Do you find yourself in some relationships – with mom, boss love – where, no matter what you do, you always wind up miserable? Do you react in a way you don’t want that leads to consequences you don’t want whereby you feel like one version of you made a big mess and left another version of you to mop it up? If so, it’s time to examine reality.

WHAT'S REAL?

When we’re young, we don’t know what “reality” is. Children can believe anything – that elephants deliver the mail, that a cement floor is a really a pool of taffy, etc. While we have certain built-in physical self-protective mechanisms, e.g. flinching, we, as children, have to learn what is harmful. We also learn what makes us “happy,” and “happiness,” in painful environments, generally means “not in pain,” “currently not under attack,” “safe.”

Physical pain needs no reinforcement – touch a hot stove once and you’re done. Psychological pain does need reinforcement; because there’s no physical harm to the body, it requires ongoing fortification. This, incidentally, is what makes abuse abuse – it’s not the one-time whack or the occasional put-down that causes entrenched psychological damage; it’s the ongoing, continuous nature of the incidents that gives them their lasting power and, thus, makes them abusive.

We’re designed first and foremost to survive. We don’t have some separate subsystem in place for psychological pain; it piggybacks on the one we have to save our physical bodies. Fear of actions you intellectually know won’t hurt you – calling a guy you like, standing up to mom, saying no, etc. – are equivalent to the fear you feel if you were to, say, fall through a hole in the ice and almost drown. You feel that your body, your very being, is going to die, and you will do anything to circumvent this. And, in the same way that you might be extra cautious about thin ice – perhaps even avoiding ice skating altogether – you are extra cautious to avoid the issues that caused you emotional pain.

You may want a better relationship with mom, for example, but the action necessary to get is, to you, deeply unsafe. Self-protective behavior can’t be intellectualized away because that behavior was learned the hard way, by pain.

Self-protection trumps desire every time. This is why people stay in bad relationships or go from one bad relationship to the next. It’s not the familiarity that drives them over and over to the same kind of relationship; rather, it’s the safety – which they misidentify as “happiness.”

Look at it this way: let’s say you learned early on that you’re never right and that vulnerability equals pain. You might then find yourself in a relationship with someone who’s very controlling (“Safety – if I just follow those rules, I’ll be fine.”) and self-absorbed (“Safety – I won’t have to expose my self.”). You may recognize all of the negative qualities in the other person and may be miserable much of the time but you stay – or find someone similar to replace them – because, to the core of your being, you believe is you assert yourself or expose yourself, you literally will not survive.

AND THIS SHOWS UP IN LOVE HOW?

You’re drawn to people in whose shadow you can exist. You want to be needed by someone, hopefully someone who will tell you what to do so you’ll never be “wrong” and suffer the consequences of being wrong.

So you, the one in the bad relationship, are attracted to the people who make you feel all the things you can’t feel inside yourself – loved, alive, normal, right. They don’t make you feel this way all the time; in fact, most of the time, you’re totally miserable around them. But they make you feel it some of the time, and some of the time is better than none of the time. It’s not the negative that you’re drawn to, but the brief moments of positive.

Unfortunately, you’re now in the worst of all traps – relying on other people to “make” you feel something about yourself. You are now their puppet; they can “make” you feel anything (not that you have feelings, and not that you’re responsible for them if you do have them – what you feel is always someone else’s fault). Usually, they don’t even know or care what you’re feeling, but, thanks to you, they have complete and total control over you nonetheless.

So one of two things happens: 1. You form long-term relationships with people who treat you badly. By servicing their needs, you’re somehow safe. You cling desperately to these relationships and debase yourself to their memory long after they’ve ended.

2. You go from relationship to relationship – or date a lot or have long gaps between seeing people – and somehow magically never really connect.

Both the relationship and non-relationship versions amount to the same thing: they allow you tell yourself you’re normal without actually having to expose yourself emotionally. In order to maintain the lie that nothing’s wrong with you, you need to find a mate; “normal” means connecting with someone, right? But, whatever mate you find, you need to ensure that you won’t be harmed the way you were harmed when you were younger. Of course, the fact that you’re horribly maiming yourself in the present-day is irrelevant; it’s about protecting yourself from past harm, not current harm, that drives everything.

IF YOU’RE THE UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP TYPE:

You stay in the relationship because the person you’re seeing expects absolutely nothing of you. You’ll never have to assert yourself because they want to control everything; you’ll never having to worry about not feeling normal because you’re told what to do all the time – THEIR expectation is YOUR normal; you get to feel valuable because you have a tangible list of things you’re doing for your mate – this list assures you that they couldn’t survive without you (you try not to the think about the fact that they could replace you at any moment because you’re not really a person to them).

So instead of love, you get utility, which is perfect for you – love is dangerous. You already KNOW your feelings are wrong; thanks to the strict relationship rules, you can often feel really right. Following the rules makes you feel normal. You can never make anything worse because you’re not allowed, really, to do anything at all. You’re safe.

IF YOU’RE THE DODGING RELATIONSHIPS TYPE:

You go out, date, hookup, have “relationships” that always die. You need them to tell yourself you’re normal – nothing’s wrong with you, right? It’s just that you can never seem to find anyone who works out! Weird!

You start feeling something for someone, something stronger than feels safe or wilder than feels safe. Not that that feeling ever gets to your conscious brain; you take action the second you start feeling it. You pretend you’re normal by saying things to your friends like, “I really like this one!” or “We’re having a good time, this is good.” Things to indicate you’re open, willing, reaching for love. You’re setting up evidence of your normalcy in advance for when it fizzles down the road (and it always fizzles), evidence to prove it couldn’t have been your fault because you were into it and wanted it to happen. While this “evidence” is often relayed to other people, it’s really, of course, for you.

So, when feelings for the other person arise, you need to figure out a way to get rid of that person without doing anything traceable. They need to somehow disappear, and it needs to look like it’s their fault. Therefore, you PUSH.

Pushing always involves either external circumstances or something being wrong with the other person. In either case, it’s evidence that’s there’s nothing wrong with you; the reason this relationship ended – which is totally different from the last relationship’s ending and the one before that – had nothing to do with you.

Pushing looks like this:

Just as things seem to be heating up, you somehow magically have a ton of work to do! Or mom’s in town! Or you just got a creepy vibe on your last date! Or any of a million other external circumstances that interfere with your actually continuing to see the person you have unacknowledged feelings for.

“I mean, what – I’m supposed to quit my job to go on a date?!?” “My sister’s going through this crisis and I have to be there for her.” “This week is just crazy for me.” “I already made dinner plans with [random person X – this lady I met twice on a plane, my old housekeeper, a journalist friend who’s staying with me for a few days].”

You somehow have time to see non-meaningful people or your best friend whom you see all the time but you just can’t drag it all together to actually make a meaningful love date – my nutso week, my boss, work pressure, I’m just exhausted, I already made plans with a friend this weekend. Somehow, all of a sudden, NOTHING is cancelable. It’s with great regret that you just can’t manage to see that person you’ve been dating. Maybe you even complain to your friends, your later “trial” witnesses, about your wacky schedule. Regardless of what you do, you’ve managed to create a circumstance where the other person is so turned off by you that, if you ever do call them, they (hopefully) won’t really be interested anymore – which is fine; them rejecting you allows you to get rid of them while still appearing “normal.” (Because if you felt abnormal, you might find yourself doing some self-examination which might lead to DANGEROUS behavior – and that’s needs to be avoided at all costs.)

At any rate, if the person persists, well, you can always go back to being flaky until they finally go away for good. Alternatively, you also might delay calling for so long that you embarrassedly tell your friends that you’re horrified, you got so sucked in by work, and now you just can’t call. You blew it, sigh. Sometimes, because you really really want love and your emotional garden is so damned parched, you just randomly call the person 2 months later. “Hey, what’s up?” You then talk about making plans which magically don’t really come together. You want it, but you have to make sure you’ll never get it. The push always works. Relationships, after all, follow the laws of Newtonian physics in that the object at rest tends to remain at rest. If you don’t both do work at the beginning, it’ll die. So it dies, you’re blameless, and onto the next.

By the way, sometimes you may even marry or form long-term partnerships with these people to maintain your self-oblivious “normalcy.” Those are even better because, once you’re married or committed, you can stop acting and just completely disconnect – you don’t have to ask yourself any questions when you have a spouse right? Maybe you stop being there for them as much; maybe you start drinking a lot or doing drugs; you go out with friends; you just mysteriously don’t wind up spending a ton of time alone with the other person. One excellent way to do that is by having kids so your partner won’t notice how absent you are and will, as an added bonus, have an investment in being blind to your behavior because of their need to pretend that you’re actually a family.

WELL HOW DO I CHANGE THIS?

The most difficult part of self-awareness, the first step really, is assuming that 100% of your emotions are fake. All of them. Here’s the problem. We assume our emotions are giving us accurate information, e.g. “I’m feeling angry; I must be angry at you!” The problem is that, prior to true self-awareness, your emotions are NOT unbiased reporters of your actual feelings. Your emotions have one intention: to make you take self-protective action. It goes like this:

• Someone tells you you did something wrong. • Addressing this requires one of two things, standing up for yourself or apologizing. Your subconscious knows that “standing up for yourself” and “being wrong” require immediate action; you can’t ever stand up for yourself or apologize (and, thus, be wrong) because those two actions had horrible consequences for you in the past. • You need to get this person to shut up or even better go away and, ideally, never confront you with this kind of thing ever again. Thus, your response: • Emotion: You get angry, furious. Which leads to: • Action: You verbally lay into the person, enraged.

Your emotion, in other words, did NOT truly relay your feelings. Your emotion had a function; the function of anger, for example, is to shut down communication – kill the messenger because you don’t like the message.

This is why you need to assume that all of your emotions are false. You’re not angry, you’re frightened. You’re not happy, you’re safe. This is a painful and scary place to be. You can’t count on your own feelings anymore – everything’s suspect. Most importantly, you need to stop acting on them. Just the act of not acting, of giving yourself breathing room to think about what you’re feeling and doing (and, incidentally, of not taking action that’s counter to your current-day desires), will jumpstart the process of change. Stopping is change.

Getting real means acknowledging real reality – that you’re acting out of a need for safety and that’s it. Even if peeling back all the layers seems like too much right now, breathe a little easier knowing you’re behaving for a reason. You’re not a self-destructive self-loather; you’re simply seeking a safety you no longer need.