Relationship strategies that get you nowhere.

Delyse Ledgard, RCCRelationships

couples communication, relationship strategies,

Do You Use These Relationship Strategies?

Negotiation in relationships is essential as you attempt to get what you want from your partner. Not all relationship strategies lead to loving and positive interactions. This blog identifies 5 strategies that make it harder to get your needs met and can erode trust. They tend to become more frequent when you are at your worst or stressed and in some relationships take over most communication. Being hard-wired to protect yourself can lead to a need to control vulnerability and disappointment. Your protectionist nature is affected by experiences growing up in your family or society as well as the interactions that develop in your intimate relationships. If these strategies escalate in your relationship it becomes harder to be vulnerable and emotionally available to one another. Perhaps you can identify which of these approaches you most often use.

Control

Controlling behaviour comes in many forms and occurs when you restrict your partner because of insecurities about what they want to do or might do. Partners who use this strategy tend to move into a one-up position and are judgemental of their partner’s different ways of doing things with a tendency to invade boundaries. Manipulation and threat are central to this strategy.

Sometimes the threat is spoken and obvious such as leaving the relationship, withholding sex or covert actions by avoiding or doing something behind your partner’s back. Control occurs when there is a complete lack of negotiation. You will just go ahead with your actions to get what you want or restrict your partner to get what you want. Controlling behaviour is fuelled by insecurities that are deeply buried. Rigid rules are employed to maintain control such as; ‘if you loved me you would _’ or,’ In a relationship, you should/should not _.’

All genders can exert control. However, men and women can be affected differently for the most part. Even though we have come a long way, the world we live in is a Patriarchal system where there is a hierarchy of entitlement and status with cis white men at the top. These power dynamics show in the way controlling behaviour plays out in relationships with feelings of vulnerability associated with women and men socialized to deny their ‘weaker’ feelings. This masculine code of invulnerability has a detrimental effect on cis men. They are in a bind where to be intimate with their partner means to be more emotionally available and vulnerable, but goes against their training of invulnerability. Attempting to control your partner can be a way of managing the helpless feelings that come up in intimate relationships of disappointment, loss, feeling let down, that you need your partner in some way or feelings of uncertainty. Giving each other choices around decisions or acceptance of different ways of doing things opens up the possibility of disappointment and doubt.

Women often use guilt and shame to try and control their partners. Men have more of a sense of entitlement that leads to overt ways of control vs. women tend to use covert methods of control. Partners who use control as a strategy will tend to use the rest of the strategies in a controlling way.

Being Right

Being right is the foundation of any argument. It will go something like this. One of you starts a discussion where you need something, want to share something, want your partner’s help, and need to be heard or understood. The urge to make each other wrong is activated as your requests are not able to be met. On the one side, you are wrong for disagreeing or not meeting the need and on the other hand for the way you are asking for something or making the request in the first place. Each partner is protecting themselves from feeling the disappointment of not being satisfied or feeling guilty about not giving their partner what they want. Nothing gets sorted out because the focus is on maintaining your position of being right.

You can reach a moment of feeling superior if you manage to convince your partner you are right or exhaust them into agreeing with you. However, it becomes an ongoing battle between you of who is going to stay on top. When you are trying to get your needs met through being right, it is exhausting and leads to low self-esteem. The battle to be right escalates as you both try and protect yourself from the shame of losing.

Unbridled Self-expression

The catchphrase ‘it is better out than in’ has been used in the psychology field as an encouragement to express feelings and thoughts. This has been particularly important for women who have felt their experiences silenced and unheard by society and their partners. Unfortunately, this has also justified interactions in relationships such as emotional dumping on one’s partner, and being unkind in the name of honesty. Typically what happens when there is ‘unbridled self-expression’ is discussions become an opportunity to talk about everything that is and ever has been wrong with the relationship, and the original point of the discussion gets lost. Nothing ever gets resolved, and so this list of unresolved events, hurts, and unmet needs are brought up time and again. This is the nature of unbridled self-expression.

It is important to know not everything is relevant at a particular moment. Just because you are feeling something does not mean your partner has to listen to you then and there. Nor does an unfettered expression of all your feelings and thoughts equal being close to one another. The expression of one’s feelings and desires is essential to a healthy relationship, but for this to be effective we need to learn to be focused and relevant.

Retaliation

We can all recognize the feeling of wanting to hurt someone because they have hurt us. The desire to get back at your partner, and make them feel what you are feeling can satisfy your angry/hurt feelings, although it’s only temporary. This strategy only serves to bring more hostility and hurt into your relationship.

Because you are in pain, it is easy to justify retaliatory behaviour whether it is shaming jabs back and forth in an argument or a week of the silent treatment. If confronted you can always point to what your partner has done. Neither partner’s hurt gets comforted or repaired because each of you is more concerned with accusing and wanting to get your pain acknowledged. Retaliation can be described as persecuting your partner from the victim position.

There is often a feeling that you want your partner to feel the pain you experience then, maybe, they won’t hurt you again. Unfortunately, this all too often escalates into more retaliation when either of you is in pain.

Resisting the urge to retaliate when you are hurt is the first step. Learning to repair instead of retaliating is ongoing work.

Withdrawal

Withdrawal is a strategy of flight and avoidance to feel safe and comfortable. It is a strategy of non-participation in the relationship. If you don’t participate, then you won’t get hurt. However, if you don’t participate your needs won’t be met, and your partner is likely to feel abandoned, ignored and frustrated. Over time withdrawal can lead to more and more distance between partners and even venturing outside the relationship to get your needs met.

Any number of aspects of the relationship can feel uncomfortable and cause you to withdraw. For example discussions or specific topics or a part of the relationship such as sex, parenting, and spending time with your partner. Withdrawal is not the same as needing time to yourself or space although you may convince yourself that is what you are doing. Needing space is conducive to a healthy relationship where you negotiate and communicate about what space you need. Withdrawal is a habit to avoid being uncomfortable and often acted on without returning to deal with what you were avoiding. Learning to calm the anxiety and fears about facing your partner or talking about difficult topics is what will be required to overcome a withdrawing strategy.

The ideas in this blog are inspired by Terry Real and Relational Life Therapy

Our relationship counsellors are trained to help you transform these losing strategies

10 Ways to Let Go of unhealthy mistrust

Delyse Ledgard, RCCRelationships, Trauma

mistrust,suspicion,guarded,

Developing Trust in Relationships.

Do you ever wonder why some people can breeze through life with confidence and calm when you are quickly consumed by thoughts of danger and betrayal? Your instincts are needed to tell you when there is a threat, and you are unsafe. When those instincts are on constant alert, then you are receiving faulty information and unhealthy mistrust develops making it hard to trust people and yourself.

What causes us to be suspicious and mistrustful?

Let’s start with a simple understanding of what is happening in our nervous system.

There are three parts to your nervous system that work together to help you deal with and make sense of the world.

  1. Social engagement is the part of your system that helps you to connect to others.  It involves your face, eyes, ears, and voice and connects to your heart and guts.
  2. Fight or flight. Emergency centre. Increases energy, the heart pumps faster, and muscles tense. You are ready to deal with a threat.
  3. Freeze. Cuts off the fight/flight when it gets too overwhelming. When you are in this zone, you will feel a lack of energy and numb to your feelings

When you are on constant alert, you are mostly in the flight/fight or freeze parts of your nervous system

How your experience can create a lack of trust

Most danger and threat is at the hands of others. Sometimes that can be single events such as a physical attack, bullying, verbal abuse, or witnessing violence. It also occurs from the build-up of interactions with others, such as:

Living in an atmosphere of criticism and judgment,
The unpredictability and neglect caused by a father’s alcoholism,
Living with a parent who is depressed.

On the other hand, feeling safe and secure also occurs through your connection to others.  It is their compassion, support, and caring that increases your sense of security and that you are not alone.  Also, feeling connected to nature can enhance your sense of well-being and that you belong.

When you have a build-up of unprocessed threat and stress your social engagement part of your nervous system becomes disengaged. You will become disconnected from yourselves and others and go further into an emergency alert.

When you deal with a threat, this is what happens

  1. At the first signs of discomfort, your social engagement will still be active. You can use your eyes, ears, and voice to engage others and try to mitigate the situation. If the uncomfortable signals continue to increase and reach levels that are overwhelming, this triggers your fight or flight. The connecting part then goes offline.
  2. You are then prepared to fight or flee a situation to survive. You might use anger and protest, refuse to be coerced, or if necessary use physical defense. Other than literally running when you feel threatened, you might withdraw or try to be invisible and silent.
  3. Freeze kicks in when you are unable to fight or flee, and your only option is to leave mentally.  One aspect of this is called dissociation.  So as the threat continues, you protect yourself by collapsing into inaction and not being present.

When you have space and support to recover from trauma and stress, your social engagement system has the possibility to reactivate. If not, and you continue to experience being let down or threatened by people in your life, relating to others is shaped by the fight/flight and freeze parts of your nervous system.

As you relate to others with constant alert and caution, unhealthy mistrust develops.

When you are on constant alert there is a sense of protecting yourself and ‘making sure’ you ward off danger. Right? Ironically this leads to experiencing the world and others as unsafe because you are stuck in the traumatic fear when there is no threat. With this perspective and response going on in your nervous system, it is easy to see how you would end up feeling cautious, and suspicious, keeping to yourself and fearing vulnerability. You end up looking for ways others are going to let you down. You have developed unhealthy mistrust.

10 ways to Let Go of Unhealthy Mistrust

  1. Awareness is always a major factor in any process of change and healing. So becoming aware of how your nervous system is keeping you stuck on alert will help you to work to change your actions in response to it. Many people are so used to operating this way it has become automatic and so to notice the fight/flight or freeze activation takes practice. Mindfulness practices can help to bring focused attention to the sensations in your body.
  2. Learning to relax the alert activation. There are many ways to calm and soothe the fear and tension that you notice in your body and thoughts associated with this. Meditation, and yoga are all good practices for this, but learning to calm the fear as it arises is key to changing the mistrust radar.
  3. Give yourself at least 3 alternatives to any mistrustful conclusion you have about someone’s behaviour or communication. If you can, check it out directly with them. Sometimes your fears are confirmed, and you will know you were right to feel wary. There will be many times that you will learn that your mistrust radar has been active. It is important to realize that the thinking and beliefs you have about people or a particular situation represent past experiences, not present experiences. When you feel threatened it comes from noticing something that you associate with past betrayals. You quickly go down a well-worn road in your thinking that prevents you from taking in new experiences.
  4. Connect with things in your environment that give you a pleasant feeling. Anything from a colour you like, something in nature, a person you do trust, a smile from a stranger. Slow down and take it in. Connect with the sensations in your body that you associate with noticing this.
  5. Notice how much you can tolerate without going into the fight/flight. Tolerating experiences means that you can stay with your feelings even if they are uncomfortable. For some of you, it also feels threatening when someone shows you caring. Once you know the range of what you can tolerate, hanging out in this zone will increase your experience of well-being and reinforce this connection in your nervous system.
  6. Release the traumatic energy bound up in your system. Often this is best done with the help of a therapist. Having an emotionally safe space is so important in processing feelings and memories in a way that will release them.
  7. Experience people who are calm and centered. When you are around individuals who are calm, it calms your nervous system. Our bodies affect each other and are another way to help your nervous system to come out of the fight/flight.
  8. Notice that you are not in danger. When you slow down, you can take in much more. Our fight/flight tends to scan quickly because you are looking for danger. Practice as often as you can taking a moment to feel your feet on the ground noticing where you are and identifying that you are not in danger.
  9. Take a calculated risk. Overcoming unhealthy mistrust requires at some point to start taking risks to open up to people and letting them know who you are. Each time you take a chance, it needs to be one that you can tolerate the outcome. If you push yourself too much and feel too vulnerable, you are likely to end up reinforcing the mistrust radar.
  10. Look for inspiration. There are many things out there especially these days on the internet that can provide inspiration. I always find TED talks excellent for this. To hear how people in the world are doing amazing things can increase our faith in the human race.

Life on the other side of unhealthy mistrust

One way of thinking about this is the difference between standing on the sidelines watching life go by vs. engaging and participating in life. So it is critical that you work to release the mistrust that holds you back.

When you feel safe, you can relax into your present moment experience. You are open to what is going on around you and how that connects to your inner world. You are not aware in a watchful defence, but a welcome embrace to all that is around you. Your self-absorbed bubble that shuts others out has gone. You can tolerate what comes your way and not be overly concerned with trying to prevent things from happening. You can connect with the world and others with ease and flexibility.

Life is all around a lot easier!

“Fear says I will keep you safe. Love says you are safe.”

Do you struggle with wanting to feel normal?

Delyse Ledgard, RCCTrauma

feeling normal

Struggles to Feel Normal.

I am not sure I have ever said ‘I want to feel normal.’  I think I have been one of those people at the other end of the spectrum who has made a point of being different and expressed my independence at every opportunity.  Being unique and authentic has been a lifelong task.  For me, it came from feeling controlled and pressured to conform growing up.

In some ways, these two expressions have a similar motivation.   A desire for connection and acceptance.  In other words, when you want to feel normal it is because you want to connect, and expressing differences is a desire to be seen and understood.

You may express a desire to feel normal in the context of your differentness experienced as wrong or bad.  My expression of being different was in reaction to control and I had similar feelings of being unacceptable attached to it.  So even though I did not consciously want to be like everybody else and conform, there was a struggle between being myself and not fitting in.

Difference threatens people.  Racism, misogyny, homophobia, and war are examples of how this gets played out in society.  In relationships, you can feel disconnected and rejected as your differences emerge.  So we put pressure on each other to be the same.  Families and cultures express norms that try to keep people in line and bring together your group, country, or religion.

No matter what your upbringing is, the struggle to come to terms with who you are and your place in the world impacts everyone to some degree.  The more violent and abusive your upbringing and life have been, the greater your struggle to find acceptance will be.  From this perspective, the internal pressure to conform is a result of rejection that you internalize.

Let’s Take an Example.

If you grew up with continual criticism about being emotional, you would eventually shut down your emotions. Whenever you started to feel anything you would get anxious and thoughts such as; no one will want to be with me if I am emotional, would reinforce the struggle to suppress your feelings.  It is easy to see how this would lead to the conclusion that emotions represent being outside and not belonging.

On the other hand, the expression of wanting to be normal can also come from a sense of something within you being out of whack.  That you don’t feel right within yourself, and this is a signal to examine what is your authentic self.

How do you belong without diminishing yourself?

The simple answer is that you already belong as you are. You are unique. Your individuality and expression add to the rich diversity and creativity that is being human.

We could say all that is human is normal.  Which includes the messy, awkward, self-conscious, defensive, and disconnected behaviours and habits that you express. Whether you are open and inviting or closed and protective, they all have a story to tell.  That story reflects your experience, and as you give attention to that experience, a new story begins to be told.  Change is healthy.

When you can connect to others’ differences the easier it becomes to express yours.  The more you connect as you are, you realize that we all belong.  Curiosity is healthy and fosters new learning and growth.  It is the feeling of separation that destroys your ability to be at ease with who you are.  Separation encourages paranoia and a sense of others as hostile which can lead to harsh judgments and hatred.  It is easy to see how your sense of belonging would be harder to experience under these conditions.

It is human to want to connect, and it is through a connection you feel human.