The TRUTH about how to avoid Pain in Romantic Relationships: a 4-part series
Discover 4 reasons we are vulnerable to relationship mistakes — and how to avoid them.
Unveil what’s in the “Haunted Maze” of your subconscious mind that is causing relationship grief.
As human beings we are really vulnerable to pain in romantic relationships. You could say we aren’t very good at this kind of partnership!
Have you noticed the divorce rate? At least 55% of marriages end up there.
Have you ever looked around at friends and even family, and you can’t find even one relationship you admire or would want to be in yourself?
In social situations, do you put up with couple friends who bicker and put each other down, who get drunk and fight, or who are so bored with each other you swear they are just waiting to leave if or when something better comes along?
Did you know that since the pandemic lockdown, people have rushed to divorce lawyers because when locked up together, they’ve found there isn’t much to enjoy?
Maybe you have tried dating and relating and are so fed up with the string of useless, self-focused, miserable, or drama-filled connections that you just want to put your head under the pillow and forget about romantic relationships altogether!
If any of this rings true for you, you might realize that humans aren’t that good at relationships! In fact, we are most definitely terrible. You may wonder if there is hope for you to be in a meaningful romantic relationship, and you may really want some help to find ways to make that happen.
From my own perspective, I watched my parents struggle for 35 years. They did not understand each other, couldn’t communicate, and their constant conflict made my sister and I wish they would separate.
Then I headed down the relationship path, at the wisdom-filled age of 19, only to find, three children later, that I had married a severe alcoholic. After vacating that relationship, I went on to spend time with some interesting partners, a few stray narcissists, and happily- for the last ten years, an awesome man whom I met on the internet. He actually moved 3000 miles to be here and marry me. So you see, there is hope in spite of what you are about to read!
Here is the first of 4 reasons people are vulnerable to relationship pain. We will expose the other three reasons in the rest of the series.
Reason 1: Because of where we learn about relationships
When you are good at something, you ideally learn about the thing from someone else who is good at it, right? So if you want to learn about relationships, and you don’t know any good ones, what happens then?
The Walt Disney Effect
First of all, did you know that most of how we behave in relationships is learned? Most of us think that when it comes to relationships, you just live them, you don’t really think about relationships. That is partly because of one of the first places you learn about romantic relationships, from Walt Disney.
It’s ironic that most children are exposed to the creative work of a man who said he would rather spend time with Mickey Mouse than with a woman! Perhaps not a relationship expert.
Yet children pick up from Disney’s books and movies that after Cinderell’s hard life, she gets magically rescued by a gorgeous prince, gets carried off to the castle, and from then on, there are no problems and life is amazing!
Way down in their experiential brain, kids also learn things like “You can know someone is relationship material even if they are asleep!” The prince who fell in love with the soporific Snow White, or the one who rescued Sleeping Beauty had no need to know what he was looking for, no need to “build a relationship.” Just look into the glass case, like what you see and it’s a done deal! — permanent euphoric relationship!
Even in more recent Disney films like ‘Frozen’ the female has to have magical powers to be important, and again the courtships in that movie have the effort all on one side.
Unconscious Magical Beliefs
These and other fairy tales drop into a child’s mind and create a thread of magical belief that relationships are not work, that they rescue you from your boring or miserable life, and really they just “happen to you.”
When we are little, we learn how the world works, from every single experience we have. Evidently the brain memorizes everything, not in words but in experiences and pictures. This makes stories big contributors to creating vivid experiential beliefs in a child’s subconscious mind.
We absorb what is presented to us and make a relationship blueprint out of our experiences that answers questions like:
- How do you meet someone?
- How do relationships work?
- What is a relationship for?
- What is my part in a relationship?
The Haunted Maze of the Subconscious
Your subconscious mind is full of the ghosts of old experiences that create patterns and triggers that are waiting to jump into your behaviour and scare the … out of you and your romantic partner.
All of these beliefs are in an unconscious map of the world which I call “The Haunted Maze of the Subconscious.”
Here patterns and triggers are hiding, waiting to jump into your behaviour and make you do things for reasons you don’t understand. The same goes for any partner you are with.
The subconscious rules our lives whether we are aware of it or not.
Most of us think we know why we do things. We often feel we are very logical and that we are in touch with what is driving what we feel and say. This is actually not true!
‘According to the literature’ we are aware of the reasons for only 3–7% of what we do, think, feel and say. We are not aware of what happened when we were learning how the world works that created patterns that drive our behaviour.
So because the maze which is haunted by all these old learnings is so powerful, I figure it is important to find out whatever we can about what is in there.
To avoid relationship pain, the first step is to find out what you learned about relationships through stories and fictional characters.
Clues in the Haunted Maze
It can bring some real surprises to answer the following questions. Answer each one and see if anything you learned from stories, fairy tales or Mr. Disney is playing out in your relationship hopes, dreams and struggles.
Haunted Maze Discoveries, Part 1
- What books and stories did you love when you were growing up?
- How did your favourite characters behave in relationships in these books? Were they respectful and kind, or entitled and condescending?
- Was there conflict or were their relationships peaceful and loving?
- What did you learn from these characters about how to be in a relationship?
- How is that working for you in your current relationships?
- Do you believe in “happily ever after” without ever working on a relationship?
These stories will lead you to unconscious beliefs that when you find them, you can decide whether to keep them or not.
The World according to Mom and Dad
The next place you learn about romantic relationships is — and I hate to be so obvious, yes, it’s Mom and Dad.
Let’s say you want to learn something, so you go watch a demonstration of how to run a vacuum cleaner, or some other kind of appliance. How many times do you need to see the demo before you know how it works? Maybe a couple of times? Maybe just once?
Now think of how many times you saw how your parents treated each other, how they communicated, what was important to them, how they solved problems, how affectionate they were (or not).
The Unconscious Blueprint
You already know about the subconscious map you made as a kid.
As a little person, you knew what a chair was, even before you knew the word ‘chair.’ No matter what colour or texture, you knew that thing with the four legs was something you could climb up and park your little butt on.
Once you knew how to open a door, you could open all doors because our little brains have a “plug and play” function for everything we learn.
But it’s not just your physical environment that populated your little mind. Everything that went on around you was included in your idea of how things work, things like “What is a man? What is a woman? What happens when people talk to each other? Is there enough money? Who am I and am I important?”
So think of how deeply and without even realizing it, you learned about relationships from your parents and significant caregivers. If they were good at relating, you probably unconsciously copied what they did.
If there was craziness and conflict in their relationship, you probably expect the same and will find it hard to trust other people’s motives.
In one of my more tempestuous relationships, whenever I would start a sentence or ask a question my partner was not expecting, he would go into a rage and accuse me of all kinds of agendas that were not mine. I happened to know his mother, who was a genius at manipulating and twisting what anyone said. He was unconsciously expecting that kind of mind game from me and couldn’t actually just listen and ‘be with me.’ This is just one tiny example of how early blueprints affect us as adults.
The Unconscious Double Standard
Something our families often teach us is that you behave one way with family, but in public things are different.
I see many children who have learned from how things are behind closed family doors that it is alright to be mean to siblings and rude to parents yet they know they can’t get away with that at school or work.
This sets up a dangerous double standard and rolls over into how they treat anyone who has a relationship position in their life.
You actually can’t not learn from your surroundings.
As a child, your job is to take in everything around you and make sense of how the world works. But because all the relationship stuff was just part of life, you did not even notice what you were learning.
Asking yourself what you learned about relationships from your parents is like asking a fish to define water. You are submerged in their way of life and you just absorb their patterns and behaviours.
How can we describe what we have unconsciously learned? It isn’t easy, but it helps reduce relationship pain if we know where our behaviours are coming from.
Haunted Maze Discoveries Part 2:
Here are some questions that can help you discover what is hiding in your subconscious that you didn’t know you learned.
- How did your parents talk to each other? Was it painful or loving? Did they have much to say, or was there a lot of silence.
- Was affection important to them? Either expressed to each other or to you. What did you learn from that?
- Did you have only one parent, or were your parents divorced so you did not get to see people solve problems and make decisions together?
- Did they believe in ‘punishment?’ Did they use emotions like anger or resentment to make other people feel bad if they did something your parents didn’t like?
- What did they teach you about money, and has that brought you financial success?
- Did they teach you that people don’t change, and relationships don’t change, so down deep you feel if there is a problem in your relationships, there really isn’t anything you can do about it, so you might as well tolerate or leave?
Just let your mind wander around through scenes of childhood to see what was going on, and what you learned from those experiences.
As an adult I used to visit my Mother in another province every year. I would stay with her for a week. After each visit I was mortified to see some of her, shall we say ‘interesting’ behaviours that I was doing myself, without realizing!
For example, on one visit, I noticed Mom would say ‘I’m so tired!’ whenever she didn’t want to do something. Then her energy was right back when something caught her interest. After that visit, I realized I was doing that too, and had not noticed. Once I did see the behaviour, though, and got over my embarrassment, I was able to change and be more honest about what I do and don’t want to do.
Screen Time Learning
I had conversations with a young man who was so surprised and hurt that people around him did not act the way they did on the show ‘Friends.’ He expected friends to be entertaining and to act almost like a super supportive family. When that did not happen, he withdrew socially and had no idea how to create real relationships.
This is one small example of how you can learn about relationships from the media.
Unfortunately, media is such a confusing information source! You are bombarded with images of slim, fascinating entertainers and their dramatic romances.
You are lulled into believing “real families” get along with sweet humour and forgivable mistakes as in the Cosby Show and The Brady Bunch. The irony of the actual lives of the actors in those shows is incredible and in part exposes the lie of the storylines that were fed to the public.
Comedies, sitcoms, shocking news and more . . .
Comedies and sitcoms include so many scenes of people being rude, demeaning, or just plain stupid in relationship scenarios, that unconsciously we can learn to treat other people this way and feel there is nothing wrong with it.
In the news we read horror stories of unsuspecting innocents being lured into romance, then abused or even murdered.
In movies the characters are so smart, or so gorgeous, so handsome, beautiful, sexy, that we feel we have to find someone that amazing if we are to have a hope of being happy.
We forget about the editing, makeup and filters that help create these magical characters.
All of this “mixed modelling” leaves us with unrealistic standards, fears and unsettling questions like “what can I actually hope to find that works for me? Am I good enough? and how do I behave if I do find someone important?”
Haunted Maze Discoveries, Part 3:
Wander through the maze of your subconscious and see what relationship destroying beliefs are hiding there, waiting to jump out and ruin your romantic connections!
- Do you believe you have to be incredibly gorgeous to be relationship material?
- Do you believe that you can “be yourself” in close relationships, really just meaning you act on impulse and treat people in any way that crosses your mind, and without social filters, just like on the sitcoms?
- Do you believe that all relationships are traps or end in misery? the plot line of some movies.
- Do you believe that relationships either work out or they don’t, and there isn’t much you can do to fix them, as most media would have you believe?
The Subconscious Invasion that makes us vulnerable to Relationship Pain
So now you know that you have been invaded by all kinds of unconscious learning about relationships.
You are modelling what you have seen and experienced because that is what humans do. It is not your fault.
You also won’t find anyone else who hasn’t learned from what was around them growing up, or from childhood stories, family and media influence.
So in any relationship there are two Haunted Mazes with subconscious ghosts and monsters that trigger us to do stuff we don’t understand.
