Lisa Brookes Kift, MFTIf you’re wondering why your relationships often go awry or seem more difficult than they should be, perhaps it’s time to consider your role. If you’re carrying unresolved family of origin wounds or other impact from your past, this baggage you’ve been carrying could be weighing down you and your relationships.
There are many ways that your stuff can impact how you show up in your relationships, intimate and other. What is your narrative about yourself and how others will treat you? Your value? These stories can play out as an underlying belief system in which filters how you see the world. You might be unconsciously scanning your environment for evidence to support your story. But what if your story is inaccurate?
Don’t want therapy but looking for real human expert feedback? Ask Lisa via chat.
Here are some ways you might be inadvertently sabotaging yourself:
- You have rigid expectations of how others are with you and can be easily disappointed, leading you to cut off from people –>
- Underlying Belief: People will let me down.
- You are a people pleaser to avoid conflict but you carry resentment for doing more than your share or being taken advantage of –>
- Underlying Belief: People will reject or abandon me unless I make them happy.
- You struggle to let intimate partners in too close to you yet desperately want connection. –>
- Underlying Belief: I am unlovable …or… Intimate relationships can’t be trusted.
- There is a big difference between how your portray yourself to the outside world and how you feel inside. –>
- Underlying Belief: There is something wrong with me.
Belief systems such as the ones above can develop from painful experiences or messages received from the important people in your life about connection, love, safety and your value. This can reflect itself in unhealthy relationship patterns and you continue to attract partners who reinforce your negative story. On the flip side, your experiences may have created insecurities or fears that hold you back from being your best self.
If you’ve never worked through your past, you can inadvertently sabotage your relationships with the stories you tell yourself about how things are. You might ASSUME that things happen a certain way and these expectations can either make it be so (self-fulfilling prophecy) or make it hard to believe someone’s intentions.
If you take ownership of your wounds and the strategies in which you developed to defend against further pain, your world view can shift. Self-love, fulfilling relationships and a sense of peace become possible.
How to unwind out of a painful past
If you can do the following three things, you have a great chance of lightening your load and breaking out of unhealthy patterns.
- Identify your issues.
- Understand the origins and how you adapted to the challenges in ways that may not serve you now.
- Resolve the issues with deeper level change by shifting your belief systems and doing things differently.
This can be done by finding a local therapist to help, processing with a trusted friend or diving into the world of self-help if you’re more of a “Do-It-Yourself” type. Check out my guide, Break Your Unhealthy Relationship Patterns for a step in the right direction.
What you’re trying to avoid is inadvertently sabotaging your relationships with unresolved family of origin issues. This deeper kind of work is the ultimate act of self-care and can only benefit your relationships as well.
