Help! I’m Sabotaging My Relationship.

Have you recognized yourself really liking the person and yet, something just feels so off? What could be wrong? He/she is everything right!

If you come from a background of toxicity in a relationship, then your perspective of a healthy relationship is unsettling. Here’s what I mean.

You know that every person ought to be in a healthy relationship, right? What does that look like? How does this play out in an every day dating relationship?

Say you come from a background where you were taught that emotions are a sign of weakness so, you decide to push them aside. Nobody likes feeling weak, right? Yet, in situations where something feels wrong, your learned behavior is to get mad and in turn, it just makes the situation worse. Well, that’s is a prime example of two people coming together and not knowing how to have healthy communication in a tense situation. Spread that consistently over the course of time, you may find yourself craving validation. “Oh! Is that what that is,” you may think. Here’s where things will go south: say your partner shares a variation of validation. In reality it could be very diluted and we could call it a “half-apology.” Being that your craving for any amount of validation, what little bit that you do receive could be interpreted as the whole package. You become used to that version of validation.

Let’s fast forward in time. Lets say that a new Mr. Mister or Ms. Thing comes into the picture and they have it together! They listen. They validate. They apologize. This is going to feel very foreign and nobody enjoys uncomfortable situations. So, what’s the solution? It could be a number of things such as:

·       Pulling away from the relationship and asking for space.

·       Blame shifting and accusing your partner as being too soft or a pushover as if their role is supposed to look different.

·       Ending the relationship with a solid, “it’s not you. It’s me.”

This list by no means is all-encompassing. If you do see yourself in any of these scenarios, your next question might be: “What now? How do I not be that way?” I’m glad you asked because here are some practical ways that you can address this.

First, you have to recognize that these are thought patterns. By drawing attention to your perspective allows you to gain awareness of what you truly believe. Remember in our story, when we identified you learned emotions as a form of weakness. Perhaps that is not you. My point is that you may need to identify what you did learn about emotions. Ask yourself this question: if you allow yourself to be vulnerable with people, what will happen?

Here's the skill: examine the evidence. Can you find proof that what you believe about what happens when you are vulnerable is true? Does this happen with all people? If not, your believe is overgeneralized. Simply because one person or a small handful of people in your past have invalidated your emotions or ridiculed you for your vulnerability does not mean that all people will.

Lastly, it is helpful to reframe those thoughts. You can do this by calling it for what it is. Again, you may have been invalidated and accused of a negative label. Call it for what it is. That person or those specific people did that to you and…well, how about you finish that sentence. What is your “and?” Meaning, what else is true about your experience. This exercise allows you to see the full picture and not a small portion of your experience.

Here's a bonus tip. Despite what happened to you, what can you recognize about how you survived? Do you have any lessons that you learned along the way? These are your strengths and your abilities. Hang on to them because they offer you future potential. Like a return on an investment: you don’t gain much when you first sign up but after time passes, somehow your investment multiplies and you yield a greater return. Life lessons tend to have that effect. In the moment, negative emotions seem only to take from you yet, if you have increased tolerance to them, you’ll begin to recognize a strength inside of you that you didn’t realize you had.

Now, happy digging! I mean digging for those pesky thought patterns. Cheers!