Another Three Highly Effective Ways to Sabotage a Relationship

In October, we introduced you to Insecurity, Dominance, and Distance. In November: Pessimism, Addiction, and Relentlessness (which we called ‘Needing to be Right’.)  Well, it’s a new year, and with it comes new insight into how you can easily wreck a relationship. Let’s dive right in:

Martyrdom
At first, being with an emotional martyr can seem like a dream come true. A martyr will give, and give, and give, changing every part of their life for you and swearing all along that it is out of pure, unconditional love. But inevitably, one day, everything changes. Often without any discernable trigger, your relationship with a martyr will suddenly become transactional — you will abruptly ‘owe them’ for all of the sacrifices they have made. Their suffering is no longer a gift, and in fact it never was: it was all a preparation for the day when their turn would come, and you would be the one doing the sacrificing.

Suffice it to say, for almost every martyr, that moment is the end of their relationship. So how do you combat the urge to give endlessly and tally up at the same time? By consciously acknowledging that you’re doing it. Every time you have a problem with your partner, sit down and write out four things:

• What they did wrong.
• What the actual problem was (the trigger that caused them to do something wrong.)
• What you would have wanted them to do about it.
• What you could have done to ensure that they responded in the way you wanted.

Stop waiting for them to figure out how to treat you ‘right,’ and start by deciding what ‘right treatment’ means and how you can convey your need for that treatment to them honestly.

Defensiveness
You know the moment someone becomes defensive, because you’re arguing about a point and suddenly it becomes not about the point, but about a perceived attack that you are making on them. The next stage is predictable: they attempt to invalidate what you are saying, looking for any grounds to do so — because the other option is to let the attack wound them.

Overcoming defensiveness is difficult, because the time between feeling like you’re under attack and coming up with reasons why that attack is invalid is often less than the time it takes to inhale and start your first word of response. Thus, the most important step in overcoming defensiveness is holding up a finger and asking for a moment. That gut-level, nearly fight-or-flight reaction that comes when you are attacked unexpectedly can be simply discarded, but in order to do it, you have to ask for and receive the time you need to consciously think and decide to respond. When you do, respond by finding some small part of what they said to agree with, and build from there.

Betrayal
Sometimes, people really do simply grow apart or change in ways that make them incompatible, and they must regretfully ask that an agreement made in the past be altered. That’s not what we’re talking about here — we’re talking about those people who off-handedly make promises they can’t keep, rewrite history, and deny things they previously acknowledged.

Betrayal may well be the granddaddy of all relationship-sabotaging behaviors. If there is no trust, there can be no relationship, plain and simple. Quite simply, if you are a chronic betrayer of trust, you have a heck of a job in front of you. You must learn:

• Credibility: that people expect you to only speak facts you know to be true.
• Reliability: that people expect you do what you say you will do, and not do what you say you will not do.
• Intimacy: that people expect to be able to confide in you without having you use that confidence against them.
• Empathy: that people expect you to be able to put their needs ahead of your own in situations where their needs are actually more important than yours.

Those four factors are the basis of trustworthiness; internalize them. Understand that so long as you act in a way that does not display those four traits, your relationships will continue to fail, and no amount of blaming the other people will keep your next relationship from failing just as utterly.

Are you living with one of the people we introduced above? Do you need help getting away? Call Gucciardo Family Law immediately: we will help you. Even if the help you need is finding a counselor or a social worker rather than finding a lawyer — we’re here for you. Don’t suffer needlessly.