When you look back over your past relationships do you see patterns? Whether it’s being drawn to bad boys, ending up with narcissists or falling for someone who needs looking after, it’s not unusual for us to end up in the same kind of toxic relationships again and again. So how do you break the pattern?
After four women shared their very personal experiences with Woman’s Hour reporter Milly Chowles, we spoke to Penny Mansfield, co-director of relationships charity One Plus One, and Simone Bose who works for Relate. Here they share their best advice for fostering a strong and healthy relationship…
Be active in your relationship
“The more that we are realistic about relationships, the more we can be active and build the relationships that we want,” says Penny.
“And perhaps leave relationships where we don’t have the power to make them much better.
“There is a creativity to relationships and if you look at interviews with people who have been in a relationship for a very long time, you will find there are periods where they might have thought, ‘Is it good enough to stay? Bad enough to go?’. And then times when they felt pleased that they’d stayed.”
Make time to connect and share experiences
“All relationships go through periods where people lose touch with each other, literally maybe physical touch, but also a sense of where the other person is coming from,” says Penny.
Research shows people who share experiences have stronger relationships, whether it’s simply doing things together or dealing with difficult things together.
“Consciously try to behave in a different way, listen differently and engage with your partner, share some of the things that are going on in your life,” advises Penny. “What tends to turn people away from each other is when they struggle with something on their own, they don’t share it and then the relationship become dissatisfied on both sides.”
Allow yourself to be vulnerable
“A lot of clients I see, they don’t know how to be vulnerable properly, and that could be that they don’t trust,” says Simone.
“That’s something they might have learnt from when they were younger, that it’s not safe to show how you feel or to speak up. Trust doesn’t necessarily mean, ‘I don’t trust you’, as in infidelity or something where you’re being betrayed. It can actually be trust with your emotions and your feelings.”
Take a step back and try and look at your relationship objectively
“Ask yourself, ‘how is this actually making you feel?’,” suggests Simone. “Watch your emotions when you’re with this person. Question how you think about things and how that is affecting your life and your happiness. Be more observant of yourself and then question, ‘do I really want that?’.
What is the other person saying to me? Is it derogatory? Is it putting me down?
“Also it’s important to understand, are you aligned on your beliefs and values in life? When you have couples that are very different, it comes through in lots of things – decision making, life stages, how they see their lives together, how they make decisions for the future. See if there are compromises to be made there.”
“Many people don’t have opportunities to reflect,” adds Penny, “But if you’ve got a chance to actually talk to other people or have some kind of therapeutic intervention, you begin to see your behaviour and the behaviour of the other person in a slightly different way.”
Learn how to spot the red flags
Simone suggests some simple questions that can help you spot negative behaviour in your own relationship: “Are you tiptoeing around somebody? Are you not able to be an autonomous person in your life in the relationship? Have you lost that part of yourself? You have to question also if that’s coming from yourself, if that’s your upbringing or if that is about the other person.
“What is the other person saying to me? Is it derogatory? Is it putting me down? Look out for those red flags - are you arguing constantly? Is there a repetitive argument happening over and over again? Are you feeling that you’re not loved? Or you’re not being loved in the way that you need, and if that’s affecting your mental health or you’re not feeling supported in some way.”
Listen to your friends
“If your friends are saying [you shouldn’t be in your relationship] just observe it and have a think,” says Simone.
“People who care about you and know who you are, they may notice changes in you that you may not realise. They may see things that you’re not seeing, how you’re behaving. Are you acting hyper-vigilant around that person? Are you altering the way that you are for that other person? Is there something coercive going on there?”
Learn to have better arguments
“Conflict damages people, but actually well-managed conflict is part of living,” says Penny, whose charity One Plus One runs online relationship courses, including ‘How to Argue Better’. Simone agrees that teaching people to have more constructive arguments is vital.
“[Learning] to hear each other better, to not dramatize things, to maybe think about your anger levels when you’re reacting to the other person. Most certainly you can change patterns,” says Simone. “Do you detach or switch off from your partner when there’s a conflict? Do you move away or do you try and keep an argument going because you want validation that everything’s ok and that you’ve resolved it?
“Some people are scared of arguing. They associate it with being scary and frightening. [But] arguing or having heated discussions is healthy, because it means that you’re speaking up and you’re airing something and you’re going to work on a compromise. To say that you don’t argue ever, that would be a very quiet relationship with not a lot being said and that can also be very dangerous.”
If you have children, try looking at your relationship through their eyes
“If you’re parents, stop and think about who the audience is to your arguments,” says Penny.
Simone adds: “I ask my clients who are parents, ‘how would you like your children to talk about you when they’re older?’ You know, when they might be having [their own] counselling sessions - how would you like them to talk about your relationship and reflect back on their childhood? That gets people thinking about what they would like to model and how they would like their children to experience family life and love.”
Your upbringing may be affecting your relationship choices
“If you have had quite a difficult childhood and experience, it will form your sense of what it is to be needed and to be loved,” says Penny.
For example, Simone says people with low self-esteem often put up with being treated badly because “it feels safe to them” in some way. “Even though it’s not good for them, it’s familiar, it’s what they know and it may be what they feel they deserve.”
Another common pattern is people being drawn to partners they believe they can ‘fix’. “When we explore it, in their childhood they were ‘the fixer’ in their family relationships,” says Simone. “The person that made things better. Perhaps they had a mother that had a very anxious attachment style and needed to be comforted a lot. So you repeat that in your adult life because you feel ‘that’s how I’ll be loved and appreciated’.”
Beware that the thing you were once attracted to can be the thing that undoes you
“Something I’ve noticed with clients is that you may be drawn to somebody who has opposite traits because you want more of that in your life,” says Simone.
“So, you may be quite dramatic or quite an anxious person and then you get drawn to somebody who’s quite calm and relaxed. But the funny thing is that has the flip side. So the thing that’s calm and collected and a calming force in your life, somewhere down the line can become, ‘you’re disinterested in me, you’re not passionate enough, you don’t care enough.”
Remember our ‘failed’ relationships are how we learn
“Part of the relationships we form in our young adult years are actually finding out about ourselves in relationships,” says Penny.
“So they may not last but they are instructional in a sense - we can reflect on them and we can learn from them. So it’s not a case of, ‘well, I’ve been out with four people and I ended up not having a relationship with any of them’. That’s not a failure. That is how you learn about relationships.”
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