Landmarks of Healthy Relationships Archives - Baggage Reclaim with Natalie Lue

Podcast Ep. 122: Relationship Crumbs, Whether It’s From The Shady or The ‘Nice’, Are Crumbs

January 12, 2019 By NATALIE 5 Comments Reading Time: 3 Minutes

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When we’re romantically involved with someone who’s ambiguous and ambivalent about their interest and/or whether they want a relationship with us, it grinds us down. We accept crumbs. This week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions follows on from last week’s about trying too hard.

It’s pretty damn demoralising to feel as if we’re jumping through hoops trying to keep something going. And yet, so many of us go through this because we think that this is what being interested in someone or dating is about: convincing and converting them into desiring a relationship with us. We think that we have to prove that we’re “good enough” and worthy of love, care, trust and respect. You always deserve more than crumbs.

Just because someone is “nice” or “better” than a previous unhealthy relationship, it doesn’t make them the right one for you if all they’re offering at the end of the day is crumbs on the equivalent of the nice china instead of the dirty and chipped crockery.

Some nuggets from the episode:

Sometimes we exaggerate how great someone is because we’re not used to being around someone great and being around someone who treats us like we’re great. We find that while we’re not settling for the crumbs that we did in the past that we’re settling for a different kind of crumb.
People who give good date When they’re ‘on’, they’re on, and so when you spend time with them, you have such a good time that you forget that you spent however many days, weeks or even months in turmoil wondering what the hell is going on

When someone is enamoured with you in a very genuine sense, they just want to know more about you. They want to be around you.

In the end, all it takes is one relationship regardless of any previous experiences you’ve had.
Humans struggle with uncertainty. We want to know what’s going to happen in the future so that we know what to do. We can prepare ourselves for the worst (the relationship going wrong).
Sometimes we experience anxiety because of our internal narrative. And sometimes we experience it because we’ve delayed on taking action on something that we need to. Our feelings are alerting us to take care of ourselves. We need to reassure ourselves and take action.
We might not be settling for crumbs in a toxic, abusive relationship. But we might be settling for crumbs with someone who is “nice” but who is just not cutting it.

If we’re on one side going “I really want to be in a relationship with this person” and they’re on the other going “Yeah, better not let them get too close”, there’s a mismatch.

You need to be with someone who is enthusiastic about seeing you and who isn’t trying to fit you into some rigid schedule so that they can manage the hell out of you and keep you at a distance.
You need to be with someone who
- isn’t dipping in and out of your life.
- sees possibilities, who wants to see a future with you.
- can admit that they’re scared, but they’re like “It’s scary, but I’m here for this.”
The possibility of getting hurt is part of the vulnerability of opening ourselves up to love.

You deserve to feel secure in your relationship.

A relationship without a purpose has no aim.
If we know that we want to be in a mutually fulfilling relationship and we’re accepting less than that, we are selling ourselves short. As long as we are doing this, we cannot be open to being in a relationship where we don’t have to feel as if we’re scrabbling around to get them to make an effort.
You deserve to have self-esteem. When we are reliant on waiting for this person to decide if they want to be with us, to decide if they want to value us, to decide what the state of play is, then we are on the rollercoaster of following the path of whatever they’re doing.

Crumbs are still crumbs even if it's someone "nice" who's giving them. Nat Lue

Relationship crumbs

Links mentioned

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Podcast Ep. 117: Needs, Gary Chapman’s 5 Love Languages & Misunderstandings

November 23, 2018 By NATALIE 2 Comments Reading Time: 4 Minutes

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In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I delve into the topic of why lack of awareness of our needs and what’s driving us causes misunderstandings in our interpersonal relationships. I share insights from finally reading The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman. I’d had various people mention the book to me over the years, but felt somewhat bemused by the theory. None of the love languages resonated as mine (a mystery that was finally solved by reading it). His theory offers another lens for us to consider our needs, including why we’ve sometimes felt neglected, abandoned or misunderstood. I also, though, address something that the book doesn’t: the need to be aware of our ‘why’ when our pursuit or desire for something overshadow everything else or has become a blind spot.

Some nuggets from the episode:

Every single person on the planet has the same needs. We each have them to greater or lesser degrees depending on our past experiences, backstory, fears, desires, motivations, hopes and aspirations. Our needs are also based on our present circumstances: the quality of our interpersonal relationships and the way in which we’re living. There’s a context to why our needs may be a certain way at a particular point in time. It’s also about where we’re hoping to go in the future.
Some needs are driving us that feel like hidden forces, or even hidden destructive forces. These influence us to feel, think and behave in certain ways. We can recognise what’s driving us through the things that we keep on doing, our frustrations, and what we pursue. Understanding what drives us and what we perceive as “love” helps us to take better care of ourselves. It allows us to make better choices and to be conscious, aware and present within our relationships.
Each person feels and perceives love in different ways. Our emotional well-being reflects how well our needs are being met.
As humans, we tend to give what we feel like giving because…
- It’s less vulnerable than getting to know that person’s actual needs that might require us to stretch ourselves.
- We’re hinting at what we want to get back.
- It’s what we’re used to doing even if we don’t always or even ever feel good doing so.
According to Gary, we each have a primary and secondary love language.
- Quality time – He emphasises that this is not about spending time near each other. It’s about activities and conversations — focused time, undivided attention.
- Acts of service – Doing useful things. “People unwittingly slip into roles. They slip into habits of thinking, feeling and behaving, and they don’t realise how they’re falling into stereotypes and creating expectations based on that…. ‘I’m the one who does all of the things around the home and I expect my partner to provide’… ” And, yes, this can and does occur in same-sex relationships.
  Gendered roles cause us to do things not because we want to but because we think it’s expected of us. We feel obliged to play a role because it’s “how things are done” but then feel resentful.

Friction can arise because we might have needs that don’t fit within the stereotypes [we’re inadvertently pigeon-holing ourselves into].

Words of affirmation – Affirming that you appreciate and value that person with compliments, praise, admiration. Basically, encouragement.

Physical touch – Not just sex! Physical affection.

Receiving gifts – “Visible symbols of love”. And it’s not about the money! Although, actually, I think that for some people, it is.

“I’m more than happy to buy gifts [for my mom] but I don’t want to buy them in a race to please and impress.”
“When we acknowledge why a need is so prevalent in our life, it’s often because of a story we’re telling ourselves based on an experience from the past that has told us, ‘Well, you’re only a person of value if you get this.’ Or ‘It’s only love if you get this’ – and some of those things that we tell ourselves are quite simply not true.”
“Yes, it’s nice to receive gifts, but do we really want to burn down our relationship if we’re not receiving gifts all the time?”
When we can approach our relationships from the place of the autonomous give (as opposed to shamed, guilted, obliged), it takes a lot of the tension out of them.
It all comes down to empathy.
Sonder: the realisation that each random passerby has their own internal dialogue within that is as vivid and complex as our own.
Most friction in our relationships is caused by expecting others to be like us. “If it were me…” Empathy is about meeting people where they’re at. It’s essential for us to step outside of ourselves so that we can see and hear others clearly.
Each and every single one of us has our own specific language informed by our experiences, fears, desires, intentions, motivations, dreams, hopes and aspirations.
My husband has his way of communicating, I have mine, but what we’ve had to do is learn how to get to know each other.
Misunderstandings occur in relationships because each person thinks that the other person is speaking their language. Each relationship has its own specific language co-created by the two people in it as a result of them getting to know each other.

Links mentioned

The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Take The 5 Love Languages quiz
Episode 15 about over-gifting and overspending
Episode 100 about recognising whether you’re over your bandwidth
Becoming by Michelle Obama
This Is Marketing by Seth Godin
Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl
About Buffers in unavailable relationships
Dirty Cash (Money Talks) by Adventures of Stevie V

Podcast Ep. 75: #Relationshipgoals, The Common Denominator, Wanting Love Is OK

February 10, 2017 By NATALIE Reading Time: 2 Minutes

Welcome to another episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions.

In episode 75, I cover:

#relationship goals: I was a guest on the Melanin Millennials podcast earlier this week for their relationships special and we got onto the topic of people posting photos etc with the hashtag ‘relationshipgoals’ and aspiring to other people’s relationships. This got me thinking about how we sometimes put our relationships under pressure to ‘hit’ goals but also how our perception of other people’s relationships is often projection not reality.

The Common Denominator: I explain what it means when we recognise that we are the only person who shows up to every scene, act and moment of our life, so if there are recurring themes in our hurts, frustrations etc, we need to be willing to examine our side of the street.

Links mentioned

Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl

It’s OK to want to love and be loved: I talk about why it’s very real need and desire to love and be loved, but whether we want a relationship or not, it needs to be from a positive place.

Links

Listener Question: How do I stop feeling guilty over my breakup that I didn’t even instigate?

What I Learned This Week: Sometimes we expect too much of ourselves and we have to cut us some slack.

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Have a great weekend,

Nat xx

Figuring out whether you have the landmarks of a relationship that’s going somewhere good

September 2, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Something I’ve noticed when I listen to people describing their relationship is that they talk about what the person does, with it often being linked to what a previous partner wasn’t doing. “They text/call me regularly”; “They don’t stand me up”; “They’re not treating me like a booty call”; “They seem like they’re over their ex”; “There’s no harem with this one”. These rather funny descriptions provide clues about what they deem as their barometer for feeling comfortable or even compatible.

While this stuff is all well and good within the context of a mutually fulfilling relationship, when focused on too much, we won’t really have a sense of what makes a relationship work never mind what is making this (our) relationship work. Sometimes we focus on these details because we’re quite simply unsure of what to look for emotionally and in the overall feeling and substance of our relationship.

We might get so caught up in breathing a sigh of relief that we’re not getting messed around like we were before that we either fail to acknowledge genuine positive qualities and characteristics as well as components of our relationship…., or we fail to acknowledge incompatibilities caused by clashes in core values.

For example, I hear from a hell of a lot of women in particular who, because they get dinner, flowers and romance periodically, it took them months to a year or so to realise that they weren’t in a relationship. They got caught out by what I refer to as the hallmarks.

A relationship with hallmarks isn’t an automatic precursor to a relationship with the landmarks of healthy relationships – intimacy, consistency, progression, balance, and commitment.

These along with shared cored values and care, trust and respect that lead to love, are what are present in relationships that not only stand a chance of going the distance (in whatever form that may take – remember that marriage is not the only form of commitment!) but are present in relationships where we feel secure, content and basically happy on a consistent basis.

We’ve got to stop procrastinating in unavailable relationships

April 15, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Over the years, many a reader has claimed that they’ve been emotionally available to an emotionally unavailable partner. Here’s the thing:

If we are truly emotionally available and want to keep our integrity and basically not be met with tumbleweeds or the equivalent of, “What? What was that? You’re breaking up…” or even a ‘dead ringtone’, why are we choosing to be emotionally available to somebody who is afraid of intimacy, commitment, progression, balance, and consistency?

Why are we claiming to be emotionally available to somebody who doesn’t want to ‘hear’ us and ‘feel’ us to the level of which we’re claiming that we’re available?

One of the things I’ve learned from experience and also through the stories of BR readers, is that when we habitually engage with an emotionally unavailable person, even if we started out available, in the context of this involvement, we adjust ourselves. It may be conscious, it might be unconscious, but we do.

We can pick up on cues that indicate that certain subjects or situations are not a good idea.

We edit ourselves.

Let’s be real: If we’ve been raised in an environment with a lot of tension or where feelings or discussions were a no-no, or where we’ve gotten into the habit of being a pleaser, we can be pretty damn adept at reading a room or reading for what we feel are signs of tension, and then adjusting ourselves.

What do you do when you feel as if you’re putting yourself out there with somebody who at one point, was all over you like a rash or certainly giving the impression of availability, and now they seem to be stepping back by quietly or even aggressively putting up walls? You become more guarded and stop being as honest and vulnerable as you were before.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting love and a relationship but the path we choose to achieve our desires has its own consequences

February 12, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

I listen to people express their desire for a relationship and romantic love and there are a significant portion of these who come across embarrassed and almost apologetic. They feel as if they have to defend how they feel and what they believe, and some of these people, when confronted with romantic partners who are presenting them with something less than mutually fulfilling, will back away from their desires for the sake of keeping the peace and not wanting to appear “uptight”. Next thing, they’ve been on a permanent date for numerous years with one particular person who keeps flip-flapping in and out of their life or who keeps putting the brakes on any movement. They believe that what they want is wrong or that if they hang in there and keep trying to be as pleasing as possible, that the other party will finally cave and meet their needs, expectations, and wishes.

It’s OK to desire love and a relationship. If we get involved with somebody whose preference is for something else, that doesn’t invalidate our desire. Their preferences are a matter of taste for their life. Imposing theirs upon us, whether it’s them or us doing it, is to carry on as if their preferences are objectively ‘right’.

Sometimes our attitude to relationships reminds me of our attitude to enjoying life and retirement; we work ourselves to the bone and by the time we retire, we might be too frickin worn out with ill health or shrinking energy levels to actually enjoy our lives.

Similarly, we could spend a significant chunk of our life pursuing that one person that we’ve decided will be ‘it’ and that they’re eventually going to make us the exception to the rule or, maybe we’ll chase variations of the same person. If we finally get them to succumb to a relationship, we’ll probably be emotionally exhausted and bankrupt of energy, esteem, and even the the other things that used to matter to us, that it will all be a bit of anti-climax. Is this it?, we’ll wonder.

It’s important to be honest about what we want, not just so that we can be more authentic by being and doing the things that are in alignment with our values including our needs, expectations, and desires, but also so that we can consider how we’re going to go about fulfilling our desires.

We must consider the consequences of the option that we pursue.

Sometimes we get so focused on what we want and the basic premise that, yes, we’re only human and it’s only natural for us to want to love, be loved, and desire companionship, that we forget to consider the fact that there are various options for arriving into a relationship, all with consequences.

‘I Can Change Him/Her’ syndrome: Don’t tie your worth to trying to control the uncontrollable

October 23, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

When people share their stories with me and a recurring theme emerges, I ask: If we look at this story a different way, why are you consistently attracted to and involved with partners who pretty much need to spontaneously combust into another person with a different set of values and habits in order to make you happy?

Many people believe that if a person loves you, they’ll change and make you the exception to their rule of behaviour and when this doesn’t happen, they personalise it and blame their worth. Why is our happiness and sense of purpose tied up in whether we can get somebody to make us the exception to their rule of behaviour?

‘I Can Change Him/Her’ syndrome is a habit of engaging in relationships that are fixer uppers. Like property, it’s where you take on a partner due to what you regard as their potential due to the return on investment you’ll make from renovating, redesigning, or even stripping them right back and raising them from the ground up.

Someone with an I Can Change Him/Her habit of thinking and behaviour believes that the love and relationship is valuable if they have to work hard for or even fight for it and ultimately be made the exception. This is a key reason why people get involved with unavailable partners especially the heavy duty commitment dodger and assclown versions. When the person blows hot or throws crumbs, it feels like more than the loaf that could be gotten from an available partner.

Commitment: If they can’t show up for the basics, they won’t be able to show up for the long haul

June 13, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

So many people who feel twitchy about commitment say stuff like, “Natalie, it’s too much to expect somebody to know if they want to commit in the early stages of the a relationship”, which is the same as saying, “It’s too much to expect a person to make any decisions no matter how basic, in the early stages of a relationship.” A bit of probing and it becomes clear that that they’re twitchy about commitment because they associate the term with forever. Personally, I’d be damn scared of dating and being emotionally honest if I thought that me saying, “I like you. Let’s spend more time getting to know each other”, was going to be taken as an iron-clad forever agreement.

Commitment is a decision and we make decisions in all areas of our life and without even being conscious about half of the ones that we’re making – we use habits to take care of a lot of our decision making, sometimes too much so.

In terms of dating and relationships, when it comes to commitment, we phase it in – something I’ve written about before. At its most basic level, commitment is about showing up and then choosing and re-choosing to keep showing up to the relationship in a committed (decided at that level) capacity. If the person you’re with cannot show up for and with the basics, they’re not someone that you should be strapping yourself to for the long haul.

No matter whether we’ve just been introduced via a dating site or just met (stage 0), whether we’re dating (stage 1), whether we’re in a relationship (stage 2), whether we’re evolving into something more long-term (stage 3), or whether we’ve made a level of commitment that says that we’re in this for good (stage 4), all of these require us to show up.

This past Monday marked our two-year wedding anniversary – incidentally, after two years of being blanked, my father called and apologised but we’ll save that one for another day. One of the things I know with absolute certainty is that I can’t decide that I don’t feel like showing up to my marriage tomorrow. I can’t decide to emotionally check out or start shopping around. Well actually I could but in doing so, I would be making a decision that takes me in the opposite direction of commitment.

If I’d had a problem with showing up in the previous stages, that in itself would have indicated that we shouldn’t have been making another level of commitment through marriage.

I see relationships and the phases of commitment in a similar fashion to children learning to read. Here in England, they have different reading levels (by colour) and as the kids move up the levels, they enhance their literacy skills. Somebody who is on yellow – a preschooler – won’t have the same literacy level as someone who is a few levels along.

When we go from stage 0 and move along, we are becoming emotionally and relationship literate about each other, or at least we hope we are if we’re both working together.

Problems arise for instance, when we take stage 4 declarations seriously from someone who we’ve only been introduced to via a dating site (stage 0) or when we have ‘forever’ feelings and expectations for that person. This is Fast Forwarding and Future Faking. It also shows a lack of comprehension for what a relationship takes – action with time and experience.

The more assumptions you make, the more misunderstandings you have to deal with (Mo’ Assumptions, Mo’ Problems)

May 30, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

While sometimes our inability to understand each others’ positions on something can be attributed to incompatible values, sometimes it’s down to being at cross purposes – talking about different subjects without realising it and as a result, not understanding each other. Or thinking that you’re both communicating ‘correctly’ or the same… and not understanding each other. It’s easy to assume that because we feel a certain way about somebody or because we share similar interests or values, that communicating with that person or being understood, will be that much easier. We think that they’re the same or similar and feel safe.

This is our human disposition – to look for the familiar so that we don’t have to familiarise ourselves with new things or so that we can slip into default habits. Habits automate a significant part of our lives. We’d be exhausted if we had to think out every last move and make many thousands of decisions, hence if we can find someone who we regard as being on the same page as us, we can relax a bit and make some assumptions about what to expect. Of course as many of us can attest to, we feel confused, anxious, or even slighted when people don’t behave in the way we expect. Just ask anyone who’s been through the, But we have so much in common experience of sharing similar hobbies, interests, and even outlooks on certain issues, and yet not sharing the same direction or their characters clashing.

But they’re so intelligent, attractive, work in the same profession as me, and they like 18th century poetry by blah blah blah, recycling, War and Peace is their favourite book, and yada yada yada – I don’t understand how they don’t understand me. I don’t understand why they have a different personality to me and/or they don’t want the same things. Because you’re not clones no matter how much you have in common.

When two people are trying to communicate their positions and end up being at cross purposes, what becomes apparent is that each party believes that they’re speaking the same ‘language’ and that they’re coming at it with the same thought process, when in reality, each has their own individual communication style and way of looking at things, which is only discovered through that discovery phase of getting to know someone and continuing on from there in reality.

Don’t confuse what you want to avoid with being the same as what you desire or need

May 28, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 3 Minutes

Having an awareness of how we truly want to feel and the path we want to walk, is crucial for ensuring that we don’t be and do things that inadvertently take us away from those very things. Too often, we focus on what we want to avoid and we neglect to realise that the actions and thinking that go into avoidance are not the same as what would go into being and doing the things that reflect our needs, expectations and desires.

For instance, wanting to be happy within a mutually fulfilling relationship that allows us to be our authentic self, is not the same as having the desire for a relationship based on fear of being alone or fear of having to step up.

Can we honestly say that we would use the same thinking and actions for a healthy relationship as we would to avoid being alone? Would we make the same choices?

One is about love, care, trust, respect, shared values, interdependence, and personal security, and the other… is about codependency (excessive emotional reliance on others), and this only compromises all of the things that go into making a healthy relationship as well as leaving us with a very fragile self-esteem.

Attraction is prompted by instincts: If we lack self-knowledge, our intuition is off, which means our instincts are off too

January 31, 2014 By NATALIE Reading Time: 3 Minutes

If you’re involved with someone who backs off once they feel in control of the dynamic and then blows hot when they’re uncertain about you and basically out of control, that’s someone who lacks self-awareness and is running off of their feelings. When they feel panicky as the intimacy builds, or their desire wanes as they become vulnerable or when normality kicks in and you each have to deal with life’s inevitables’s, they’ll respond to those feelings and bail / play up and not consider the fact that they have intimacy and problem solving issues. They’ll claim, yet again, that something wasn’t right with the relationship or their exes. They have typical responses to their feelings but don’t really dig too deep (if at all) for reasoning and knowledge that would help them read their feelings and make more authentic choices grounded in a healthy sense of self.

A lot of what we do with regards to attraction is driven by instinct, and our instincts and intuition are very much governed by how connected we are to ourselves.

Do we feel all of our feelings? Are we willing to be emotionally honest and listen to our own thoughts and feelings? Do we live by our values? Do we even know what our needs, expectations, and desires are and how to step up for most of these as well as how to healthily seek them in others? Are we responsible and accountable, or do we tend to look for external solutions to internal problems? Do we, for instance, blame it all on qualities or characteristics of our ex when our relationships break down or even claim that all of our exes are ‘psychos’? Do we act first, think later? Do we get carried away and place too much stock in our intentions and so end up Future Faking and Fast Forwarding? Do we edge or even dive out of relationships claiming that we don’t want a relationship and aren’t up for commitment and then have our ex’s feeling more than a tad confused when they see us prancing around with a new partner claiming that they’re the ‘love of our life’ in two shakes of a lamb’s tail?

You may recognise flip-flapping, hot and cold blowing exes who you’ve probably lost some sleep over wondering why they’re with someone else and not you. You may be blaming you when actually, it’s not about you.

If we’re disconnected from aspects of ourselves, our instincts will be off base and this means that until we’re aware of the patterns of thinking and behaviour that result from us running off what we believe to be the ‘correct’ information from our instincts, we’ll be driven primarily by feelings that we may not be aware of the origins of or may even be mislabeling them. The less we truly know about ourselves and the trickier we find it to have an honest conversation with us and be willing to look within, is the more muddled our intuition will be, which in turn will mess with our instincts, which will not only affect our fight or flight response, but also who we’re attracted to.

This means that not only do we have to stop owning other people’s behaviour to the extent that we do but that we also have to recognise that we ourselves are going to be making some unhealthy ‘instinctive’ decisions if we don’t know ourselves either and have our own emotional unavailability issues to deal with.

We cannot expect to be in a mutually fulfilling relationship with the landmarks – consistency, commitment, balance, progression and intimacy plus shared values – if we lack the self-knowledge that stems from knowing our own needs, expectations, wishes, feelings, and opinions. Not knowing these is why we wake up knee-deep in a relationship feeling hungry and recognising that there are issues around compatible values.

When we are willing to know ourselves more, we change not only who we’re attracted to (and why) but are also happier with the results of who we’re attracted to, instead of carrying the same baggage, beliefs, behaviours and attitudes and choosing similar people and then wondering why we’re getting the same results, and then lather, rinse, repeat.

Until we’re willing to recognise and represent ourselves, not only will we struggle to have self-trust, but we’ll be living off of our feelings and lamenting why we can’t make a healthy relationship with an unhealthy attraction. The two things don’t match! We won’t have the instincts to assert our boundaries, because we won’t have the self-awareness to use reasoning and knowledge to back us up. The way we treat our feelings will keep leading us astray.

Change doesn’t come without change. The most radical change you may have to make is being willing to know yourself more. That can only be a good thing.

Your thoughts?