My approach

When I am clear about who I am in the world, which values I live by, and what my strengths and difficulties are, I am able to make far more conscious decisions. This is especially true of choosing a partner: in the long run we can truly flourish and build a healthy family alongside someone whose core values and life goals are in harmony with our own.

While we are getting to know someone, we often already sense the signs suggesting that in certain areas we are not a good match. Even so, we frequently hope the other person will change for our sake – when in truth they have no real intention of doing so – and we enter a relationship that was never very promising.

The reality is that our fundamental personality traits often stay with us for a lifetime. Every pattern of behaviour can be fine-tuned, though, if we bring genuine determination and courage to understanding and reshaping the way we operate.

That is exactly why it matters so much to build the deepest possible self-knowledge by the time we are choosing a partner, so that we are clear about our own values, needs and boundaries. This makes it far more likely that we find a partner who suits us – someone equally committed to developing their own self-knowledge, so that we can grow together, moving in the same direction.

When we feel the time has come to have children, the relationship reaches a new level. With a child's arrival we take on one of the greatest responsibilities of our lives. Day after day we make decisions that affect not only our child's present but their entire future.

This is when it becomes truly visible what kind of relationship we have built with each other. Do we have an emotionally mature, loving partner beside us, someone we can count on in the hard moments too? Someone who doesn't leave us alone in the parental role, who supports us and also makes room for us to keep our own identity alongside our child? Someone who is glad of our shared successes, takes on shared responsibility, and shows our child by example what it means to connect with another person in love, respect and commitment?

Having to discover that we have been left alone in parenthood – emotionally or even physically – can be an intensely painful experience, with deep effects not only on our own well-being but on our child's development and on how the family works. This does not mean, of course, that a well-functioning relationship has no difficulties: becoming a family is a transformative experience that can test even the most balanced couples. But stable foundations can be decisive at this point too.

The “loving well” approach starts from the fact that we all arrive in life with inheritances and with gifts. Our family's history, the patterns that run across generations, our early experiences and our personal traits all shape how we think, how we feel, how we connect with others and how we make our decisions.

None of this means that our past defines our future for good. Thanks to our free will and our conscious decisions, we are able to give our own story a new direction. The first step is to recognise and understand those family patterns that may have been present in our lives for generations.

When we gain a deeper insight into how we work, it becomes easier to accept ourselves. We see our inner values, our resources and our real needs more and more clearly. This self-knowledge helps not only with self-acceptance but with learning to love ourselves. When we know who we are and what we stand for, we are far more likely to choose a partner who strengthens those values in us. Two emotionally mature people, empathetic and committed to each other, can build a relationship that offers safety, love and room to grow for them both.

A relationship like this can also create the foundation for breaking negative patterns handed down through generations. Through conscious self-knowledge, responsible partner choice and commitment to one another, we have the chance to create a new family legacy – one in which our children can grow up in greater emotional safety and in a more loving atmosphere.

I believe that every real change begins with getting to know ourselves.

Self-knowledge gives us the stable ground on which a healthy relationship, a harmonious family life and a loving future can be built. Because a family is not simply a group of people living together – it is a series of conscious decisions made day after day, side by side, in love, responsibility and commitment.

At the heart of my approach, then, is not only working through difficulties that have already arisen, but preventing them. I believe that deeper self-knowledge, consciously understanding our family patterns and reshaping them, gives us the chance to break the negative dynamics passed down through generations, and to create a more loving future for ourselves and for the generations that follow.