5 Toxic Relationship Patterns to End Before They Begin

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Often when someone feels wronged by their partner they demand "payment" for the pain they feel unjustly inflicted upon them. History proves they will argue until this well-established pattern completes itself, one way or another. At some point, unable to resolve who’s to blame for the pain, one or the other will either storm off to brood over the mistreatment, or decide that retreat is the better part of valor and make some kind of peace offering. Sad but true, in the long run, neither of these solutions makes any real difference. Their suffering passes into the night, but not the unseen reasons for it.

This situation sounds familiar, doesn't it? One event, a single word or critical glance triggers a negative reaction. Then and there we feel our partner has set him or herself against us, and a moment later, we respond in kind. The feeling of being disrespected or misjudged morphs into a certainty that we’ve been betrayed; pain, not love, becomes our common denominator.

At this point, both parties are sure there’s only one way out of this misery, and that’s to get the offending party to acknowledge his or her misstep. The only way things can ever be right again is for them to make the appropriate confession and concession. But, let’s be quite clear about the following:

These unconscious demands, and the unhappy results they create, do nothing to balance the account we keep with those we feel are responsible for our pain. Our own experience proves this true. Has any apology extracted from our partner ever changed the fact that there will come the inevitable demand for another one?

For our love to thrive, everything about this kind of pain-driven pattern must be shattered. Not one part of it can remain in place or else, like the root of an invasive weed left in the ground, the sorrow will surface somewhere else under a different name, and continue to darken the hearts of those involved.

Here are five simple examples of such futile actions, as well as the beginning of a way out of these old patterns we may be unconsciously reliving with our partner.

Stop Justifying Your Negativity

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Imagine you’re walking down the street, window-shopping with your partner. Things couldn’t be nicer, and you’re feeling a quiet sense of gratitude for all that life and love have given to you. Then he says, out of the blue, something like, "You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and we really need to cut down on our expenses."

In less than a heartbeat, gone is the you that just a moment before didn’t have a care in the world. It's been replaced by a smoldering sense of discontent with your partner.

In such moments, being now unconsciously identified with a host of negative thoughts and feelings, their nature has become as your own. They call the shots. Cruel things are said. Actions soon regretted are taken. Yet, the only power this painful pattern has to keep you in its grip comes from but one place, your identification with the negative forces that are keeping it in play.

Rather than going along with these unconscious parts of yourself that want to justify being negative say goodbye to them instead. Choose to snap the spell of this painful pattern by deliberately dropping any dark inner dialogue dragging you into why you have to set things straight. Be vigilant with this new inner resolve and you’ll soon see your negative state and its false certainty fade away.

Start Taking Full Responsibility

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While the particular conditions that bring moments of conflict with your partner to pass might belong to almost any set of circumstances, the outcome remains the same. The pattern of your conflict is pre-arranged, virtually guaranteed, by all of your earlier unresolved disagreements; not unlike a steam kettle on a slow but steady heat that finally reaches its inevitable boiling point. And the whole time, both are thinking, "You owe me an apology for this pain in me; it’s your responsibility as my partner to make things right between us."

First, any ongoing dispute we may have with our partner can’t come to an end until one of us sees that our usual tried and true solutions to unsettled differences do nothing to really resolve them. On the contrary, our standard fix is actually an unseen part of the very pattern in which we’re stuck! And second, the clearer our insight into the real nature of this trap, including our unseen role in it, the nearer we are to enacting the following understanding that alone can shatter it. The only way some painful pattern with our partner, or with anyone for that matter, can come to a true stop is if one of us agrees to shoulder the burden of shattering it completely.

Help Yourself (and Everyone) Go Higher

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Have you ever said, near the end of a disagreement with your partner that has no end in sight, "let's agree to disagree"?

Now, maybe this technique has some benefit if you're at a party debating opposing political views with someone. A few glasses of wine later, the intelligent discussion turns into a real disagreement. Finally comes the last resort, the socially accepted escape clause for conflicting opinions, "let's just agree to disagree," and you go your separate ways, secretly hoping your paths never have to cross again.

But what happens when encounters like this come up with our partner where we want them to agree that the problem at hand is their fault, but that’s not how they see it? The fallback pattern of agreeing to disagree does nothing to change the one-sided parts of us whose false perceptions and demands set us against each other in the first place.

The real reason this negative pattern keeps being resurrected is that, over and over again, we identify with one side or the other of opposing forces. Take away either one of these two sides and well, you’ve heard the old expression: "what if they gave a war, and no one came?"

As soon as we catch the smallest hint of impatience, frustration, or resentment gathering steam, we must act decisively to instantly drop these trouble-makers, much as we would a hot skillet that we know will burn our hand if we hold onto it.

Drop the Pretense of Detachment

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Just because we can pretend not to feel pain doesn’t mean we’re not suffering. Out of sight may seem out of mind, but the heart knows better, and grows bitter for whatever pain is buried in it.

Here’s why this "act as if you don’t care" routine seems to work, at first: parading an icy heart not only goes to show that you can’t be hurt, but has the added "benefit" of making your partner feel the very chill you’re giving off. Sounds strong in theory, but when the weight of hurt feelings gets too great to bear – which it always does – everything that had been buried comes rushing to the surface. Pent-up resentment is released that’s so far out of proportion to the deed blamed for it as to shake the very core of even the sturdiest of our relationships.

This whole painful pattern can never come to an end as long as one partner clings to a demand that the other can make good on a debt, a debt that can’t exist outside of some imagined payment overdue. The whole of this kind of imagined debt between you has to be paid off now, not later; otherwise, this pain, including the pattern that keeps it alive, is never going to end.

Make the sacrifice you need to keep alive the love that brought you together. Deliberately drop the false assumption that coercing your partner to pay for your pain can do anything other than increase whatever resentment may be growing between you.

Refuse to Guilt and Shame

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After all other approaches having proven powerless to resolve the conflicts between you, is it common for you to accuse your partner of having changed? You find some way to imply, or even state directly, that what’s gone wrong in the relationship is basically their fault. Something has happened to them, and that they no longer care for you, as was once true. In other words, you try to make your partner feel guilty because they’ve been unable to satisfy the expectations you have placed on them.

This pattern of using guilt or shame to re-shape our partner is doomed at the outset. Even if we manage to momentarily make them into the perfect partner, the ensuing contentment of having our expectations met is unsustainable; not just because our partner is unable to maintain the makeover we’ve imagined will end our differences, but because there’s no satisfying the parts of us that almost always find something that needs to be fixed in those we love.

Trying to escape the pressure of pain is what pushes us to try to make them pay for our suffering that we’re sure they’re making us feel. Seeing our own pressure and realizing it’s in our partner too is the beginning of meeting each other in a new way that can cancel painful patterns before they get started.

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Shedding light onto these painful patterns leads us to this stunning discovery. Our partner is not, as we’re presently inclined to believe, the reason why any painful problem keeps re-appearing in our relationship.

To be sure, half the responsibility for repetitious conflict, including the pain that helps keep it alive, belongs to us, and the other half belongs to our partner. But the pain that first sets us against one another, only to push us apart, isn’t his, or hers, or theirs. It’s our pain.

In truth, for those of us who wish to know a healthier, more loving relationship with our partner, our response to these conflicts becomes a question of conscience. We must dare to ask ourselves, and even better... right in the middle of a fight with our partner: Why is my pain more important than yours? Can I ever hope to understand the pain that moves you to act against me, if all I want to do in these same moments is inflict a similar pain on you? Is it possible to really love you and want to hurt you at the same time?

A completely new kind of action is called for in our heart any time we feel hurt and want to blame another for our pain. As soon as we start to feel some old familiar stress or strain when we’re around our partner, we can remember: It’s time to go to work. Now, instead of mechanically identifying with that familiar old pain that’s asking us to see our partner as the one responsible for our pain, we see the lower nature within us, inviting us down a one-way street that dead-ends in another fight. And seeing the truth of this unconscious part of us, we give it up. That’s the payment. It’s a kind of sacrifice that only love can make; and our agreement to enact this new understanding guarantees the growth of our partnership through a continual renewal of it.