maybe you see your overstepping aunt only a few times a year at holiday family gatherings. But maybe every time a gathering approaches, you spend the weeks leading up to it feeling stressed about having to interact with her. And after the gathering, you spend at least a few days feeling upset about what she said or did.

When a relationship takes up a lot of your time and energy, you might find that you don’t frequently take the time to do things you enjoy, meet your needs, and just relax and catch your breath. And when you don’t get much time to take care of yourself, it’s easy to feel drained, resentful, unhappy, and unfulfilled. That’s why if you’re navigating a relationship with a loved one who won’t change, you might find it helpful to prioritize self-care.

When you prioritize self-care, you carve out dedicated time to recharge and fill your emotional tank. Depending on your needs, desires, and passions, this might mean setting aside time to grab coffee or tea with a friend, go for a massage, head out on a hike, or even just curl up on the couch and binge your favorite show.

And once you set aside the time in your calendar, you treat it like an important meeting or appointment. This means that you don’t cancel or postpone it just because your loved one “needs” you, you’re ruminating about something they did, or something else that isn’t a true emergency happens.

When you have a loved one who won’t change and their behavior is weighing on you, self-care can be helpful in two key ways.

First, it can help you to take your mind off your loved one and their behavior and do something that’s enjoyable or fulfilling for you.

And second, because self-care helps you fill your emotional tank, it can put you in a better position to approach interactions with your loved one from a healthier and more centered headspace. This means that it can make it easier to use the strategies I share in my post on WHERE to focus your energy with a loved one who won’t change.

Nurture Other Relationships

You’ve heard that phrase about not having all of your eggs in one basket, right? It applies to relationships too, including when you’re navigating a relationship with a loved one who won’t change.

As humans, we’re social beings, and we’re wired to form relationships with people to fulfill our social needs. But no one relationship can fulfill all of these needs on its own. And if someone you love regularly does something that bothers you or that you don’t agree with, the relationship may also create some emotional challenges for you. That’s why if you have a loved one who won’t change, you might want to consider nurturing other relationships too.

For example, if your relationship with your overstepping aunt has been weighing on you, you might decide to nurture relationships with other family members. This way, you’ll have a bond with other people in your family. And you’ll have someone other than your aunt to socialize with at family gatherings.

Similarly, if your partner is struggling with their mental health, you might decide to lean into your relationships with a couple of close friends. These friendships may be able to give you some of the support and fun social time that you’re not able to get from your partner right now.

Remember that when you nurture other relationships, you aren’t abandoning or replacing your loved one. You’re simply ensuring that you have other people you can look to for support, love, and companionship right now.

Set Limits About Contact

Depending on how your loved one’s behavior is affecting you, it might also make sense to set limits about the contact you have with them. These limits can be about how often you see them, how long you see them for each time, where or under what circumstances you’re willing to see them, and who else should be around.

For example, maybe you decide that you’re willing to see your aunt at family gatherings, but you won’t get together with her one-on-one. This way, you’ll only see her when other family members are around to distract her and keep her in check.

Or maybe you decide that you’ll only talk to or get together with your quick-tempered brother on a Friday or Saturday night. Because then, you’ll have at least one full weekend day to process and calm down about any conflict that arises so that it doesn’t distract you at work.

Limits can help you maintain a relationship with your loved one while minimizing the negative impact that it has on you and other aspects of your life.

Take Care Of YOU

You may not be able to change your loved one’s behavior.

But as I shared in my last post, you can change how you approach the relationship.

And as I’ve described above, you can also change what you do to protect yourself, honor your needs, and put yourself in the right headspace to approach the relationship in a healthy way.

Specifically, you can honor yourself by cultivating self-love, prioritizing self-care, nurturing other relationships, and setting limits on contact that are right for you. When you do this, you can give yourself a better chance of maintaining a relationship with someone who’s important to you without letting it drain you, make you unhappy, or keep you from fulfilling your needs.

Now, I know that when it comes to self-care, you might be thinking, “Vera, trust me, I’d LOVE to be able to go for a massage or spend an hour of my weekend reading a great book. But I can never find the time to do it.”

That’s why I created a FREE resource for you called the Self-Care Time Hacker.

It’ll help you regularly find time for self-care in your busy schedule so that no matter what your relationship with your loved one is like right now, you can still fill your emotional tank, do the things you love, and get a chance to center yourself and catch your breath.

And if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.

Until next time!

Vera

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