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S1 EP13 – The One Major Cause of Relationship Problems

Episode Summary

What if there really is ONE major cause of relationship problems, one issue that if you address, would change everything? The good news and the bad news is – there is! The good news is that it makes it easier to understand why you might be having problems in your relationship. The challenging news is that to resolve the issue takes a deep personal commitment to heal.

Transcript

Hi everyone dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding podcast. So today I want to talk about the one major cause of relationship problems. I’ve been working with couples for, I think about 53 years now. And I have seen over and over again, that there actually is one major cause of relationship problems. One issue that if you truly address and heal would change everything.

This issue is self abandonment

And the good news and understanding this is that it makes it easier to understand why you’re having problems in your relationship. And the bad news is that your resolve this issue takes a deep, personal commitment

To heal. So let’s

Take a look at the various aspects of self-abandonment, what it is, why it causes almost all the problems in relationships. There are many different ways in which we can abandon ourselves. And I’m going to go through these six major ways that most people do abandon themselves. Not in all of them, sometimes just in one or two, I’m going to be speaking about the emotional, physical, spiritual, financial, relational, and organizational one or more of these might be having a very negative effect on your relationship.

So let’s first talk about emotional self-abandonment. We emotionally abandoned ourselves in four major ways. One of them that almost everybody has learned to do is to judge ourselves, judge ourselves rather than accept ourselves. And of course, when we judge ourselves, we feel bad. And then we have a tendency to either project that self-judgment onto others onto a partner, or to expect the partner to make us feel better.

We’re making ourselves feel bad with ourself judgment. And now it’s up to our partner to make us feel lovable and worthy. We may abandon ourselves by ignoring our feelings and staying up in our head rather than being present in our body, especially for the deeper painful feelings, such as loneliness and heart heartbreak, heartache, grief, helplessness over others. These are very, very hard feelings to feel which we learned to avoid when we were children, because there was no that we could make manage these big feelings.

And so we learned to cover them over in various ways. And one of them was to stay up in our head cause our feelings are in our body, not in our head. And another way that we learn to avoid these big feelings, which we all learned was to turn to various addictions, to numb out feelings, such as anxiety and depression and guilt and shame and anger that come from actually judging ourselves and ignoring our feelings.

We make ourselves feel very badly when we judge ourselves, then we ignore it. And then we numb out further with various addictions. And also we use addictions to cover over those deeper core, painful feelings. And finally, we make others responsible for our feelings. Like I said, we judge ourselves, we feel bad. And then we hand over to our partner, the responsibility for making us feel worthy and lovable and safe. And that’s actually another addiction and nobody wants the responsibility of us.

They, they might take it for a while. They might caretake, but eventually they feel kind of drained. And also if they’re going to take responsibility for you, they’re going to expect you to take responsibility for them. And since nobody lives inside of us, nobody’s with our feelings, nobody but us can take responsibility for our future and were the causes. So many of our feelings when we judge ourselves and step in our head and turn to addictions, we’re causing the anxiety and depression and guilt and shame and anger and aloneness and emptiness and jealousy and resentment.

And when we feel the core painful feelings, we have to learn to show up for that with compassion. Nobody can tell you, take those away from us. And so when we are ignoring our feelings and turning to various addictions in these different ways, we’re, we’re making ourselves feel worse. These big ways of abandoning ourselves. So once we emotionally abandoned ourselves and then make others responsible for our feelings, yeah.

Then we have to try and control it, to get them, to love us and make us feel worthy. And we may try to control with anger and blame and criticism with compliance, giving ourselves up, shutting down, withdrawing all of these forms of, of trauma, trying to control creates many problems, bumps in relationships. Yeah. Then we might resist being controlled. Nobody likes to be controlled.

So we try and control not being controlled called by resistance. And that also causes a lot of problems in relationships. So I hope you can begin to see the big problems in relationships that emotional self-abandonment can. Cause. So now let’s talk about financial self-abandonment. If you are refusing to take care of yourself financially and instead expecting your partner to take financial responsibility for you, this can create problems.

It’s not a problem. If it’s okay with your partner. If the two of you have an agreement that maybe you’re going to be staying home, taking care of kids or taking care of the house or whatever, and, and it’s fine with your partner to take financial care of you. It’s not a problem, but I’ve worked with a lot of people where they get together. And one of the persons that could be the, the man or woman, or it could be in a gay relationship, but one of them decides they don’t want to work anymore without getting the agreement of the other person.

And this of course creates a huge problem in relationships. It can create a lot of conflict where the one person feels taken advantage of used burdened with the responsibility and the other person is just spending the money or doing whatever they want with their time and, and, and not having an agreement about that. And that can cause a lot of resentment in relationships. Then let’s talk about organizational self-abandonment.

So this relates to taking responsibility for your time and your space. Like not always being late and not being a clutter. Now this is, this can cause a lot of problems. If one of you is an on-time person and the other isn’t or one of you is a neat person. And the other person is a messy person. So these might not seem big problems at the beginning. Like let’s say you go out with somebody and you notice that their car’s a mess or their house is a mess.

And you’re a neat person. And you think, Oh, well, you know, not a big deal, but then you live together and it becomes a very big deal. It becomes really annoying to have clutter all over the place. And it becomes really annoying to always be waiting for your partner. And the more you get upset about it, the more your partner goes into resistance. So if you’re a person who’s consistently late and consistently not, not taking care of your space,

This may be causing huge p
roblems in your relationship problems that like I said, they might not have been big problems at the beginning of the relationship, but over time they can cause very, very big problems. I’ve actually seen relationships end over clutter in the house. For example, not so much over time because people can learn to give their partner the wrong time. Like, like one couple I worked with the partner learned to tell their, their spouse an hour ahead of time.

And then they would be on time. But you know, it’s, it’s not good partnership to not care about the effect that your behavior has on your partner. And so very often there’s, there’s an underlying narcissism in the wound itself. We’ve all got narcissism in the wound itself. We’re where it’s about us. And we don’t care about the other person. And we get to do what we want. That that’s different than narcissistic personality disorder. We’ve all got what I call garden variety, narcissism, where at times we’re just not caring about the effect that our behavior has on others.

And, and time is one of those things like keeping people waiting and not caring about the fact that they, they have, they’re busy too. And, and they don’t like to be kept waiting probably any more than you do, but not caring about that or not caring about the effect that clutter has on your partner. And so of course, that can cause a big problems in relationships. So now I want to talk about physical.

Self-abandonment let’s say that you just don’t want to take care of yourself, physically. You, you, you eat badly, you don’t exercise and maybe you’re causing health problems and your partner might be feeling resentful at having to take care of you, your, your physical self-abandonment eating sugar, eating junk food, not exercising, being too overweight, not getting enough sleep in causing various health problems.

Not only has negative consequences for you regarding your health and wellbeing, but it also has consequences for your partner. And it can certainly lead to conflict and power struggles. And then you might go into resistance. Your, your partner might feel scared that, that you’re going to get sick. That you’re going to die. Especially if there’s children and start to try and have control over you to eat better or, or bringing better food in the house and you might go into resistance.

And so that can cause very big battles. Jack. One of the things that when, when I’m talking to people about me eating a partner is, is to be on the same page for things like that. Because I mean, if you’re both eating badly, then probably you both gonna get second. And, and you’re going to have to deal with that. But if one of you eats really well and exercises and takes good care of yourself and doesn’t put on a lot of weight and the other doesn’t take good care of yourself, that’s going to create a lot of problems in the relationship.

So let’s talk about self-abandonment within a relationship relational self-abandonment if you don’t speak up for yourself in your relationship and you either give yourself up or you resist being controlled, you’re eroding the love in the relationship. When you abandon yourself to another person through compliance or resistance, you, you create a lack of trust that can create conflict or resentment.

Sometimes people who give themselves up a lot, they kind of Pat themselves on the back. I did this. I was a caretaker for everybody in my life before I learned inner bonding. And I thought I was being so loving by giving myself up and taking care of everybody else. But of course, eventually you feel drained. Eventually I got sick. Eventually you feel angry and resentful that you’re giving and you’re feeling drained. And, and the other person is just taking, but they, they don’t know that that’s happening.

They think you’re giving because you love them. And not because you’re trying to control, getting love back. And so giving yourself and character and caretaking are forms of control, where you’re giving yourself up to try and get love back. Now, resistance can be a very deep issue where you might’ve learned in your family, your family, maybe your mom or dad or somebody else in your family was very controlling and you didn’t want to be controlled. So you just go into resistance and your partner can’t ask anything of you.

They might ask you to like, do the dishes. And maybe you say, yeah, but you forget, or you do them badly, or you just don’t do them to get back at your partner for something. Cause you just don’t want to be controlled. And this is extremely frustrating in a relationship when one partner can’t make a request because we have to be able to request things in our relationships and one partner can’t request something because the other partner’s just going to go into resistance or, or do it badly or forget or say, well, yeah, I mean, what’s the big deal I just forgot.

And so this can create a lot of conflict and resentment in relationships. So now I want to talk about spiritual. Self-abandonment what happens in a codependent relationship is that you make your partner, your dependable source of love rather than turning to your higher source for your dependable source of love.

And you place a very big burden on your partner. When your intent in the relationship is to get love from your partner, rather than to learn to tune into your higher source of love, which is here for all of us, so that you can share love. Then you’re going to be pulling on your partner for attention or approval or a time or sex.

So when you don’t take responsibility for learning how to connect with a higher source of comfort and sustenance and, and, and, and love and wisdom, your neediness, your emptiness can create a lot of conflict in the relationship.

So i
t’s vitally important that each of us learn to access the love that is all around us. This love is always here, and this is a big part of what you’re going to learn. If you learn in practice inner bonding, I really encourage you to, to get on the website, get on the inner bonding site and begin to learn the process, begin to learn how to access that higher source of love and wisdom. That’s always here.

And so many people enter relationships to get love. They feel empty inside. They feel unworthy. They feel unlovable. They think this other person is going to fill them up with love and complete them. But you see, we attracted our common level of woundedness of, of self-abandonment or our common level of self love and self responsibility. So if you’re abandoning yourself in these ways, you’ve attracted either you’re going to attract, or you’ve already attracted a partner, that’s doing the same thing.

So if you’re in a relationship, your partner is going to be pulling on you and expecting you to give yourself up and give love to them in various ways, just as you’re doing with them. That may seem like it works for a while, but it doesn’t work for very long. And, and the thousands of couples that I’ve worked with who are having a lot of problems, or maybe even on the edge of divorce, this is the issue is that they’re not taking responsibility. They’re abandoning themselves in one or more of these ways.

They don’t know how to fill themselves up with love. They don’t know how to love themselves and take responsibility for themselves. And this is what the inner bonding process teaches you about. So it’s so vitally important for you to learn, to love yourself rather than abandon yourself. When you decide to learn to love yourself, rather than continue to abandon yourself in one or more of these ways, you will discover how to create a loving relationship with your partner or how to move into a loving relationship and how to have loving relationships with everybody in your life.

And so I just so encourage you to learn inner bonding. It’s such a powerful way of learning to love yourself. I also encourage you to go on our website, click on the link that says the 30 day course for wildly, deeply joyously in love, which will help all of your relationships, any relationship, especially your relationship with the partner, but with anybody in, in your life.

This course is very powerful. And even if you’re the only one in a relationship doing the inner bonding process and learning how to take responsibility for yourself, learning how to love yourself, even if you’re the only one doing it, you can make a huge shift in the system because all relationships have systems. And when you shift your into the system, you shift the entire system and you have a very good chance of that system becoming more loving.

And I also encourage you very soon in a month or so that there’s going to be a course that you can take about learning, to access your higher guidance. It’s going to be called unlocking your inner wisdom. And so I encourage you to look for that soon to really learn how to connect with that higher source of wisdom, because we that’s where we get love. We don’t manufacture love.

We open to love and we allow it in. And so we all need to learn how to take spiritual responsibility for ourselves. Open to that. Love, fill ourselves with love so that we have love to share with others. So once again, I encourage you go to inner bonding.com. If you don’t know inner bonding, take the free course. There’s so many free articles on there. There’s many, many courses that you can take that will be extremely helpful for you, not only for yourself and for your health and wellbeing, but for all of your relationships, I send all of you blessings.

I send all of you love for a wonderful day, a wonderful week, a wonderful life.

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