Stop Letting the Past Rule Your Present Relationships

 

 There are many expe­ri­ences we have lived that we are grate­ful for. These sit­u­a­tions have made us smarter, stronger, and kinder. How­ev­er, when it comes to rela­tion­ships, the past  can be dif­fer­ent. The vul­ner­a­ble moments with a sig­nif­i­cant oth­er are hard­er to let go of. Many of us find our­selves man­i­fest­ing a future based on the past. In some sce­nar­ios, this might look like avoid­ing nice guys because you accept tox­i­c­i­ty, or hav­ing a bad expe­ri­ence dur­ing sex and being scared to try again. As for me? Hav­ing been too emo­tion­al­ly depen­dent on a guy three years ago, I have now turned into a per­son who relies on my emo­tion­al inde­pen­dence. Inde­pen­dence in the form of self-ful­fill­ment was a hard-won bat­tle for me. How­ev­er, my inde­pen­dence iron­i­cal­ly holds me back now. I avoid com­mu­ni­ca­tion and push peo­ple away. Remem­ber­ing my past has made me scared to risk los­ing my emo­tion­al inde­pen­dence again.

Rela­tion­ship Moment / Pexels

Relationship patterns

Some of you read­ing this may know exact­ly what your own tox­ic pat­tern is. How­ev­er, there are also some of you who may not know if you even have one, or maybe you feel you always self-sab­o­tage rela­tion­ships, but don’t know why. In many cas­es, chron­ic cas­es of bad rela­tion­ship pat­terns call for more pro­fes­sion­al inter­ven­tion. Psy­cho­an­a­lyz­ing myself is a hob­by of mine, but not a pro­fes­sion and def­i­nite­ly not rec­om­mend­ed. How­ev­er, that is not to say we shouldn’t do some reflecting. 

Accord­ing to Busi­ness Insid­er, the fol­low­ing pat­terns are tell-tale signs that your old rela­tion­ships are affect­ing your cur­rent ones: You always attract the same type of peo­ple, you have “hang-ups” about inti­ma­cy, you strug­gle to com­mu­ni­cate, you are con­stant­ly anx­ious, you push peo­ple away, and there is no trust between you and your part­ner. If you are like me, you iden­ti­fy with more than one of these signs.

Why we have patterns in relationships

A cou­ple weeks ago I met a per­son who, by all means, was amaz­ing. It was the first time I had a mutu­al con­nec­tion and, to put it cheesi­ly, a spark with some­one since high school. Despite this, I found myself avoid­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion with him. I was too anx­ious to look at his texts, so I wouldn’t have to respond. I didn’t under­stand why, but I knew this required some thought because, deep down, I didn’t want to pass up this chance. 

It seems the world didn’t want me to pass it up either. As I tried to explore my feel­ings weeks ago, I end­ed up get­ting over­whelmed and decid­ed to turn on a pod­cast for com­fort and dis­trac­tion. I turned on the pod­cast that would make me feel as if I am lis­ten­ing in on an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Car­rie and Sam from Sex and the City. That week on the Girls Got­ta Eat pod­cast, author and psy­chother­a­pist Lori Got­tlieb joined hosts Raina and Ash­ley. I had already start­ed my own arti­cle when this episode came out. At the time, I was a bit stuck, per­son­al­ly and pro­fes­sion­al­ly in how to pro­ceed with my writ­ing. So, you can imag­ine how I jumped out of my chair when the women brought up “how to stop your bad dat­ing patterns.” 

There was one thing Got­tlieb said in par­tic­u­lar that made me pick up my plan­ner to write it down. The phe­nom­e­non that occurs in rela­tion­ships where we repeat sim­i­lar behav­iors and habits is called rep­e­ti­tion com­pul­sion. Rep­e­ti­tion com­pul­sion occurs with­out our inten­tion or aware­ness. And why does this hap­pen? It feels famil­iar. The pat­terns occur because they feel com­fort­able to us. Got­tlieb used an exam­ple of a woman who always dat­ed the same type of man. The type who always end­ed up treat­ing her bad­ly. Gotl­lieb stat­ed that this woman didn’t know she was always choos­ing these guys, but they were all she knew. Accord­ing to Got­tlieb, stop­ping that pat­tern was hard for the woman because that would mean change and humans do not do well with that. “Change, even pos­i­tive change, involves loss and uncer­tain­ty,” Got­tlieb told the podcast. 

Breaking the pattern

So, how can we effec­tive­ly cope with this change to break out of our pat­terns? I decid­ed to ask a pro­fes­sion­al who could speak to the Her Cam­pus audi­ence, direct­ly. Jes­si­ca Kaplan is a licensed mar­riage and fam­i­ly ther­a­pist who has worked in the field for 20 years. As her title sug­gests, she’s focused on rela­tion­ships, mar­riages and fam­i­lies.  Part of her job involves “recogniz[ing] prob­lem­at­ic behav­ioral pat­terns or faulty beliefs that lead to unhappiness.” 

Joshua McK­night // Pexels

Accord­ing to Kaplan, we need to change our per­spec­tive of the past. We should try to see each rela­tion­ship as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn more about our­selves. We can learn “what we want and don’t want in a part­ner, how to set healthy bound­aries and advo­cate for our needs, how to deter­mine if it’s safe to be vul­ner­a­ble with a per­son, how to estab­lish equal­i­ty with­in the rela­tion­ship, and how to set real­is­tic expec­ta­tions for our part­ner.” If we are able to think of past rela­tion­ships as part of our growth, then it becomes eas­i­er for us to stop let­ting them con­trol us. 

I asked Kaplan about my own sit­u­a­tion. I explained my past expe­ri­ence deal­ing with dis­ap­point­ment and rejec­tion. I also described my com­pul­sion to push peo­ple away. “Hit­ting bumps, chal­lenges, and heartache in our ear­ly rela­tion­ships is nor­mal. It’s impor­tant to try to not look at the past rela­tion­ship (or one’s behav­ior and feel­ings with regard to that rela­tion­ship) as a fail­ure or regret. Instead [we need to look at it] as an impor­tant part of one’s jour­ney in learn­ing how to estab­lish healthy inti­ma­cy,” Kaplan told me. 

Chang­ing our ways may seem like a dif­fi­cult and exhaust­ing jour­ney. Accord­ing to Got­tlieb, it’s true that break­ing any pat­tern or habit doesn’t hap­pen overnight, but instead through small steps. As we adjust our rela­tion­ship with our past, it helps to prac­tice try­ing new rela­tion­ship behav­iors. Got­tlieb said on Girls Got­ta Eat that the most effec­tive way to bring about any change is to prac­tice. Change in rela­tion­ships is no dif­fer­ent. “Most big trans­for­ma­tions come about from the tiny steps we take along the way. Most ther­a­py occurs out­side of the ther­a­py room when what is talked about is put into prac­tice,” Got­tlieb said. This could look like going out with a per­son who may not be your “type.” 

Ulti­mate­ly, Kaplan and Got­tlieb helped me real­ize a lot more than my own psy­cho­analy­sis did. The past that took me a while to recov­er from, still lives in my mind as both regret and as a famil­iar sit­u­a­tion. I must accept and appre­ci­ate the past because it taught me a lot. Now, it is time to let it go by let­ting the fear go and seek­ing what I tru­ly want. My cov­et­ed emo­tion­al inde­pen­dence is what has been famil­iar and safe to me for three years. How­ev­er, my ide­al future includes a sig­nif­i­cant oth­er. If I am going to have a shot at the future I val­ue, then I need to face what­ev­er dis­com­fort comes with change. After all, change brings us all clos­er to hap­pi­ness. If not for change, life would be stag­nant and our best selves, part­ners, and expe­ri­ences would not be out there wait­ing for us. So, with that, I am log­ging off to go text a guy!

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