Healthier Relationships Archives - Baggage Reclaim by Natalie Lue

Recognising Healthy Interactions and Relationships (There’s a simple way to do it)

April 27, 2018 By NATALIE 45 Comments Reading Time: 4 Minutes

One of the biggest challenges that we face in our efforts to build meaningful, fulfilling and loving relationships is that–thanks to what might be some pretty painful experiences in our past–we might be unclear about how to recognise healthy relationships and interactions.

Becoming educated about healthy boundaries as well as having greater awareness of what I call code amber and red issues and behaviour are undoubtedly vital, but us humans do have a tendency to become hypervigilant for potential transgressions rather than empowered.

**We quite simply don’t realise how guarded we’re being instead of boundaried.**

We build walls to protect us from our fear of the past happening again (or to assuage our guilt about where we think we royally messed up either through actions or inherent inadequacy). Despite what might be our increased awareness and knowledge, we play Columbo. We also engage in catastrophic thinking and routinely doubt ourselves despite what might be overwhelming evidence that something isn’t right.

If we have increased awareness and knowledge of what constitutes unhealthy behaviour/situations, why do we doubt ourselves?

It’s because we tend to wonder if we’re being needy/dramatic/too sensitive/unreasonable/unfair/psychotic/jumping the gun/judgemental/over-emotional.

It’s like knowing the signs of fire but wondering whether you’re being melodramatic as the place is burning. So many of us have a fear of not only making a mistake but also just straight-up listening to ourselves.

The aim of life isn’t to only listen to ourselves when we’re guaranteed to be right! We have to tune in and be OK with sometimes getting it wrong–vulnerability. Life is on-the-job-training and by listening and learning, we gain personal security and hone our judgement skills. We become happier.

The irony is, of course, that if we’re criticising and doubting ourselves in response to something, it’s a code red alert. Something is very wrong. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person/situation is shady, but it definitely means that we don’t have our back. We are the feeler of our feelings, thinker of our thoughts and keeper and advocate of our needs and desires. If we’re not listening, no one else can.

Who’s Parked In Your Relationship Space?

April 20, 2018 By NATALIE 8 Comments Reading Time: 4 Minutes

One of the most frequent conversations I have with both friends and readers is about readiness for a relationship. They feel more than ready, often citing all the things they’ve done and wondering where the hell The One is. They’re understandably frustrated, especially because they often see what isn’t happening as a reflection of their lack of ’enoughness’. Sometimes they want a relationship so badly that by extension, they’re persistently reminding themselves that they don’t have it which gradually sucks the joy out of other areas of their lives.

Who, where and how we invest our time, energy, effort and emotions directly impacts our capacity for a relationship and/or the quality of relationship or type of partner we choose.

We don’t have an unlimited capacity, and so we have to tidy up and clear out. We have to make space for what matters.

For many of us humans though, we want to hoard old emotions, stories, exes, harmful habits and the like, while also acquiring other things, people and opportunities that might not fit with what’s piling up.

Here’s just a sample of some of the questions I’ve asked recently:

If your parent/sibling is behaving like your substitute husband/wife or as if they’re the boss of you (and you’re going along with it) where does a healthy, loving partner fit into the mix?
If you’ve felt pissed off, resentful, victimised, powerless, hurt and frustrated on a near consistent basis over an extended period of time, where does a healthy, loving partner fit into the mix?
If you’re talking to your now-married ex a few times a week claiming that you’re “friends” while secretly being in love with him throughout all of your relationships over the last two decades, where does a healthy, loving partner fit into the mix?

The short answer is that it doesn’t.

Our relationships begin before we have even met the person

March 5, 2018 By NATALIE Reading Time: 3 Minutes

When you enter into a romantic involvement, you have to be what you seek. From when you put your profile on a dating website/app, to those initial communications, to how you might be interacting with a love interest prior to knowing whether they reciprocate, to how you think about you in the context of your relationships — you have to come from a place of love, care, trust and respect.

When you treat you like the worthwhile and valuable person that you are, this gives you confidence. How you feel about and treat you is your self-esteem. It allows you to enter into relationships with personal security. When you do, why would you give that up for a stranger? This is what so many people do: they become romantically involved with somebody and neglect their self-esteem and security to bet on the possibility of being ‘chosen’ and the relationship working out.

The thoughts that you feed you and the way that you treat you matters. When you treat you like a less-than person, it puts you on the back foot. Instead of being able to enjoy life and your relationships, your energies will go into trying to ‘fix’ you via the people and situations you come to depend upon. Why burden you with with this debilitating task? Why give romantic partners the responsibility of ‘fixing’ you?

You don’t love someone from the outset but having your own back is a prerequisite to carrying yourself with integrity, compassion and responsibility.

This means that even in those instances where you don’t know, like and trust someone [for who they truly are] yet, you can still operate from a place of love care trust and respect in your dating interactions because you’re coming from a place of self-worth instead of fear.

Coming from a place of self-worth limits the crumb mindset. This is where you conduct yourself as if you have to earn the basics.

‘If I prove I am worthy they will go from where they are now (being/doing the things you don’t want) to becoming someone who will treat me right and give me what I want.’

When you treat and regard you with love care trust respect, you won’t accept less from others than what you can already be and do for yourself.

In unhealthy relationships, you accept from others only slightly less than what you do from yourself. It’s like, Well, I’ve got this covered in my [uncomfortable] comfort zone. Yes, it’s painful but at least I know what to expect and it can’t get much worse. Until it does.

It’s not as if being with someone who mistreats you in a similar fashion will ‘double’ what you’ve been receiving from you. If anything, it’s going to decimate your own efforts because you’ll be in an emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually taxing relationship.

Even though you might feel as if you get by on your self-esteem, possibly because your perfectionism and people pleasing has garnered a level of success (e.g. career or education) or you’ve quite simply gotten into a routine that shuts down or numbs feelings and thoughts, it’s another thing altogether when the person you’re with is the living embodiment of your fears.

You can, for a time, get away with hiding your beliefs and their impact but there will always be people who are willing to step into your life and reflect the truth back to you through their behaviour and what you go on to continue to accept from the relationship.

If you treat you decently, it’s gonna feel damn funny to continue to be around someone who doesn’t.

You have to be the person you seek.

Your relationships begin before you have even met the people. Through your relationship with yourself, you are laying the foundations for how you will be when you meet them and when you’re in the relationship. The more you strive to treat and regard you in this way is the more you break unhealthy habits and patterns, but it’s also the more receptive you are to meeting someone who can treat you similarly.

Your thoughts?

Be Careful What You Wish For (Or Raise Your Standards By Wishing For More)

March 2, 2018 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

An acquaintance realised that she was getting what she wished for when she found herself dumped and alone on her birthday. Her then-boyfriend was typically twitchy about committing to having breakfast with her the following day and could be damn-near hostile about hanging out with her friends and family, tending to bail on events or cause drama afterwards. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that no matter how fabulous she was, he wasn’t going to be chomping at the bit to settle down, never mind make her feel special on her birthday. It wasn’t his inclination or his typical pattern of behaviour.

How the hell did this happen?, she wondered. From her perspective, she was the doting, patient, loving girlfriend who saw beyond his ‘quirky’ ways to his potential. She couldn’t understand what she was doing wrong and why each boyfriend had an allergy to commitment.

And then she realised something: each boyfriend had been what she wanted at that time.

This guy was muscly, tick, very good looking, tick, gave her butterflies, tick, ‘spontaneous’, tick (she never knew when he was going to show up or when he was going to pull a Houdini, plus he tended to expect her to drop everything), great in bed, tick, and had a good job, tick. This was what she found attractive and she went out with variations of the same guy in different packages, always trying to meet their needs in the hope that they would meet hers.

As usual, she had got what she was looking for, it’s just that she didn’t like what else it came with.

She hadn’t realised that her type is also moody, ambivalent, prone to selfishness, passive aggressive and reluctant to take responsibility.

They Didn’t Change; You Just Got To Know Them

October 4, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

Picture it, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 2005 (pulling my best Sophia from Golden Girls imitation): It’s just one month before I would have the epiphany that would cause me to change my life and a couple of months before I would start writing Baggage Reclaim. I’m on holiday with one of my best pals and we’re looking for a club to go to after spending time in a bar dancing to Gorillaz’ ‘Dare’ (epic tune) and giggling at two guys who were wearing matching trainers that made them look like they were wearing flippers.

Anyway… I digress…

So, we walk along the strip and after checking out a few places, we stop at this club with a plasma screen outside that was playing what we thought was live footage of the jam-packed club inside. The guy was doing a hard sell, and to be fair, the footage was pretty compelling and he made out like he was doing this amazing deal for us. You can guess what happened next–we got inside to discover that we were two of about eight people in the bloody place! We were fuming!

With the benefit of the 20:20 vision that is hindsight, it would have served us well to ask if the video was live footage of what was going on inside and actually, it was quite obvious that he was doing a hard sell.

Now, the thing is, I see this whole inviting-plasma-TV-outside-a-club scenario all the time in dating and relationships.

When we’ve just met someone or we’re in the early stages of dating, or we’re setting out on our new relationship, we sometimes get what we think is a dazzling preview of the amazingness to come.

They’re so full-on and are painting this picture of being The Perfect Potential Boyfriend/Girlfriend TM or The Perfect Potential Spouse, that we reason that this is what we can expect from them in the future.

When days (yes, really), weeks or months down the line, they seem to do a complete u-turn on who they presented as or what they promised, we’re baffled, wounded and stuck on this notion that we just need to get things to go back to how they were ‘in the beginning’.

This spot of what I call Future Faking (building up and faking a future so they can get what they want in the present) and Fast-Forwarding (being emotionally, physically etc., intense to speed you through the early stages of dating), messes with our heads.

The people pleaser in us cannot help but blame it on us having done something to scare them away as if character and intentions leave a person as quickly as they can drop their drawers to the ground. We then try to overcompensate for what will undoubtedly be becoming an unfulfilling partnering and feel as if we’re getting increasingly diminishing returns in a relationship where it used to be so ‘easy’.

The whole experience can erode our confidence and cause us to be skittish about subsequent involvements and prone to settling for less than what we need. It’s as if we reason that if we go low in terms of expectation that it’s safer than going ‘high’ and getting disappointed, only you’d be amazed how when we lower our expectations into crumb territory that not only can we be disappointed, but it wounds us even more.

Jaysus, how much lower do I have to go to get some love up in here?

Expectations are our strong beliefs about what we think will and should happen.

We believe that we have experience of them meeting our expectations so we don’t understand why they can’t go back to how it was ‘back then’. The thing is, they weren’t meeting our expectations in the beginning—it was a brand new involvement where we did not know them.

They didn’t change; you just got to know them.

In some cases, it’s not they changed but more that we got to know them a teeny bit more that they were in very real danger of us seeing past the pomp and bluff.

In the early days, they could pretty much tell us anything and as long as it was positive and fitted with our picture of how things should and could be, we’d go along with it.

They also go so hard at it in trying to woo us and win us over that instead of wondering why they have to be so frickin’ OTT, we allow ourselves to create this unrealistic expectation that someone could blow in on the wind and make a bunch of inferences and promises without having really got to know us, and that they’ll deliver it from now until forever.

Of course, that’s why we feel so wounded because ‘in the beginning’, they didn’t know us so ipso facto, it must be ‘knowing’ us that caused them to do a u-turn.

But, like the guy outside the club displaying a plasma screen of dated footage that probably didn’t even take place in his own club while doing a hard sell on getting us in there, isn’t it time that we acknowledge that actually, it’s a fundamental lack of integrity and maturity?

That, and yes, we can stand to ask more questions or to quite simply know our pace and what we want so that we can’t be bulldozed by someone into going at a pace that doesn’t match our values.

Dodgy club guy knew that he was pulling a fast one.

And, I hate to break it to you, but people who go all super intense on you at the beginning and try to speed through the getting to know, have form for their behaviour. It’s not the first time they’ve behaved this way and they’re stuck in their own getting high on romance Groundhog Day while avoiding the true intimacy of taking one’s time.

You also, if you’ve been in this situation, have to acknowledge a fundamental truth: that you don’t like what you got to know or that it’s certainly not what you want(ed).

Sure, you can take responsibility for allowing you to get swept up in their shenanigans and you can acknowledge anything that influenced those choices, but what you must stop doing is blaming your worth or something you said/did on their lack of integrity and maturity.

Even if my friend and I had asked whether the footage that was being shown on the screen was live, it wouldn’t change the fact that he was trying to screw us over in the first place.

Your thoughts?

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About Unconditional Love

July 19, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Love can seem very complicated and painful but the truth is, it’s only like that when we use our feelings to try to control the uncontrollable. We say that we love someone and next thing, we’ve rolled out a whole load of expectations about who and what we think that person ‘should’ be and do due to the fact that we love them (or that they’re supposed to love us). So, with family, we do the things that we think fulfil the role of dutiful daughter/son etc., and we expect them to play their part(s) because we, after all, have met our obligations based on the assumption and expectation that [what we’re being and doing] is required in order for them to be who we want them to be. This is a hangover from childhood where we see people and in fact life, as being a reflection of our worth, of what we think we did or didn’t do.

When we continue to experience frustration with loved ones not living up to our expectations, it spills over into other interpersonal relationships such as with friends or romantic partners because we often unwittingly, although sometimes consciously, try to pursue our unmet needs via these other relationships.

Life is a teacher, something I talked about in episode 87 of the podcast, and so it’s always trying to open up our awareness and perspective so that we can amend the assumptions, judgements, stories and yes, expectations that are holding us back from being in fulfilling relationships that reflect the truest version of us.

We get out of payback mode where we’re expected to be rewarded with something and instead, loving someone means truly knowing and understanding them and wanting the best for their happiness and fulfilment without expecting anything in return.

Love means doing and being because it’s who we are, not because we’re trying to create the right conditions to get what we want from others.

We can’t expect from others what we’re not prepared to do for 1) us and 2) them.

It can come as quite a surprise when we’ve spent a lifetime looking for validation in one form or another from our family, to discover that actually, we have loved them conditionally.

When I’ve fallen into the trap of expecting my mother to grant me my wish that she change into someone else altogether in exchange for my love, I’m not loving her unconditionally, and there’s a level of irony there because part of my old struggle is feeling that I was not loved unconditionally and that when I was less than perfect, this is why I was experiencing unwanted outcomes and why she wasn’t being the type of mother that, well, ‘everyone else’ has (they don’t).

When I do things out of obligation in my head and then carry on as if I’ve made a sacrifice that she or anyone else for that matter, ‘owes’ me for, it’s unfair.

My intention in those times wasn’t shady but my pattern of people pleasing seemed like it was such a noble thing–you know, me sacrificing myself for others, ahem–but my recovery from being a people pleaser has centred on taking responsibility and removing the hidden agenda, whether it’s about reward or me trying to avoid something (conflict, criticism, rejection, disappointment).

I don’t like being made to feel guilty whether it’s by me or by others, so it should come as no great surprise that others aren’t too keen on me doing that to them.

It’s acceptance.

Like when you see your alcoholic father or dysfunctional mother and instead of growing impatient, lecturing, monitoring them, meddling, side-eyeing, eye-rolling, huffing and puffing, feeling helpless due to not being able to control their problems and life, self-blaming, and silently cursing and resenting them and you for them not being different to who they are yet again, you instead hold space for what is and stop carrying on as if it’s your responsibility to fix them. It isn’t.

All we need to do is love them. That’s it. Just love them.

That’s actually what we’re afraid of because if we truly accept and love imperfect people who we’ve previously unwittingly expected to be perfect and/or to spontaneously combust into someone else, it means that it’s what we have to do with us too.

It means that we have to give up suffering.

It means that we have to give up this vocation and accept that even if it was far from pretty and in fact, traumatic in parts, that was our childhood, that was our family.

We’ve got to stop trying to fix them so we can feel as if we’re making things right with us. We can make things right with us and move forward even if our family still do all sorts of feckery. I’ve learned that I’m not disloyal or a ‘bad’ daughter/granddaughter/niece/friend or whatever for not subscribing to someone else’s version of OK– I’m just me.

As I explain in Love, Care, Trust and Respect, “Just so we’re all clear, unconditional love isn’t love without boundaries, which is codependency and self-destruction due to it reflecting our lack of self-love. When we love and like us regardless of what is happening externally, we love others authentically because we have the healthy boundaries to do so. Unconditional love is about choosing love the actions, mentality and attitude through all seasons and conditions, not loving someone no matter what they do to us.”

In this way we learn that unconditional love starts at home.

We stop accepting disrespect from ourselves and choose instead, to love us, especially on those occasions when we err and not just when it’s easy to do so because life is hunky-dory.

We accept us now instead of delaying it until we’ve ‘fixed’ certain things about us or achieved a goal. Less than perfect people live, breathe and achieve things every day, so waiting for some arbitrary moment in the future is not only redundant but it reeks of moving the goalposts.

When we’re genuinely striving to come from a place of self-acceptance (aka respect), we become conscious of where we’re doing things that represent playing a role that essentially amounts to self-rejection (doing things with the aim of trying to get others to fulfil what we feel are their obligations to us, halts self-acceptance).

We can then chill out because we’re not taking responsibility for other people’s feelings and behaviour and personalising what they do (or don’t do) so much that we reject ourselves and our truth.

We don’t reject happiness to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

We stop self-rejecting due to people and life being less than what we would prefer them and it to be.

We also, when we choose to start accepting us right now and through all seasons and conditions, we won’t remain around those who don’t accept us and who we can’t accept.

Choosing love, incidentally, isn’t just about loving people in the sense that we do our loved ones; choosing love also means acknowledging where we want different things to others and where yes, we don’t like who someone is or what they represent and then choosing to accept them as they are, which is in the highest good for all parties involved because we don’t pretend to be something we’re not and we come from a place of respect.

That might mean acknowledging that we don’t have a deep and abiding love for a parent like some other people do but that what we do know and feel is true and that ultimately, we want the best for them but don’t see us as being responsible for it. We might love them because they’re our family and through all seasons but won’t feel that we have to put up with anything and everything out of love.

Love flourishes where people know the boundaries.

Your thoughts?

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There is no ‘job opening’; relationships are co-created.

July 3, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 6 Minutes

Are you looking for a relationship right now? If so, consider whether you’re coming from an empowered place, or whether you feel inferior in some way and as if this potential future partner, who you might not have met yet, holds the power to determine your future. If it’s the latter, you are falling into the trap of behaving like someone who has to do ‘all the right things’ in order to be chosen. You’re hoping that someone will give you a home.

Auditioning to be chosen for the role of girlfriend/boyfriend or The Ideal Spouse™ causes you to immediately enter into non-mutual agreements, even if that’s purely in terms of your own mentality, attitude and behaviour. The other party might actually be up for a mutually fulfilling relationship, but if you act as if you have to interview and perform to fill the ‘vacancy’ they have, as if you’re a sidekick to the big boss, you will de-prioritise you. Putting them on a pedestal and so deeming them to be superior, automatically creates an imbalanced relationship. It inadvertently places you in a child role, keeping you small and automatically giving them a parental, or certainly, authoritarian role. You will override your intuition and basically give you up by deferring to them.

There is no job opening; relationships are co-created.

You can co-create great ones, good ones, so-so ones and sh*t ones, but whichever way you slice it, relationships are co-created.

To assume otherwise is to give automatic authority to anyone who gives you the time of day, sparks interest, or makes noises about the possibility of a relationship.

It says, ‘You know best and are superior. Please give me a job for life so that I can feel safe and secure. I’ll do whatever you like’.

I’ve realised that back in the day, I was a bit like Little Orphan Annie waiting for a Daddy Warbucks to whisk me off to a better life. It’s no wonder then, that despite the fact that I was well past the age of needing adopting, I did carry on, even in my fledgling relationships, as if I had to hold my breath until I could be sure they weren’t going to send me back.

Imagine how this attitude of believing that men had all the power and the keys to my happiness, was impacting my sense of self—it affected my perception of my opportunities, my sense of personal power, my sense of worthiness full stop.

Red flag? What red flag? There’s no such thing as red flags, or as I call them, code amber and red issues, when you’re afraid to bite the hand that’s literally feeding your self-esteem and perceived to hold the keys to your future.

In truth, there is no ready-made relationship that allows you to step into someone’s life playing a role that you already do by default (e.g people pleaser, Florence Nightingale, scapegoat, odd one out)—because, you know that is what treating dating and relationships like a job opening amounts to, don’t you? It’s looking for somewhere that matches how you already feel about and treat you so that you can ‘slot in’, so you’re actually looking to extend a familiar albeit uncomfortable role that isn’t serving your highest good.

Think about it: If you always approach dating and relationships as if the other party has a vacancy that needs filling, you’re basically saying that they set the terms and that they have the best idea of how you should be utilising your time, energy, effort and emotions.

You’re also saying that how you perceive the past, including any negative beliefs about you, are permanent statements of the future that need to be applied to the types of job (read: relationship) that you can apply for.

Auditioning for relationships suggests that they know best about who and what you should be, and that the real you doesn’t matter if at the end of the day, you’re going to get a relationship out of it.

For some reason, you’re inferring that you have no clue, and you know what? They might not have a fricking clue either, but instead of being clueless together and figuring it out with healthy boundaries (we all have to start somewhere after all), they’re now The Grand Poobah of relationships, despite the fact that actually, they might not have the character, values, or experience to justify even one iota of what you’re attributing to them.

If you don’t co-create relationships, you will be a replacement or temporary stand-in and distraction for something from the past.

Which begs the question: Why are you trying to stand in for an ex that it didn’t work out with?

Sure, it might be comfortable, it might be familiar, it might even be easy for him/her to transfer their relationship balance over to you, but it sure as hell isn’t a good idea. It’s dirty debt.

Aside from it being emotionally lazy for someone to treat you like a cardboard cut-out that replaces someone they haven’t gotten over, whether it’s that they’re still angry (could be a parent/caregiver, ex etc) or because they still have unresolved romantic feelings, you’re immediately marginalising you.

If you’re inclined to marginalise you, ask yourself:

Where did I learn to take a backseat?
Why do I allow someone’s ex or their parent/caregiver/sibling/bully issues to be the dictator of what role I feel is suitable for me?
Why is someone’s fictional perfect person that they’ve come up with in their head as their relationship ‘job spec’, more important than me being myself and aligning with someone who is ready and willing to show up and co-create a relationship with me?
Why am I trying to be perfect for someone who isn’t perfect for me?
Why am I trying to be what I think someone else wants despite the fact that I don’t know them yet or they have not unfolded enough over time and through experience for it to begin to even justify me perceiving them as an authority?

They’re just not that special.

There’s nothing wrong with having clarity around your values and what you need and want in a relationship, but someone who doesn’t want to get out of their head and out of their past, is going to:

1) Be emotionally unavailable due to being on autopilot and will
2) Judge you unfairly, whether it’s consciously or not, plus up at the shadier end of things, will blame you for their actions or lack of them in the relationship.

People who are detached from the truth of themselves and their past, love latching on to people who blow smoke up their bottom by extension of the fact that they’re behaving like they’re auditioning for a prize role.

Love care trust and respect is conscious, aware, and present.

You can’t expect to be loved for who you are, if through auditioning, you’re trying to be loved for who you’re not.

You’re also not liking or loving someone if you’re putting them on a pedestal; you’re just setting you up to feel inferior.

Auditioning and acting as if you’re inferior, automatically blocks you from being a loving partner in a loving relationship.

There is no job opening; relationships are co-created.

In every relationship, there are two people who have variances because they might be similarly strengthened or similarly flawed, but are also differing in individual strengths and weaknesses. That’s the beauty of not just relationships, but embracing who we really are as people and being OK with bringing that to the table instead of carrying on as if everyone else is perfect [even when it’s quite obvious that they’re not].

It doesn’t matter how much experience you or they have (or don’t have).

Even if you have little or no relationship experience, or you’re like me and have only previously been in unavailable and shady relationships, what matters is what you do next. What matters is how you show up in this or your next relationship.

You’re allowed to grow and you have just as much to bring to the table as someone who is seemingly more ‘experienced’.

What matters is the relationship and what you do together. It matters how you show up and how you’re each prepared to evolve.

You are either co-creating a loving relationship or you’re in servitude playing it small. Choose wisely.

Your thoughts?

Blind Spots Block The Relationship You Want

June 19, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 7 Minutes

“Natalie, I am sooooo ready to be in a relationship and settle down. I can’t [whatever they’re currently doing and suffering through] anymore.”

I hear variations of this statement sooooo much, sometimes from the same people multiple times over several months or even years, and it’s often after sharing their dissatisfaction, frustration and even despair over what is currently happening in their lives.

It’s not just that they’re not in the relationship they want; there is invariably something else in the mix that’s a major pull on their time, energy, efforts and emotions.

They’re obsessing over an ex who, based on how the relationship was, along with any medium to long-term incompatibilities, it’s the right thing that the relationship ended. They’re often also stuck on The Replacement Mentality, so believing that they’ve been replaced by someone ‘inferior’ or similar, or believing that this person is living ‘happily ever after’ with The Replacement, even though this is made up or exaggerated, especially when this same ex is messaging/sexting them and/or complaining about The Replacement [to them]. If they’re not obsessing over being replaced, it’s often about experiencing activation and so not recognising how it has triggered feelings and wounds from the past and as such, this notion of being abandoned, passed over and rejected in totality – receiving no, the relationship ending, not getting what they want etc., is seen as being a rejection of them in their entirety, full stop.

Some have been what I call ‘single on the surface’, so yes, they’re technically single but at the same time, they’re either in some form of purgatory over something from the past and so, in effect, in a relationship with pain, fear, guilt and whoever the person or people are that are connected to the events, or, they are unaware of a set of habits that are part of their safety mechanism to defend against intimacy. Whatever they’re doing, it can amount to going through the motions while subconsciously (and in some cases, very consciously) sabotaging their own efforts. One of the easiest ways to do this is to be drawn to the same type of people, whether it’s on or offline, and to go through a similar habit loop each time which eventually leads to disappointment, and then lather, rinse, repeat.

They’ve been in a vague, ambiguous, ambivalent, indecisive setup with somebody for months or even years, and actually in a few cases, decades. For some, they repeatedly accept vague, ambiguous etc setups because they want to play it cool / not appear ‘too needy’ / not appear to create drama like they think that ‘others’ do. Some play the Really Good Friend role as a back door route to a relationship, only to be told that the other party doesn’t see them in ‘that way’, or only wants to ‘go with the [casual] flow’, or that they’re interested in someone else.

Some have been breaking up and getting back together with somebody for an extended period of time and there’s often enough drama and betrayal to fill an entire series of the now defunct Jerry Springer Show.

All of these situations are understandably frustrating, disheartening, and enough to sap so much life force out of you, that even if a loving relationship appeared before your eyes, you would barely be able to move let alone step into it, but–and there is a big but—it’s at times like this when we say we really want something but it’s not happening, that we have to be willing to own and know our own bullshit.

We have to be willing to acknowledge our blind spots.

We have to be willing to let go of a story, a version of events that might have been keeping us company, albeit uncomfortably, for what may be all or the majority of our life.

Incidentally, this is some scary but necessary and liberating work on our part.

“They’re ‘Too Nice’ To Break Up With”

February 8, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

One of the trickiest situations can be when you know that you need to break up but you stay together or keep going back because you feel that the person is ‘too nice’ to break up with. It’s like, if they were treating you badly or there basically wasn’t something about them or the relationship that made remaining beneficial, you would have finished it, and so as such, you feel caught between a rock and a hard place. As I said to a close pal earlier this week, you end up feeling as if you’re going to kick a puppy in the face and of course, no one wants to think of themselves in this way!

But, here’s the thing:

You’re not doing yourself, never mind the other person any justice by remaining in the relationship.

It’s one thing to stay because you want to and because you genuinely love and accept the person, but it’s another when fear of looking like ‘the bad guy’ or enjoying aspects while gritting your teeth and vacillating between breaking up or staying, is blocking you from making the right, albeit uncomfortable decision.

My friend is used to doing what I used to do: metaphorically torching the relationship a la Angela Bassett in Waiting To Exhale, or exiting with stealth moves to avoid dealing with the person and the situation.

Neither option, while they might feel good initially, results in growth, because if the only way that you can break up is with drama or trying to do a Houdini, you won’t know how to do the grown-up thing and admit when something isn’t working, discuss it, and make a solid ending.

Ask yourself: Is there a way that I could love myself AND be in the relationship too?

February 6, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

One of the issues that becomes very evident when talking to people who are struggling in a relationship or who have been through a series of painful relationships, is that loving themselves and being in a relationship are seen as mutually exclusive. Now sometimes that’s due to the nature of the relationship and so it has issues that are having a knock-on effect on their self-esteem but equally, it can be down to the fact that they tend to give themselves up no matter who they’re with.

Whether we’ve lost ourselves as a direct result of engaging in a relationship or we’re lost because we give ourselves up in the pursuit of love in general, it results in confusion about whether to stay or go because we’re unable to distinguish the relationship from our self-worth and so the relationship is at once a source of external esteem, while at the same time, intertwined with feelings, thoughts and actions that mean that the relationship is closely associated with pain.

The person/relationship that’s seen as the sole source of our happiness paradoxically becomes the sole source of our pain.

It is possible for us to be in a relationship and love ourselves at the same time.

It’s in this kind of relationship where we can have love for another without diminishing ourselves in the process, where we experience love that flows and grows between two people rather than it being about one party having something we want to ‘get’ or ‘earn’ from them or it being called love because it’s what we associate anxiety, angst, precariousness, worthlessness, uncertainty, turmoil and other such feelings that become the norm in a relationship where we don’t feel good about ourselves.

Does Chemistry Matter When You First Meet Someone?

January 18, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

Chemistry shouldn't make you less of who you are, off balance or unable to function. Healthy chemistry in a loving relationship leaves you feeling calm. If you’ve ever been involved with someone who was at best, narcissistically inclined and at worst, an actual narcissist, or you’ve felt utterly flummoxed by it having started out so great and then wondering, What happened to that great guy (or woman)?, then you can understand why some people are very gun-shy about new relationships. They find it difficult to trust themselves because they feel that they’ve been misled (or misled themselves in the past). This is why so many people ask me, ‘Natalie, how much does chemistry matter when you first meet someone?’

The first thing I ask anyone who is confused about chemistry is, Have you felt chemistry when you’ve first met someone before?, and of course, the answer is yes.

I then ask, How much has chemistry played a part in 1) your perception of someone, 2) your decision to get involved and 3) your decision to remain? Invariably, chemistry has played a significant role, to the point where some, with the benefit of hindsight, would say it accounted for over 90% of of their involvement (and their problems).

Then I ask, Was this a healthy, mutually fulfilling relationship with love, care, trust and respect, or were there issues with emotional unavailability (intimacy and commitment), balance, consistency, progression or shared core values (basically, The Landmarks of Healthy Relationships)?, and every single time, the answer is yes.

Believe me when I say that you wouldn’t have your doubts about chemistry or have been misled by chemistry, if the net result was that you were in a loving relationship.

I then have to ask, Where are these partners now?

It’s all very well having what you might regard as ‘off-the-charts chemistry’ but it’s zero use if it renders your relationship unable to function.

It’s like riding a roller coaster all the time and wondering why it’s difficult to stand on solid ground, why your stomach’s lurching, and why it only feels ‘normal’ on the rollercoaster, chasing a feeling that you haven’t been able to recapture at quite the same level that it was on that very first ‘high’.