371 - Repeating Unhealthy Relationship Patterns Part 2 of 2
Continuing our discussion…
Last week we covered repetition compulsion, some examples of unhealthy relationship patterns, some science on whether or not we have a “type,” how trauma and intimate partner violence tend to be indicators that someone might enter another traumatic relationship, and how attachment theory can help us assess our own habits.
The five relationship patterns
These relationship patterns from the Science of People are an interesting take on our patterns in relationships and where those patterns possibly come from:
The Caregiver:
You are a person who chooses to partner or become friends with people who you want to take care of, fix, or improve.
Your partner might want to actually change, or they may have no intention or interest in changing. Regardless, you default into this caregiver role.
This might become emotionally exhausting and default to a fairly one-sided relationship where you take on the role of constantly building your partner or friend up or being one of their main sources of emotional support if something goes wrong.
Both the person who is caregiving or their partner may feel a lot of resentment over time (for their partner trying to change them, or for feeling like the relationship is one-sided).
The Alpha:
You default to wanting to be the one in charge in the relationship (whether with friends or with a romantic partner).
You are the chief decision maker and tend to drive the habits of the relationship and how it tends to function in everyday life.
Big changes to the relationship or monumental moments (like saying I love you or choosing to move in together) are driven by you.
You may try to dominate conversations and dictate how your partners live and act.
These controlling habits can wreak havoc on a relationship in a variety of ways. A partner might ultimately realize they want a more egalitarian relationship.
The Parent:
You might get into relationships where you default to being the “parent” and seeing your partner as the “child.”
You may take on the planning parts of the relationship, make sure that your partner is taken care of at all times, or resort to nagging or chastising if something isn’t done in the way you want.
You may pride yourself on being a “role model” for your friends and colleagues, but this can backfire if it isn’t something they want or need.
The parent role tends to not feel very sexy to a partner and can cause strain in the relationship. This is a classic scenario that plays out in a lot of media and on sitcoms.
The Codependent:
This role might result in you and your partner giving up a lot of your personal autonomy and choosing to heavily entwine the relationship with your own identity.
You may be excellent support systems for one another, but it may also result in isolation and cause you to pull away from your friends or from other activities that are important to you.
You may become completely reliant on one another for emotional, psychological and social support.
This dynamic can be difficult for the other people in your life and ultimately isn’t really healthy for you and your partner. Either of you might feel intense jealousy if other people or activities start becoming important in your life as well.
The Push-pull:
This type of relationship might be extremely volatile with a lot of ups and downs. The partners might break up and get back together many times throughout the course of the relationship.
This also might be similar to pursuit and withdrawal patterns in relationships.
One person might generally be the one who is pursuing, while the other is the one being pursued, or each of you might switch back and forth.
If the relationship does end, there is always a possibility that it might start back up again. Each person may find it difficult to let go of the relationship fully.
Considering non-monogamy
For those of us in non-monogamous relationships, some potential considerations to take into account are:
Finding it hard to watch our partners date people who aren’t good for them.
Either deciding that you really value your partner’s opinion and want to know if they think they see unhealthy patterns happening in your other relationships, or alternatively deciding that the relationship should remain completely separate from the others and take actions to aid in that separation.
Recognizing that any conflict in any relationship can affect other relationships, and this may be very difficult for your other partners and take steps to ensure quality time that isn’t spent venting about your other relationships.
If you notice yourself having the same issue come up in multiple relationships, considering if the issue is related to your own internal pattern.
Polyamory gives you additional opportunities to build and practice new relationship patterns and gives you the option to connect with and build relationships with people who are not your normal “type,” which potentially gives you the opportunity to gain new perspectives.
Tools for takeaway
A few ways to start assessing and getting out of bad habits:
Think about the following and write down answers in your journal: Imagine your ideal relationship. What would that look like? How would you resolve disagreements? How would you be your best self in this relationship?
Also ask yourself: What will this relationship feel like? Focus less on what the person looks like or what they do for a living. Focus instead on the feeling.
Write a list with a column for each parent (or the parent who you feel affected you most) and your partner. What traits and behaviors does your partner share with your parents? You can repeat this exercise with past partners or additional partners in your life. What are the commonalities? These writing tools can help bring more awareness to your patterns, and allow you to look out for them in the future.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) are effective modalities for reshaping thought patterns that lead to unhealthy behaviors.
Self-regulation tools such as meditation, deep breathing, positive attitude, mindfulness practices, and yoga helps change the nervous systems’ impulses and quiets the brain. They also can aid you in self forgiveness and letting yourself off the hook a bit.
Exit a relationship if it is no longer serving you, or choose to take steps to change the relationship patterns which we are about to talk about now!
Some more tips on getting out of unhealthy habits and patterns can be found here.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we are continuing on to part two of our discussion on repeating unhealthy relationship patterns and dating similar personality types. Today, we're going to be exploring these ideas further, including discussing some specific considerations for people in non-monogamous relationships. Some that make that a little bit easier to manage, some that can make it more difficult, as well as finally providing you with some actionable takeaways and some things that you can do to break some of those unhealthy relationship habits.
Emily: All righty. Let's get into a little bit of a quick recap of what we went through last week. The overall theme of these two episodes is to just discuss and percolate on, why is it that we repeat unhealthy relationship patterns and trying to answer the question, do we have a type is type? Is type a real thing? Are we drawn to the same type of personality when we're choosing to date someone?
Do you say yes? The three of us were like, "Yes. Definitely been there, done that before." Also last week we talked about repetition compulsion. Just to give that definition again, it is in psychoanalytic theory, an unconscious need to reenact early traumas in the attempt to overcome or master them. Such traumas are repeated in a new situation, symbolic of the repressed prototype repetition compulsion acts as resistance to therapeutic change since the goal of therapy is not to repeat, but to remember the trauma and to see its relation to present behavior. It's also called the compulsion to repeat.
Jase: We also discussed some examples of unhealthy relationship patterns, things like the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse, which is contempt, stonewalling, criticism, defensiveness. Talked about lack of empathy, not feeling like you and your partner are on the same team, unhealthy power dynamics, unhealthy communication patterns, feeling a lack of safety in the relationship as well as several others. We looked at a study that Emily hinted at a second ago, that's looking at determining whether we do have particular personality types that we tend to date again. It seems to indicate there's good evidence that we do, but there's more research to be done there.
Dedeker: Then we also discussed about how trauma or being previously traumatized or previously a survivor of intimate partner violence can be an indicator that someone might enter into another traumatic or violent relationship. Then lastly, we also talked about how attachment theory can play a role in this in helping us to assess our repeating relationship habits.
Emily: Moving on from all that, from that quick recap, I found something in my own research that was called the five relationship patterns. This reminded me a bit of the demon dance battles. Although that was a different thing. This is like what trope you fall into in your relationship patterns in general.
There are five that this person from the scienceofpeople.com go through. It's an interesting take sort of on what our patterns are, where they come from, things like that. These patterns, in my opinion, can apply to monogamous or polyamorous relationships or anything in between, and also can apply to friendships and relationships with work colleagues. I want both of you and myself, and I think all of you out there as you're listening to this, to try to see if you can recognize any of these within yourself. If you can relate to these patterns.
Also maybe it'll help you to think about things that you can learn from those patterns, maybe ways to change them if they're not serving you, stuff like that. Let's move on to the first one.
Jase: The first one is titled the caregiver. You are a person who chooses to have partners or become friends with people that you want to take care of or to fix or to improve. I've also heard this called, like being a fixer or repairer or something like that. Now in this, your partner might actually want to change or they may have no intention or interest in changing, but regardless, you tend to default into this caregiver role. This might become emotionally exhausting and can end up as a one-sided relationship.
I often see this play out ending up in a lot of frustration from the person who takes on that caregiver or nurturer role like frustration at a lack of progress or lack of change from the other person, whether that other person really signed up for that relationship dynamic or not. Then that both the person who's caregiving or their partner may have resentment that then builds up over time on either side of this. This was identified to me pretty early on in high school, I think, in dating, is this
Emily: Is this something that you do?
Jase: That my mom called out that I was doing this.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Jase: She felt like my dad had done this in his younger days as well.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Jase: It was one of those things where I was like, "huh". It really got me thinking about it. I did see some of that pattern. It's something that I've very consciously in the many years since then, worked to not do and to be aware of and not just fall into that pattern.
Dedeker: The next pattern that we're going to look at from the science of people they have called the alpha. I know we've waxed poetic on the show about our discomfort just with those terms, but it's their term not ours. The characteristics of the alpha pattern is you default to wanting to be the one in charge in the relationship. That could be in a friend relationship or with a romantic partner. You may be the chief decision-maker. You may tend to drive the habits of the relationship or how it functions in everyday life, changes in the relationship or big turning points like saying, "I love you", or choosing to cohabitate with somebody are most likely driven by you.
You may even dominate conversations. You may be the one to either dictate or strongly suggest the way that your partners live and act, or date if you're non-monogamous. Of course, as we can probably guess, these habits can wreak havoc on a relationship in a variety of ways because for a lot of people, this is really controlling.
Emily: I think it's interesting when you are the person who may tend to take a backseat in some relationship dynamics. I know that I've been there. I definitely have been a caregiver as well. I feel like I've been somebody who tends to let people dictate certain parts of the relationship more than others. Maybe I'm-- if what the alpha or the dominant versus the submissive and less submissive and in sub dom sense, but more like, oh, I'm fine with just going with the flow and letting someone do whatever they want, but it does potentially cause a couple to breed resentment over time. I've found that to be true for myself, for sure.
Jase: That's something we're thinking about with all of these is that these are from one point of view, but all of these have a counterpart. It may or may not be, I don't want to say, complicit because then again, it sounds like we're causing it to happen, but there is another part to these. That may be the other person is defaulting into that role. Even if they don't really want that from their partner, maybe they can fall into some patterns on the other side too. It is just worth with all these thinking about that, that it's not all just one-sided, but that there is this interesting dynamic that can vary depending on what different personalities enter into this relationship.
Emily: The next one is called the parent knows. Now this, we talked about just a touch in the last episode, but how sitcoms tend to really play up this role. I think between heterosexual couples and--
Dedeker: A lot of it where mom is the endless parent to both the kids and the husband.
Emily: Exactly. Even parenting the husband. I've seen it also, I feel like, in self-help books as well that, oh, you're parenting your significant other to a degree or your significant other is just like another child in the relationship. Again, it is this idea that you get into relationships where you may default to being the parent, and then you see your partner as the child.
They person who created this article said that maybe you were the oldest in a family, for instance, and you took on that co-parenting role or that additional parent role in your childhood in your upbringing, and so you do it in your romantic life later on as well. You may do things like taking on the planning parts of the relationship, you may make sure that your partner is taken care of at all times, or on the flip side, you may resort to nagging or chastising if something isn't done in the way that you want it to be done.
You also may pride yourself in certain situations on being a role model for your friends or colleagues, and this can backfire if it isn't something that they want or need. I thought that that was interesting. That sense of this as part of this being pointed out by the person that created this article because you don't often think about role models as being necessarily a parent, but I think that this is potentially negative if you see yourself as a role model but others don't really request that or need it in the moment and it's like, okay, are you putting yourself on a pedestal or are you looking down upon others stuff like that. It's interesting,
Jase: Interesting. Bossy that way or they are like," Why they want us to do it their way? It's not as good." It's a complicated dynamic.
Emily: Like a lot of those old fashioned tropes say, being a parent to your partner is not a very sexy thing and so that can cause a lot of strain in the relationship. You don't want to be dating your parent, for instance, even though Freud might think otherwise.
Yes, but that may not be a sexy thing if you feel as though you can't ever do anything right in the household, essentially, because your partner doesn't like the way that you're doing stuff.
Dedeker: It's a dynamic that's not sexy on either side. No one wants to feel--
Emily: That's right.
Dedeker: No one likes to feel parented by their partner in this way and also . Feeling like they're parenting their partner either.
Jase: We do want to make a clear distinction between some role play or having these of dynamics very consciously in a relationship, versus this is more about toxic patterns that can show up and that are not negotiated, not talked about or based in-- more of an unhealthy dynamic. Just to throw that out there with some of these it's like, well, these things could also be fun, like with the alpha, it's like, well, one person's making the decisions and the other's accepting and it's like, well, that could be a fun dynamic when it's negotiated intentionally between people who understand how to do that. Anyway, just to throw that out there because I keep thinking about those kinds of intentional dynamics.
The next one on this list, they called the codependent. They describe it as this role might result in you and your partner giving up a lot of your personal autonomy and really heavily entwining your relationships and letting go of your own identity in favor of this identity of a couple. Or even larger than a couple, potentially. That has some nice sides of being this great support system for each other but it can also result in isolation causing you to pull away from other relationships or maybe move away from other pursuits that are valuable to you as a person but you let go of and forget about and can end up resenting that or regretting that later on.
Also potentially becoming totally reliant on each other where it's even hard to function in society outside of that identity. I know that sounds very extreme to say but if you think about relationships where you've been more codependent, you can see some of that of, I just don't quite know how to function in the world without this identity or without always making something tie back to that relationship or I can't make decisions without that person or any number of things like that.
Emily: I think that so many people too in regular monogamy centric feelings like tropes, I guess, and advice out there, a lot of people do tell you, okay, your relationship is the end all, be all and it makes us feel as though we need to have our identity tied to our relationships. Which is interesting even though I think that it can breed a lot of these unhealthy patterns because we have that intrinsically tied to who we are in relationships and what they represent for us.
Jase: We've talked before about this, but do you know that there's that balance between you can be too withdrawn and not open yourself up to connecting and creating any kind of shared identity with a partner and that's not good, but also completely letting your own identity go or letting it go too much in favor of this is also unhealthy.
Another thing about this one is that it's not only difficult for each of you at times, eventually, you'll start to pay the price for losing that autonomy and that identity, but also can be really hard for other people in your life.
That's something to realize too that your friends who you've pulled away from or people who feel like you can never just give them an answer right away, you've always got to go and check with this other person, it can be frustrating for them. Then if we bring in something like non-monogamy or even without it, this can also bring up really extreme jealousy because if my whole identity is tied to this person, any threat to that is a threat to my own identity and not just to this relationship so that the stakes get raised even higher.
Dedeker: Then the fifth relationship pattern that we're looking at here is called the push-pull. Just like it says, it may be very volatile. It may have a lot of ups and downs, partners may break up and get back together many times throughout the course of the relationship, could be an on again, off again relationship. This could be an extension of some ongoing pursuit and withdrawal patterns that are going on. There could be one person who is generally the pursuer while the other one is the withdrawer or you could both switch back and forth.
If the relationship does end, there's always this floating possibility that it may start back up again. There may be some really fuzzy or non-existent boundaries around still contacting each other or actually letting go of the relationship fully, there can be a lot of, I don't know, I guess the classic like let's have breakup sex or just one last time for good measure, all these things that kind of pull you back into orbit with--
Emily: One last time for good measure I love it, yes.
True.
Jase: It's interesting too because I think that with some of these others we've talked about like the parenting one or the caregiver or even the alpha, we will see these patterns show up in our media often as we don't love this. Everyone's hating it a little bit, but that's life and that's just how it goes, and then on the other hand, we have this push-pull.
Emily: It kind of feels sexy.
Jase: Yes, we make it very sexy and like
Dedeker: It's funny because all things we could take them and slap it, like a stinky outfit on it and really dial up the volume and it could be real hot, again, if it's consensually negotiated.
Jase: Right, like thoughtfully done, exactly.
With this one, the push-pull, we really romanticize in our romantic comedies and stuff like that. Will they, won't they? Push-pull we're jerks to each other and then we're into each other and then we're jerks again and then it's.
Emily: Like Pride and Prejudice 100%.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: Well, I wanted to point out and you did already a little bit, Jase, that I think if you're looking at any of these and you realize that you fall into one pretty heavily, it's important to take ownership on both sides that we exist in these dynamics on either end, and I think that there are moments where we may feel like fuck like my partner causes me to be such a parent around him or whatever or around them. Yet, on the same end, you may be choosing to enter into a dynamic, even if it's subconsciously that causes that cyclical pattern to occur.
I think that that's where we need to be looking more critically at the why behind these things, what is it that is causing us to get into these patterns and to continue to perpetuate them, and understand that we have to take ownership and are part of them. Not just blaming our partners for, you know, putting us on the track of this pattern happening over and over again or, oh, I always get into relationships with such childish people, for example, no okay well where is your part of that equation? How is this serving you and why do you continue to get into this type of dynamic?
Jase: If we're assuming that this is a relationship that has some real mutual care underlying it and that there is love and affection and care there, knowing that can help break you out of that pattern of them building resentment about this thing and can switch you more into, "Hey, let's both do something to change this". Whereas, being unaware of it, you could end up with this resentment and frustration in a relationship that otherwise there is a lot of care there that it's not just this is an abusive terrible relationship, but maybe we've just fallen into some patterns that we can change.
We'll get into that later in the episode, but I did just want to mention that there because I could see this being another one of those things of like, don't put me in a box and tell me that if I do this thing, it's always bad. It's more just by becoming aware of it. It's like look, I have a place to start now. I have something to start thinking about like with my mom pointing out to being a fixer thing to me in high school. I was like, "Oof. Okay. Let me think about this. Let me explore this" and now it's something I'm super aware of in my friends' relationships as well that I'm very attuned to seeing that behavior.
Emily: I feel like I've gone into every single one of them at some point in my life. What about you two or do you really fall?
Dedker: Oh, I was going to say, I think I've got a royal flush - and even beyond this list of unhealthy relationship patterns, I'm like the variety pack myself.
Emily: Got it. Yes, for sure.
Dedeker: If I had to pick one that I tend to go to, oh gosh. See, I feel a little scared to answer this because I feel like if I answer it wrong, you two are going to laugh at me for my lack of self-awareness.
Emily: Oh, it's fine. I'm sure you've done all of them at some point, but which?
Dedeker: The ones that stand out to me the most or tend to be doing the parent or the caregiver thing maybe with a little bit of the alpha sprinkled in there sometimes.
Emily: Jase di give you that one for fun.
Jase: I think there's a lot of overlap between those three in these descriptions too. It's interesting. Now that I'm thinking about it, I've definitely noticed some relationships where I have felt like the other person in the relationship is wanting me to fit into one of these or whether they were doing it consciously or not, wanting me to take some of these roles and having to very intentionally with words, have conversations about like, I want to be sure that I don't end up in this role or I've done the other two where it's like I'm going to talk to you about a goal that I have or something that I want to change in my life, but I want to be very clear that I don't want you to be my coach for that.
Or I don't want you to be the one who feels like it's your responsibility to nag me or get on me about doing it. This is my thing. I want you to know so you can support me, but I want to be really clear that we're not going to end up in these dynamics.
Emily: That's a cool way.
Jase: That's a conversation I've had many times on either side of like, let's negotiate that of how much encouragement? Let's revisit this and see like, should I encourage a little bit more, should I back off? That it's a collaborative intentional communicated process.
Emily: I think that's a great way to approach things. We are going to continue talking about considerations for those non-monogamous relationships regarding all of these unhealthy relationship patterns and then finally get into some actionable takeaways for all you, but first we are going to discuss some ways that you can support our show and continue to bring it to you for free.
We're going to talk about considerations for those in non-monogamous relationships when it comes to repeating unhealthy relationship patterns because it gets more dicey. It gets more challenging when there's even more people involved in all of this and it really can be difficult to watch our partners date people that clearly aren't good for them.
I think in friendship scenarios too, and actually a lot of these articles talked about the fact that if you're trying to stop dating toxic people or dating the same type that isn't good for you over and over again, it said listen to your friends, listen to their assessments of things because they're a little bit more objective than you can be.
I think that is not bad advice. However, it may be more challenging when you get multiple romantic people involved because you may not want your romantic partner telling you not to date someone. That may feel shitty and not like something you want to get into. I think this is a really good opportunity to discuss with your partners about how much you want to be entwined in the other person's relationship.
What things are you going to discuss? Is it okay for the two of you to vent to one another about the relationships that you're in? Stuff like that. I think that's a really great communication to have with your partner just fairly early on because so many of us and I know that I've been there, have gotten into scenarios where I may vent to a different partner about their metamour and then they feel like the go-between, they feel like they're in the middle of it in some way. It gets really frustrating and really challenging for them.
Jase: You may decide that you really value your partner's opinion and you want them to help you identify some unhealthy patterns that you might be into or you might decide that we want to keep this separate. I don't want you to be the one who's weighing in on that, but that's definitely a conversation worth having and revisiting, reconsidering as you go along.
Also understand that regardless of how separate or entwined these various relationships are, any conflict that you have in any of them does have an effect on the others because it has an effect on you and that is going to affect the others sometimes more, sometimes less, again, depending how entwined those are and how thoroughly you work at separating those. To pretend that they don't affect each other is just not true.
Recognizing that can be difficult for your other partners to take steps to ensure that their quality time isn't spent venting about other partners like you were saying, Emily it's that every now and then maybe that's okay. Maybe we want to be there to support, but we also want to take steps to make sure that's what all our time is spent doing.
Emily: Sitting down and crying about your other partner the second you hang out with them.
Jase: There have been times where I've been very guilty of this.
Emily: Oh, for sure me too.
Jase: It's a bummer and it's difficult. It's a real challenge.
Dedeker: There's some special benefits that non-monogamy can bring along with it for being able to get some more information about yourself and how you tick. For instance, if you notice yourself having really similar issues coming up in multiple relationships, that could be an opportunity to consider might this be related to me in some way, might this be related to some of my internal patterns or my attachment style or what it is that I'm looking for?
That's not to say that it's all your fault necessarily, but this is just yet another inventory item on the list that you can look at and investigate. Again, practicing non-monogamy, it gives you additional opportunities to practice in relationship and to practice new relationship patterns as well. It also gives you the option to connect with and build relationships with people who are maybe not your normal personality type for instance and could give you the opportunity to gain new perspectives. I know for myself, it's also been really helpful sometimes for clarifying that maybe something isn't necessarily my own baggage or an internal pattern.
If I notice that things are going actually great in relationships A and B, but then something's really going haywire in C, now that doesn't mean I have free license to say it's all C's fault. Clearly, they're the bad apple of the bunch, but I don't know. It just helps to act as a little bit of a litmus test to help you get to the bottom of what's really going to be the most effective thing to focus on in order for my relationships to feel better.
Jase: Absolutely. I think that it can also bring to light some trends that you might have of I'm tending to date people that are very similar in this particular way. If you're dating them all at the same time, that might be more obvious. If not to you, then maybe to your friends who are like that's funny that you're dating another VFX artist that you might not have noticed if you had dated them in sequence.
That might jump out more. I know I used VFX artist as more of a silly example, but this could also be something more serious of falling into some of those patterns that we talked about before of that's interesting you have multiple partners and it seems like you're being a little bit of apparent to all of them.
That's an interesting observation that maybe a friend might notice that you wouldn't or that you start to see, I'm feeling this same exhaustion in all these or, I started a new relationship and I see myself starting to move it toward this similar dynamic of what I've got in my other relationships. It just gives you more touch points to look at and to compare and see patterns, which is actually really interesting and can be really helpful if you're aware of that.
Emily: My partner pointed out fairly recently something that I had said way back at the beginning of a relationship that I really like being someone who friends and partners and other people can rely on for emotional support, but I think that sometimes I take that a little bit to the extreme and I do it while sacrificing my own needs in that moment. It can create that one-sidedness. I appreciate the fact that he pointed it out because I think that does come up from time to time and causes these one-sided not really healthy relationships. That is definitely something to look at overall and question why that's happening.
Jase: Now we're going to move on to talking about some actionable takeaways, some tips, and some advice, some things that you can do if you want to break some of these patterns. We've put this into two main sections. The first one is if you're worried about dating the same type over and over again, some things you might be able to do to change that up. Then the second is if you notice you're falling into the same patterns in your relationships, some exercises and things that you can do to start to change that and break out of this.
Emily: All right, so the first section is if you're worried about dating the same toxic type over and over again, here's some ways to get out of that habit. A lot of these are journaling exercises, which I like, because again, that gets you out of your head and onto the page and allows you to look at things hopefully a little bit objectively and go back to it if you want and see how things change over time. The first is to think about the following and write down the answers in a journal or on a note-taking app, something that. Imagine your ideal relationship. What would that look like? How would you resolve disagreements? How would you be your best self in this relationship? Answer those questions in your journal.
Jase: Also ask yourself, what would this relationship feel like? Focusing less on what that person looks like or whether they're a VFX artist or not, what they do for a living, but instead focusing on how do you feel in that relationship? What is the feeling of that relationship? With these two journal exercises we've mentioned so far, the one that Emily talked about and the one that I just mentioned, the point of those is just to get you thinking about if I were to really brainstorm what I want a relationship to feel or look what is that?
It can give you maybe something different to focus on instead of falling into, I'm just doing the same old thing. I'm just following my habits, my patterns what's familiar. Instead, gets you thinking about what it is you want and maybe you'll adjust some of your behaviors in terms of who you're looking for and what you find attractive if you have that in mind, instead of just allowing yourself to default to whatever's comfortable.
Now, another different approach to this is if you're worried that you're dating someone who's your parents or maybe you're reliving some stuff from your childhood, one exercise you could try is you make a list and you have a column for each of your parent. Maybe if you're like me, you'd have several columns on a--
Emily: Millions of parents.
Jase: Right. Whoever you're concerned may be involved in this, but make a column for each parent or just one parent that affected you the most or maybe other caregivers or whatever it is. Then also your partner. Put them on that list. Maybe this is the past partner, maybe it's a current partner or whatever it is. Then start to write down what traits and behaviors does your partner share with all of your parents, with some of your parents, caregivers, whoever it is.
Then repeat this exercise with other past partners or other partners that you have, if you're a non-monogamous and look for what are these commonalities, what are the things they have in common? Again, the point of this is not to say, "Aha, that's the problem." Instead, to just bring more awareness to these patterns so that you're more able to notice, "Oh, look, that's there."
Not all these are bad. You might notice some that's like, "This is a good trait. I also see this in my partners." That's cool, but that's good to be aware of that I learned from a young age that that's a trait that I should be looking for, but then this one's not as good. I'm maybe also looking for that. What if I could get that good one and less of this one that I don't like as much, but just getting some awareness and noticing those things in a way you might not when you're just thinking about it without writing it down.
Emily: I think it might be interesting to do this also with yourself. Put yourself on one side and your parents on others and see which traits you exhibit that are similar to their traits and if that's something that you like in yourself or that's something that you want to change.
Jase: That one might be too scary. I don't know.
Dedeker: I feel I'm constantly doing that exercise in my head already and I hate it.
Emily: I think it is interesting because, again, it may inform the reasoning behind why it is that you gravitate towards certain people or not.
Jase: That's a good exercise.
Emily: My mother tended to date these types of people. Now I'm also tending to date these types of people. I wonder if it has anything to do with these personality traits that are similar to one another. Things like that. These are all just exploratory exercises.
Jase: For sure. Now, I was just going to say, that's an interesting question to explore. Is it that, I think I might be dating people similar to one of my parents or both of my parents or is it that I'm dating people similar to the people that my parent dated? Maybe that has to do with some values they taught me about what one should look for in a relationship, so boy, there's lot to unpack here.
Emily: I'm really curious if any of you do this out there, let us know how it goes, especially in our patron groups and stuff that because there is a lot to unpack there.
Dedeker: Since there can be a lot to unpack, this is also a good arena to maybe bring in a professional. Specifically things like CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. They're modalities that are specifically focused on reshaping thought patterns, reshaping beliefs that you may have about the relationship you're supposed to have or that you deserve to have, those things that can lead to unhealthy behaviors and choices that are maybe not so great. This is a fantastic topic to dive into with a therapist.
In addition to that, you can also incorporate self-regulation tools meditation, breathing exercises, mindfulness practices, anything that gets you to switch on that almost that light bulb of awareness or that searchlight of awareness of just training it in on yourself of getting curious about how it is that you tick and maybe quieting your day to day default, just zoning out, going about your day and really getting curious about actually what's going on here.
What comes up in me when I'm seeking partners or when I'm in my partnership right now, what are the things that gets triggered for me or what are the things that feel good for me just bringing in that curiosity can really invite in a lot of insight. It can also aid you in incorporating things self-compassion and letting yourself off the hook a little bit.
Of course, we have to say that if you're realizing, "Oh, I'm in a relationship that's really unhealthy. Maybe I have these patterns that are playing out or I've realized that I've ended up with the same toxic type of person once more." Exit the relationship. If it's not working for you anymore, it's okay to break up. Also choose to take steps to change relationship patterns. That's what we're going to talk about now.
Emily: Alright. These are five steps to change relationship patterns and we have some multiamory advice sprinkled in, along with this thing from Loveatfirstfight.com. The steps are from them. All the other stuff is from us. I wanted to mold the two together and give you some multiamory back catalogue stuff along with some of our tools that we love to use in our own daily lives.
Step one is notice what triggers your negative relationship pattern. Really there's just a cornucopia of things out there that trigger or that cause us to enter into unhealthy relationships or unhealthy patterns, make us upset and make us wounded, make us feel pain, things that. It's important to really try to gain an awareness of all of those reasons and also of how your body feels. I love this idea. You've talked about this a lot, Dedeker, like how does it feel in my body when my partner says something that's annoying or that's painful? What is that? Why am I feeling this thing?
Sit with that feeling and then ask yourself if a similar situation in the past has caused you the same feeling. Try to go back in time and look at your body sensation and try to recall if it happened, maybe with an experience with your family of origin or something else in your past, an old boyfriend, things like that, any of the above and that history may really give you insight into why this pattern began in the first place.
Jase: The second step is discover how you invite conflict. We've touched on this a little bit before and I want to, maybe even for this exercise, when we're talking about changing patterns in an existing relationship, to move away from how do you personally invite conflict, and maybe how do you, as a couple, invite conflict. How do you fall into some patterns that lead you down a road into conflict?
One thing that we love to talk about for this type of thing is microscripts. Basically, if you start to notice that there's a particular conflict pattern that you go into, someone reacts in this way while they're working and they get interrupted by their partner, and then we have a fight about it. Or the person reacts--
Emily: The little nothing fights.
Jase: Right. These nothing fights. We've learned like, "Okay, yes. Gosh, we've done this again." Maybe we don't notice it while we're in the middle of it, but we've noticed, "Okay, there's a pattern here." Where a microscript comes in is you work on getting better at identifying, "Where's the earliest point that we can notice we're starting to go down that road? That's where we're going to insert something else, a different pattern." That's the microscript.
It's like a weird thing that we're going to say, a little dance that we do, just something to short circuit that neural pathway, change our thinking about certain situations, maybe turn something that would lead to a fight into something silly. Even if you're not feeling it, just the symbolicness of doing that shows I acknowledge I don't want to go down this road. I don't want us to just continue down here.
Dedeker and I use tons of this. Anytime we start to notice, "Hey. You know what? We've had a conflict about this thing twice now." Even just that. It's like two or three times now. Even if it was a minor conflict, we'll say, "Okay. How's something that we could change that pattern. What's a microscript we could enter into here?"
What if there's just a funny term that we come up with to describe this, instead of saying, "I'm mad about the fact that you put the towels back in a way that I didn't like in the linen closet." It's like, "Oh, I'm about to have a limit break, like a final fantasy character." It's like, even though the meaning is the same, there's just that little bit of silliness to it that allows us to talk about it, and distance ourselves a little bit from the emotions that we're having during that conversation. It makes a huge difference.
Then something like radar, having a regular relationship check in, is a great time to start noticing those. That's when you can come together and go, "Huh. In this last month, we've twice had a fight about the linen closet. What's a microscript that we could do, or what's an action that we could take to change that?"
Dedeker: Step three is to bring in positive intention. I know this can be really hard. We do talk quite a bit on this show about how important it is to be able to assume that your partner has positive intentions rather than negative or harmful ones when they're engaging in conversation. This is something that's a little bit hard to control. The Gottman Institute studies this quite a bit. They talk about negative sentiment overriding positive sentiment override.
They find that, basically, if there's a good sense of friendship in your relationship, chances are high that you're going to naturally be able to give your partner the benefit of the doubt or assume that they have positive intentions. If something is going wrong in the friendship, there isn't a strong sense of friendship in your relationship, chances are high that you're going to assume they have negative intentions, and that you're going to expect criticism from them or negativity from them or things like that.
It's important to pay attention to this because over time, the more that you stay in that state of negative sentiment override, it breeds resentment. It means that even if your partner does something good or something kind or tries to come to you and repair or be compassionate, that you may still have this filter on of assuming they have some bad intention or secret agenda. That means that you lose that momentum of being able to even receive that repair from your partner.
We recommend going back to specifically, our repair shop episode, Episode 234, utilizing those steps to repair after conflict, and also figure out how to prevent a particular pattern from happening again. This is also a great time to use your good communications tools, like I-statements, or things like Clean Talk, or NVC.
Emily: Step four is to name the pattern. That feels a little bit like a microscript thing as well. Additionally, we talked about this a little bit on our Demon Dance Battles episode, which was 275, where we discussed Sue Johnson in specific patterns that people tend to fall into when they're fighting.
We did also talk briefly about pursuit and withdrawal patterns, and how that happens sometimes, and how you may recognize if you or your partner is the one doing the pursuing or the one doing the withdrawing, or if you go back and forth on that. Basically, once you're able to figure out your specific pattern, put a name to it, recognize when it happens, the thing that causes the event to occur, then you'll be able to stop the pattern in it tracks the next time you recognize that it's happening.
Jase: It's interesting, I was just reading the other day about colors, and that we're better at recalling certain colors if we have names for them. Whereas if like you don't have a name for that color that's in between blue and green, it's harder--
Emily: Like the one that I'm looking at in your room right now-- in Dedeker's room?
Jase: Yes, that's sort of, I'd call it an aqua color, or something like that, but if you don't have that word, it's harder to even recall the color or to recognize it in the future, if you don't have a way to label it. Coming up with some of these labels or silly names for these patterns can help you. It's like, "Oh, we're doing that thing with the with the stuff that we do." Having a name for it can help you to even recognize it at all, which is cool.
Then Step five is to fight the pattern, not each other. Now that we've identified some of what's going on, we're understanding maybe where this pattern comes from, and we've worked on interrupting it and naming it, then the two of us, with all of these steps, the point is that we're coming together to stop this pattern earlier and earlier.
Maybe at first, the best we can do is we can recognize once we're in it. Let's say, we start off, the best we can do is we recognize right after it's happened. "Oh, whoops. We fell into that pattern again." Then let's work together to figure out how we can stop it earlier. Maybe we can recognize it while we're in the middle of it now. Even if we're still upset, it's like, "Okay, but we've recognized it. Let's just stop for a moment."
Then work on recognizing it earlier and earlier, to the point where, hopefully, you get to that point where you're stopping it before you're even going anywhere near it. Then it just becomes a habit to not go down that path of negative conflict and instead, find other ways to reconcile those differences more intentionally, or in a healthier, more loving way. I think that's the big point.
I think this is something that's just huge in relationships is when you can find the way that it's us against a problem. Ideally, not us against the world, because that can have some other negative consequences of developing too much of that kind of thinking. More of this like, "Hey, look. Let's together, work to solve this problem," as opposed to, "You are the problem. I'm fighting you." If that is where it stays is, "You're the problem. I'm fighting you," then maybe that's not a good relationship to stay in, and you want to find one where you can work together against those sorts of problems instead of against each other.
Emily: Wow. The end of Part two. The end of this two-part series on repeating unhealthy relationship patterns. Hope y'all learned something out there. It was fun to dive into this and think critically as we talked about it, and maybe go and do some of those journaling exercises and blow our own minds a little bit more.