First of all, big huge apologies for not blogging this past week.

It is of course, unforgivable and if you have now left me for another blogger, well, I neglected you and I know that now. I have to take responsibility for the consequences of my actions. And if you do happen to be reading this - thank you for coming back and giving me another chance, I promise to try harder and will be blogging at least every other day from now on.

So what’s my excuse? Well, it’s been hectic. My workshop ‘What Every Woman Should Know About Successful Relationships’ has taken me all over London meeting hundreds of women who will benefit from the secrets this workshop reveals. My Athena Women’s Network which has groups all over London (in fact all over the entire country – so there is one near you), offers a fantastic opportunity to meet sassy, professional, inspiring and totally inspired women in business. I have had chicken cooked in every way possible and will continue to eat whatever is put in front of me for the next month in order to spread the word far and wide.

So what is the word? I guess as I said right at the beginning – the word is Responsibility.

And it’s about taking Responsibility in Relationship (and in fact in every area of your life), but lets take that one area to begin with.

Over the past month I have been working with couples with a variation on the same theme. The couples are splitting up. (It’s January again.) And similar reasons prevail. Perhaps he was the provider and she was the homemaker. Perhaps she never asked him much about how he managed the finances and he didn’t get involved with the every day domestics.

The ‘unconscious agreement’ that they both made very early on in their relationship was that they would play their unspoken roles and live happily ever after. Only it didn’t work out. He was a workaholic, travelled a great deal, had dinners with clients etc and she felt lonely without a real sense of her own identity apart from being a mum and a wife. Maybe she put aside a satisfying career, maybe she didn’t. You can insert various scenarios but for whatever reason, one or the other of them does not want to rebuild the relationship and its over. However, here’s the thing. One of them blames the other. And it goes something like this.

“You’re hiding money from me”
“You’re keeping the kids from me”
“You never showed me enough love”
“You stopped talking to me”
“You pushed me away physically”
“You barely saw me”

You…. You… you… and so it goes on. The blame game has a thousand connotations.

What each is failing to realize is that somewhere in that ‘unconscious agreement’ they had already voted on the way it would be for years to come.

What I mean is that if you decide to begin the year eating Crispy Cream Donuts and you do that several times a week for a year, the decision that you made today will produce the body you’ll have in 12 months time. When you feel fat and frumpy in December, I’ll remind you of the vote you caste in January. Why would you even be surprised that you feel and look like a walking donut? As my kids would say “No s…t Sherlock”!

Then why are you surprised that you don’t know where the money is, that the kids aren’t very close to you, that he/she stopped showering you with affection, that easy communication has gone out the window and intimacy is something other people have?

I have yet to come across a couple who are not equally (yes I do mean equally, even in the most unacceptable of situations) responsible for where they find themselves when their relationship ends.

Think back to past loves, long term or short term. When it ended, for whatever reason, with the benefit of hindsight, didn’t you play your part it it’s demise? Even if you stayed well past it’s sell by date, that was your decision.

So the word is Responsibility. How are you partly responsible for absolutely everything you have or don’t have in your life right now? It’s a hard pill to swallow, but you know, there’s a lot of healing in it. Once you accept responsibility for what happens in your life, you get back your power and no longer feel like a victim in any way shape or form.

The truth is, the power of taking responsibility for your own life allows you to leave a sad situation, a relationship with no further mileage in it or a circumstance that doesn’t serve you without blame or resentment or anger, so you can heal your heart and learn to live and love another day.

Love Francine

PS Don’t forget to go to the home page on my website and scroll down to workshops to read more about What Every Woman Should Know About Successful Relationships!