If Your Relationship Is Failing, Here’s Why. ~ Dr. Margaret Paul

If there was one thing
you could do to heal your relationships, would you do it?
I’m the kind of person who loves to understand the deeper
reasons behind behavior, and I’ve spent most of my life learning about what
creates loving or unloving relationships. In the 43 years I’ve been counseling
couples, I’ve discovered that there really is one major cause of relationship
problems—one issue that if you address and heal, changes everything.
The one cause: self-abandonment.
When you abandon yourself emotionally, physically, spiritually,
financially, relationally and/or organizationally, you automatically make your
partner responsible for you. Once you make another person responsible for your
feelings of self-worth and well being, then you attempt to manipulate that
person into loving you, approving of you and giving you what you want. The
controlling behavior that results from self-abandonment creates huge
relationship problems.
Let’s look at the various forms of self-abandonment and how they
result in relationship conflict and power struggles, or in distance and
disconnection.
Emotional self-abandonment.
When we were growing up, many of us
experienced much loneliness, heartache, heartbreak and helplessness. These are
very big feelings, and unless we had loving parents or caregivers who helped us
through these feelings—rather than being the cause of them—we had to find
strategies to avoid them.
We learned four major ways of
avoiding these core painful feelings of life, and these four ways now create
our feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame and anger, as well as
relationship problems.
1. We judge ourselves rather than
accept ourselves.
Did you learn to judge yourself as a
way to try to get yourself to do things “right” so that others would like you?
Self-judgment creates much anxiety, depression, guilt, shame and emptiness, and
can lead to many addictions in order to avoid these feelings. Self-judgment
also leads to needing others’ approval to feel worthy, and your resulting
controlling behaviors to gain others’ approval can lead to many relationship
problems.
2. We ignore our feelings by staying
up in our head rather than being present in our body.
When you have not learned how to
manage your feelings, you want to avoid them. Do you find yourself focused in
your head rather than in your body, more or less unaware of your feelings?
We emotionally connect with each
other from our hearts and souls, not from our heads. When you stay in your head
as a way to avoid responsibility for your feelings, you cannot emotionally
connect with your partner.
3. We turn to various addictions to
numb the anxiety, depression, emptiness, guilt, shame and anger that develops
when we judge ourselves and ignore our feelings.
Addictive behavior, such too much
alcohol, drugs, food, TV, gambling, overspending, work, sex and so on, can
create much conflict and distance in relationships.
4. We make our partner or others
responsible for our feelings.
When we emotionally abandon
ourselves, we then believe it is someone else’s job to make us feel loved and
worthy. Do you try to control your partner with anger, blame, criticism,
compliance, resistance or withdrawal to get him or her to give you what you are
not giving to yourself? How does your partner respond to this controlling
behavior?
Many relationships fall into a
dysfunctional system, such as one person getting angry and the other
withdrawing or resisting, or both getting angry or both withdrawing. In some
systems, one is angry and the other is compliant, which seems to work until the
compliant partner becomes resentful. In all of these systems, each person is
emotionally abandoning themselves, which is the root cause of the dysfunctional
relationship.
Financial
self-abandonment.
If you refuse to take care of
yourself financially, instead expecting your partner to take financial
responsibility for you, this can create problems. This is not a problem if your
partner agrees to take financial responsibility for you and you fully accept
how he or she handles this responsibility. But if you choose to be financially
irresponsible, such as overspending, or you try to control how your partner
earns or manages the money, much conflict can occur over your financial
self-abandonment.
Organizational
self-abandonment.
If you refuse to take responsibility
for your own time and space, and instead are consistently late and/or a
clutterer, and your partner is an on-time and/or a neat person, this can create
huge power struggles and resentment in your relationship.
Physical self-abandonment.
If you refuse to take care of
yourself physically by eating badly and not exercising, possibly causing
yourself severe health problems, your partner may feel resentful by having to
take care of you. Your physical self-abandonment not only has negative
consequences for you regarding your health and well being, it also has unwanted
consequences for your partner, which can lead to conflict and power struggles.
Relational
self-abandonment.
If you refuse to speak up for
yourself in your relationship, and instead become complacent or resistant, you
are eroding the love in the relationship. When you abandon yourself to another
through compliance or resistance, you create a lack of trust that leads to
conflict, disconnection and resentment.
Spiritual
self-abandonment.
When you make your partner your
source of love rather than learning to turn to a spiritual source for your
dependable source of love, you place a very unfair burden on your partner. When
your intent in the relationship is to get love rather than to share love, then
you will unfairly lean on your partner for attention, approval, time or sex.
When you do not take responsibility for learning how to connect with a spiritual
source of your own for sustenance, your neediness can create
relationship problems.
Spiritual
self-abandonment is
related to emotional self-abandonment, in that you cannot commit to 100%
responsibility for yourself without a strong connection with a spiritual source
of love and wisdom.
Learn to love
yourself rather than abandon yourself.
Learning to love yourself is the key
to a loving relationship. When you learn to connect with a personal source of
spiritual guidance and access the love and wisdom that is always within you,
you learn to fill yourself up with love. While self-abandonment creates an
inner emptiness that relies on others to fill you, self-love creates an inner
fullness. Self-love fills your heart and soul with overflowing love so that,
rather than always trying to get love, you can now share your love with your
partner.
Credits:
Elephantjournal