Happy Friday!
Last week I spoke about red flags coming up in a relationship and how sometimes we don’t pay attention to them until the time is right.
Today I want to bring up the topic of being the toxic person in the relationship.
And I don’t mean that person is a bad person, but it might be that due to resistances they are holding onto it has brought up toxic elements.
Let me give you an example.
I had a client, let’s call her Janet (her real name is confidential). Janet is a loving and generous person who is very caring and attentive to those she cares about.
However, she had a lot of resistances, some of them included:
- Insecurities about whether her partner really loved her.
- Fear that he would leave her.
- Shame about herself, her age and her lifestyle.
- Childhood experiences where her parents had told her she wasn’t good enough and wouldn’t get anywhere.
This led her to behave in a toxic way in her relationship.
She would play games with her partner so that he could ‘prove’ his love for her, like pretending to be pregnant.
She would put him down or constantly fight with him and want him to change.
All this behaviour came out of her resistances.
When we worked together and she started to let go of these and started increasing her self confidence and self-esteem and accept and love herself, everything changed, including her relationship.
She was able to accept her partner’s love and accept him for who he was, no more trying to catch him out.
She was able to turn up in her relationship as her true self, no more hiding and pretending.
They were able to talk about when she was getting triggered and work through it together (which helped him work through some of his resistances too).
The relationship was transformed and strengthened and she no longer was that toxic partner.
I know this is a long email, but I want to get that message across that we all can exhibit toxic behaviours at some point due to our resistances. (Yes, some people are toxic and won’t change and we want to avoid those people).
Noticing and realising you are behaving in a toxic or unhealthy way is the start to changing.
From there you can look at what is causing that behaviour.
It is that you are triggering a limiting belief or a past experience?
Is it fear of something?
Is it that you are taking out your own lack of self-love on someone else?
Once you know what’s behind the behaviour you can work through them and change how you behave.
It can be really hard to admit that our behaviour is toxic or unhealthy to the relationship (and ourselves), if you are recognising you have stuff to work on, reply to this email and we can look at how to work on it.