Do you keep finding friendships that make you feel uncomfortable or taken advantage of? Do you continue to choose relationships that bring out the worst in you, instead of the best? Did you unload your manipulative friend three years ago only to find a new one a year later? Have you sworn you’ll change only to end up back in the same spot?
If this sounds painfully familiar, it’s time to take a look at some of the relationship patterns you may not even realize you’ve gotten yourself into.
These patterns tend to combine 3 basic things:
1. Who we pick to have in our life.
2. How we interact with them.
3. How we allow them to treat us.
Understanding where your negative patterns come from and how they were created is key to finding ways to break them. Forgiving yourself will be an important part of this process as you work on understanding where your thoughts, feelings and behaviors are rooted.
If it’s a pattern you’ve repeated multiple times you should be able to pinpoint some of the traits, characteristics, and symptoms.
Secondly, identify some of the warning signs you’ve overlooked in the past so you can quickly spot them when they come up again in current and future relationships.
Next, clarify how you want to feel. What kind of relationships are you really hoping for with your family? Your friendships? Your romantic relationship? Dig deep. What is it you are truly longing for? What are the feelings that would help you happily stay in a relationship forever?
Lastly, take the lessons learned from your past relationships and move forward. If you find yourself sliding back into bad relationships, take time to reflect on it and correct the course.
From the outside, it’s often easy to see how people repeat patterns over and over again. But what is so simple to see in someone else can be nearly impossible when it comes to ourselves.
If this is you, this is where therapy comes in. We all have blind spots and it’s how we get stuck in repetitive patterns. Therapy helps in not only in exposing those blind spots, but taking steps to change the negative patterns.
I’d love to hear from you if this resonated. Leave a comment letting me know of any bad relationship patterns you’d like to break.
To your success,
Carrie
