Are You Stuck in an Unhealthy Relationship Pattern? Part Two

This is part two of Are You Stuck in an Unhealthy Relationship Pattern? The last post examined your usual choice of romantic partner, which stems from early childhood relationship experiences and the faulty belief system you learned about relationships as a result.

Ultimately, the self-doubts and self-defeating beliefs you have about yourself and relationships are obstacles to having the kind of relationship your rational mind wants. Whether you’re aware of them or not, they shape the relationship choices you make. For example, do you believe that:

• You have to work hard to earn someone’s love?
• You have to prove that you’re “good enough” for someone to love you?
• You must be perfect to deserve someone’s love?
• You have to go along with, like, or agree with everything your partner likes or wants?
• You need to ignore or hide your needs and feelings in order to meet all of your partner’s needs?
• Your partner should “magically” know or intuit how you’re feeling and what you want without having to tell him or her?
• Your partner should be able to meet all your needs?
• Your partner should enjoy doing all the things you do and like all of the same people you like?
• Your partner should prove he or she cares by spending money on you and paying for trips, dinners and gifts?

Whenever we make statements that use the words should, always, must, never, or have to it usually means we’re placing unreasonably high expectations on others and ourselves. This usually leads to anger, disappointment, hurt and frustration, which makes it difficult to have good relationships.

A faulty relationship belief system, which is tied to our fears and self-doubts in a self-reinforcing loop, perpetuate our poor relationship choices. For example, do you worry that:

• You’re unlovable?
• No one would love you if they really knew you?
• You’ll eventually be rejected?
• You don’t deserve love?
• You’re cursed?
• You’re not attractive enough?
• You’re not thin enough?
• You’re not smart enough?
• You don’t make enough money?
• You’re boring?
• There’s something wrong with you?
• You don’t deserve respect?

It’s hard to feel good about yourself and have confidence in your ability to be an attractive partner to others with this kind of self-defeating garbage floating around in your head. We develop our beliefs and fears about relationships from observing our parents’ or caretakers’ relationships as children and by how they treated us. In many cases, they weren’t ideal relationship role models. These beliefs cause us to choose people who treat us in ways that make us feel bad, which reinforces these negative feelings and doubts.

It becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that can make us believe that we’re doomed to be alone or unhappy in relationships. As a result, many of us learned unhealthy relationship beliefs as children that still control our behavior to this day. An effective way to counter these faulty beliefs and fears is to challenge and reality test them to see if they’re true. Otherwise, you’re allowing what happened to you “way back when” to control your “here and now.” You don’t have to allow your adult life and the course of your adult relationships be defined by what happened to you as a child or teen.

You can take control of your life now. You don’t have to be dependent on the approval of others who aren’t likely to give it to you. You can let go of your old beliefs and adopt new ones. In some ways, it’s like flipping on a light switch in your mind. When you do this, you may see some things from the past that you’d rather not deal with, but they will continue to control you and lead you to make poor relationship choices until you do.

Next week, I’ll post part three in this series. It will focus on problematic relationship behaviors and coping strategies that tend to do more harm than good and contribute to staying stuck in an unhealthy relationship pattern.

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Counseling, Consulting and Coaching with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for professional inquiries.

Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.

If you find the information I provide free of charge helpful and valuable here on Shrink4Men, please consider making a donation via PayPal.

Related content:

• Are You Stuck in an Unhealthy Relationship Pattern? Part One
• Men Have Emotions, But Women Don’t Listen
• Are You My Soul Mate? Defining the One
• 12 Signs You Should Break Up with your Boyfriend or Girlfriend or Spouse
• Why We Stay in Bad Relationships
• Ending a Painful Relationship and Starting Over
• How to Make Changes in your Relationship and Life
• 3 Dating Tips for Having a Healthy and Successful Relationships
• The Secret to Happy, Long Lasting Relationships
• How to Have a Healthy Relationship After Being With an Emotionally Abusive, Borderline or Narcissistic Woman

Photo credit:

Man on hamster wheel on MarkYoungTrainingSystems.

Are You Stuck in an Unhealthy Relationship Pattern? Part One

Are you stuck in an unhealthy relationship pattern? Do you repeat the same relationship choices and behaviors that ultimately lead to the same unhappy conclusion: conflict, unmet needs, disappointment and loneliness?

If so, the first thing you need to do in order to break your unhealthy relationship pattern is to consider the kind of romantic partner you typically choose. Do you have a habit of choosing women or men who are:

• Unavailable
• Unfaithful
• Emotionally abusive
• Physically abusive
• Totally self-centered
• Still involved in other relationships
• Too dependent
• Jealous or controlling
• Unable to commit
• Unable to express and receive love

Do you choose women or men who:

• Have substance abuse problems
• Have a lot of emotional problems
• Get serious too quickly
• Run hot and cold

Logically, you probably know that you won’t be able to have a loving and enduring relationship with the type of woman or man you’re usually attracted to; while your emotional reasoning and the “thrill of the familiar” pulls you toward the same type of relationship time and again.

Is it possible that you’re stuck in a dead end relationship pattern with the same type of person because you’re recreating earlier relationships from childhood or adolescence? Until you gain awareness regarding your choice of adult romantic partners, you’ll tend to be attracted to a certain kind of person because the way you interact with them and the way they treat you feels familiar, especially if it makes you feel bad.

Why would anyone voluntarily choose to feel bad? Seems crazy, right? But that’s exactly what many of us do; we choose to pursue and have relationships with women and men who make us feel bad. In a way it is crazy, but there’s a kind of warped logic to it.

These people are familiar due to your early childhood and adolescent relationship experiences. Because it’s what you know, you don’t realize that there are other ways to be in a relationship and  other kinds of people who are open to relationships and will value you rather than shut you out, reject you, or, in extreme cases, demean and abuse you.

When you’re stuck in an unhealthy relationship pattern, it’s usually because you’re trying to get a different outcome in your adult relationships than you had with your family and other people who hurt you or didn’t meet your needs often enough when you were a kid. This is why you choose people who are no more capable of meeting your needs and loving you the way you want to be loved than your parents, family, or your first intimate relationship partners were.

Choosing the same kind of person, even when it’s self-destructive, protects you from the realization that perhaps you didn’t have the best parents in the world or that they treated you in ways that weren’t always loving, damaged your sense of worth and affected your ability to give and receive love. It confirms your faulty relationship beliefs by setting you up for the same bad relationship result. It also keeps you from facing residual painful memories and hurt feelings that may be lingering from childhood. Consequently, your faulty beliefs, self-doubts and fears about relationships that lead you to make choices and behave in ways that support your beliefs and fears, which perpetuates the unhealthy pattern.

Next week, I’ll post the second part of this series in which I’ll explain how self-doubt and fears contribute to unhealthy relationship patterns.

 

Counseling, Consulting and Coaching with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for professional inquiries.

Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.

If you find the information I provide free of charge helpful and valuable here on Shrink4Men, please consider making a donation via PayPal to help me maintain the site.

Related content:

• Men Have Emotions, But Women Don’t Listen
• Are You My Soul Mate? Defining the One
• 12 Signs You Should Break Up with your Boyfriend or Girlfriend or Spouse
• Why We Stay in Bad Relationships
• Ending a Painful Relationship and Starting Over
• How to Make Changes in your Relationship and Life
• 3 Dating Tips for Having a Healthy and Successful Relationships
• The Secret to Happy, Long Lasting Relationships
• How to Have a Healthy Relationship After Being With an Emotionally Abusive, Borderline or Narcissistic Woman

Photo credit:

hamster on a wheel by Walala Poncho on flickr.

Lindsay Lohan’s eHarmony Profile: If Only All Crazy Women Were This Honest

I saw this comedy video on Funny or Die this morning and am still chuckling. Who knew Lindsay Lohan had such a good sense of humor about herself?

Wouldn’t it be great if all women (and men) who had issues, whatever they might be, were this up front and honest about it? Then you would be able to make an informed decision before jumping into a relationship. It would sure save a lot of time and emotional stress.

Enjoy!

Posted by Dr Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Counseling, Consulting and Coaching with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for professional inquiries or send an email to shrink4men@gmail.com.

Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.

Donations

If you find the information I provide free of charge helpful and valuable here on Shrink4Men, please consider making a donation via PayPal to help me maintain the site.

The Secret to Happy, Long Lasting Relationships

“You can’t love someone else until you love yourself first.” Everyone knows this talk show-pop psychology platitude. Self-help gurus regurgitate this mindless mantra ad nauseum.

I don’t know its exact origin, but whomever first uttered the phrase confused things terribly. Accepting and loving yourself is a precondition to being in a healthy, reciprocal relationship. However, the oft-recited advice has it backwards: Before you can RECEIVE love from another, you must first accept and love yourself.

There are women and men who have no trouble chasing after their romantic quarry, loving and desiring them without rhyme or reason, only to have their feelings unmet. They languish in their unrequited anguish—driving their friends crazy with endless conversational autopsies about why she or he hasn’t called them when they had such a powerful connection on their date or beginning of the relationship. These are usually the same people who run in the opposite direction—uninterested and completely turned off—when someone shows real romantic interest in them.

Why? These individuals are attracted to others who can’t love them in return, usually for similar reasons, i.e., “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members” (Groucho Marx). This begins a futile cycle of pursuit and distancing behaviors that reinforces their inner and oftentimes unacknowledged feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy and unlovable-ness.

They seek intimacy only from those who also cannot tolerate intimacy. The pursuer feels vulnerable and needy. The distancer feels put upon and guilty, which then breeds contempt and resentment. Think of it as mutually assured unhappiness.

When these individuals are lucky enough to meet someone who sees and is attracted to them, they push them away. They devise many reasons why the other person isn’t the one. Standard excuses include:

• There must be something wrong with him or her.
• He or she is too much of this and not enough of that.
• There isn’t any chemistry.

Mind you, the only chemistry or attraction people who struggle with these issues are likely to feel is for someone who’s only interested in keeping them at arm’s length and therein lies the problem.

Loving someone else is easy enough, especially since people who molder in this position tend to idealize those whom they love (i.e., an unrealistic, highly selective version of the other person—the love usually disappears as soon as they realize the other person isn’t perfect.)

How do you begin to love and accept yourself in order to let someone else love you?

1) Acknowledge and wrestle with your inner demons. This usually involves going back and dealing with the unfinished business of childhood. Sometimes these issues are buried so deep that many people aren’t even aware of them.

Typically, you’ll experience them as vague feelings of not being good enough, that something’s wrong with you, shame and believing that no one would love you if they really knew you. These feeling didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Figure out which early relationships caused you to think and feel like this and work through them. This is easier said than done, but it can be done.

2) Accept that you’re not perfect. No one’s perfect. You’ll never be perfect, but that doesn’t make you unlovable and unworthy. Perfection, if there is such a thing, has nothing to do with peace and wholeness.

If you can’t tolerate your own imperfections, you won’t be able to tolerate them in another person. Other people will always fall short and leave you feeling disappointed and that’s definitely not a recipe for relationship success.

3) Develop the ability to hold and sit with the discomfort and strangeness of the new and unfamiliar. If change felt the same as that to which you’re accustomed, it wouldn’t be change. (Repeat the last sentence to yourself a few times.) If feeling rejected, not good enough and unwanted is your comfort level, it’s going to feel mighty weird and unnatural when someone expresses genuine interest and wants to be with you without you having to cajole, pressure or pester them into it.

You shouldn’t have to perform feats of strength and/or demonstrate why another person should want to be with you. If they can’t arrive to that conclusion of their own accord, they’re not worth your time. Plus, it sets up an unbalanced power dynamic in your relationships in which you’re always having to please the other person. Do you really want to spend the rest of your romantic life as a performing seal?

The fear of being loved is tied to the fear of being discovered and known; of having your vulnerabilities and those aspects you don’t like about yourself exposed to another. This is fundamentally silly because we all have things we wish were different or better about ourselves. The fear is that he or she won’t love us if they find out how horrible we think we are. True love is acceptance, not unforgiving judgment and it begins with you.

Counseling, Consulting and Coaching with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for professional inquiries or send an email to shrink4men@gmail.com.

Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.

Donations

If you find the information I provide free of charge helpful and valuable here on Shrink4Men, please consider making a donation via PayPal to help me maintain the site.

3 Dating Tips for Having a Healthy and Successful Relationship

Why does this always happen to me? Why can’t I find someone? Why are all the women I meet only interested in money? Why are the guys I meet such jerks? Why can’t I meet “the one?” Why are relationships so hard? Why can’t I just be happy with someone?

The list of why questions people torture themselves with is endless. Some might say these questions are unanswerable. I disagree. There’s usually a universal and simple answer to most of life’s relationship why questions.

The answer is: personal choice.

Relationships are choices. They’re personal and/or professional choices we make and enter into, most times, of our own volition. If you’ve had a string of unsuccessful relationships and don’t know why, instead of placing blame on other people and external factors, consider your role in it first. It takes two to make or break a relationship—even abusive relationships. *If you’re the target of abuse, of course you’re not to blame for being abused. However, once you recognize your partner’s behavior as abusive, you’re complicit for remaining in the relationship and tolerating the abuse.

1) Healthy relationships require self-awareness, self-understanding and the capacity to accept responsibility for one’s choices and actions. Many people haven’t a clue about what kind of man or woman they’d like to meet and, incredibly, don’t understand why they haven’t met him or her yet. It’s the equivalent of saying you want to take a vacation and then aimlessly wandering around the airport terminal trying to decide upon a destination.

2) Know who you are and what you want. If you don’t already have a good sense of yourself; take some time to figure it out and then begin dating again. It’s unwise to try finding yourself or living through another person. The best and healthiest relationships are between two whole people.

3) Understand past relationships before beginning new ones. Some people have no trouble finding and beginning relationships, but these relationships never seem to work. Why? Because they’re more than likely making the same relationship choices over and over again, but with boyfriend or girlfriend du jour. It’s tempting to believe, different person-fresh start; but many people carry the same relationship baggage in different packages.

Some people blindly people choose relationships that recreate unresolved early childhood ones or unrequited adolescent crushes. It’s difficult to move forward in the present if you’re allowing your present life and relationships to be defined and dictated by events in the past. Being a grown-up and having grown-up relationships means letting go of what happened there and then and accepting responsibility for your choices in the here and now.

If you want healthier, long lasting relationships, explore what led you to choose past relationships, what needs or roles they may have successfully and/or unsuccessfully met and what you can do differently in the future. Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong qualities and attributes. Move past the flash—those qualities you find irresistible, but lead nowhere—and get down to the essentials. If you don’t like where you are in your life and the quality of your relationships, it’s up to you to do something about it.

Creating change is like a mathematical equation: if you want a different outcome, you’ve got to change at least one variable. We gravitate toward the familiar, even if it’s unbearable and no longer viable, which is why we make the same relationship choices over and over.

Before you jump into dating after your most recent break-up, reflect on your past relationships and choices. Ask yourself, “What have I learned and what can I do differently?” rather than “Why can’t I just meet someone and be happy?”

Counseling, Consulting and Coaching with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for professional inquiries or send an email to shrink4men@gmail.com.

Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.

Donations

If you find the information I provide free of charge helpful and valuable here on Shrink4Men, please consider making a donation via PayPal to help me maintain the site.

Photo credit:

When children start dating by wardomatic on flickr.