To take all the credit for everything that goes right sets you up for a big emotional fall when things go wrong. If you are too busy trying to control and manipulate everything so that nothing goes wrong, you are in danger of mental burnout.

If you fail to see the relationship as a partnership and are only focused on yourself, then there is the potential for a disconnect.

Our mind has one top priority, and that is to keep us safe. When it believes that you are unsafe, all its efforts focus on you, and it can easily lose perspective on the wider picture and focus only on you.

When you start feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, it is time to start inward reflection to explore the belief that everything rests on you and start asking the question: Is all this true, that everything is up to me? It is time to share what is on your mind and spread the load.

What is on your mind regarding your relationship that you could share to lighten the load?

Love can show up in different ways between individuals, but often comparisons to sanitised and idealised versions in the media may lead us to conclude that we are failing in love. We may develop tunnel vision that disregards anything that does not look like the Hollywood version of love.

We can abdicate our power to others by believing and internalising beliefs about what we perceive that they think about us that we have projected onto them by our mind. The opportunity cost is that we lay down our power to live the quality of life that is possible if we believe in ourselves.

Our mind has no direct access to what others are thinking, unless they have explicitly said so; therefore, all such conclusions are a reflection of the beliefs held in our own mind about ourselves.

This is why having SPACE between your core identity and your mind is crucial to allow you to take the role of the witness and notice when what the mind is making up is not helpful and not buy into it.

We are the central character who holds the choice to stop giving power to others' opinions to dictate our path.

How much of your expectations about your relationship is based on comparisons?

If you build a wall of protection to get through one relationship and you don't work on yourself to dismantle it, then you will take it into the next relationship, where it will hinder your ability to connect with that person.

Regardless of whether the other person wants to change, keep working on yourself. If the transformation does not save this relationship, it will give the next one a better foundation.

It is more frustrating for you to be present and not be emotionally available because, in your mind, you would rather be somewhere else. You may be saying all the right words, but at the energetic level, it can be detected that you are not fully present.

You are better off focusing on connecting when you are in a resourced state, get your rest or have your fun and then create a quality space for connection when you can be fully present.

It is easier to build the wall than tear it down, as building can happen moment by moment without realising until it's too late that we are completely obscured and the other person no longer knows who they are relating to.

Every time we suppress our true feelings and opinions and people-please to avoid conflict or make hard choices, we are building that wall and killing the relationship slowly.

Some people adopt the hedgehog approach to difficulty in a relationship and curl up and stay silent; others adopt the Rhino approach and flare up, running riot over whatever gets in their way.

To deny our truth for the sake of a fake truce is a recipe for disappearing in a relationship; it eats away at your sense of self, self-worth and self-esteem. To recover these things, people need space to reclaim their identity, know who they are and value themselves again.

Giving them a safe space for expression using creative mediums helps them feel seen and heard, reaffirming that they are accepted as they are.

A loving partner will nurture such a person, but a narcissist will abuse them. Restoration is important before seeking any other relationship.

The brain's priority is to keep us safe and would use any technique available to it to do so, including building a wall. It is the other person's responsibility to reflect on whether they contribute to making the relationship unsafe for the other person to feel safe, or if it's all just in their heads.

If we do not communicate how something is making us feel to the other person, they may have no idea of the impact of their actions. The fact that someone loves you does not mean that they won't do things that could cause you upset; the key is to communicate things in a way that would not raise their defensive walls.

In the nonviolent communication modality, you:

State the facts of what happened without projecting into it the motives of the other person

State the impact the event had on you without inferring the other person's intentions

Express your needs and how they can be met

Intention does not always equal impact, so we cannot always deduce that the impact you experienced was the original intention of the other person. Communication beyond the silence will help unravel and provide an opportunity to better align intention with impact from both sides.

When trying to bridge the divide and bring your partner out from behind the wall, it helps to find activities you will both enjoy that are relaxed and creative and take the opportunity to be kind and complimentary of each other to encourage them to come out from behind the wall. You are more likely in this setting to start learning about them and how they feel about things, which starts to break down the wall.

Try to find the positives in the other person's way of being as it differs from yours, express how you complement each other and how you can work together to find more common ground beyond the current extremes. One person's strength can be the other's weakness, and often a weakness can be a strength taken too far out of balance.

Where in your relationship have you been disappearing?

Some people use silence as a defence mechanism; they clam up when things don't go their way, and you are left wondering what is going on in their heads. This was my response of choice.

If people don't feel safe to share what's on their mind, then you have gaps in understanding what's going on. Sometimes, the lack of safety is projected rather than real, as one person tries to preempt the other person's response based on their judgment of things

When someone leaves you gaps in understanding about what they mean, share your understanding and leave the door open for them to respond by asking, "Is that right?"

What aspects of your relationship are you avoiding talking about?