When you were little, you looked up to your parents. You imitated their mannerisms, words, and actions as you learned about life by watching them. This applies to relationships as well - you leaned about relationships by watching them.

Not all you learned about relationships came from your parents; your learning has continued throughout your life. But what you saw your parents do in relationships, how you interpreted what you saw, and how you felt about it, is the foundation of your adult relationships.

That's not to say that your parents were wrong or bad parents, or even that they had a bad relationship. The only thing that can be said is if intimate relationships are problematic for you, the source is inevitably your foundational learning.

If a great relationship, a great partner, is what you are after, you must see, understand, and deconstruct your foundational learning about relationships. To take apart a foundation of something is a delicate thing. Imagine trying to remove or change the foundation of a house while leaving the rest of the house standing intact. Not an easy task. But in order to have a great relationship, you need to reconstruct your foundational learning while leaving you intact.

To begin, you must get complete with your parents. If you still have negative feelings about what they did to you or each other, you will create situations in your intimate relationships where you will confront these same negative feelings. To see an illustration of this in you own life, take the PatternTrackerTM Quiz at http://www.whatittakes.com/Quiz2/patterntracker.html.

To be complete with your parents means to be both free of negative feelings and to feel compassion toward them. Can you say both are true for you?

If you can, congratulations. You are a member of a very small minority. If you are not free of negative feeling toward your parents or/and if you do not feel compassion for them, you have some completion work to do. That is if you want a long-term, healthy, thriving relationship.

The question is, how do you get complete?

The first thing to know about completion is that it is not just a feeling that will one day appear. There are steps that can be taken to generate a feeling of completion. What stands between you and having a great relationship is taking these steps. Watch for these steps in my newsletter over the next few weeks.

Your Relationship Coach, Rinatta Paries www.WhatItTakes.com

(c) Rinatta Paries, 1998-2002. Do you know how to attract your ideal mate? Do you know how to build a fulfilling relationship, or how to reinvent yours to meet your needs? Relationship Coach Rinatta Paries can teach you the skills and techniques to attract and sustain long-term, healthy partnerships. Visit www.WhatItTakes.com where you'll find quizzes, classes, advice and a free weekly ezine. Become a "true love magnet(tm)!"