Is Your Anxiety Sabotaging Your Relationship? (Matthew Hussey)

Are you sabotaging your relationship? Have you in the past been responsible for sabotaging a relationship? It's okay if you have. We've all done it, haven't we? We've all done something that we wish we hadn't. Said something in a way where we think, God, if I'd have thought that out more, if I could go back, I would have said that differently. I would have had that argument differently. Or maybe if I'd have approached it in that manner, we would never have had an argument in the first place. If you are the kind of person who perhaps leans into an anxious attachment style, we've all heard, well, many of us, I suppose, have heard that concept in the book Attached about the three different attachment styles, avoidant, secure, and anxious. If we find ourself with that anxious attachment style, then one of the things that we can be guilty of is seeing something that we don't like or perhaps is just reminiscent of an experience we've had in the past that we didn't like and now this is triggering us in a certain way. Our brain very quickly concocts a story about what's happening. It could be that your boyfriend goes to a party and doesn't contact you for perhaps most of the night whilst at that party and the anxious part of your brain latches onto this and starts immediately calculating what this means. We have this amazing ability as human beings to construct story very quickly. I think it's one of the best and worst parts, I suppose, of being a human being is that we have this supercomputer that makes deductions and calculations at this extraordinary rate. And in this situation, especially if we're someone who has a kind of anxious mindset, we can make lots of very rapid calculations about what this thing means. They're at this party and they're not texting me because they've met someone and they're flirting with this person and now we get jealous and angry and hurt and that leads to the feelings of I'm not enough. This person is going to abandon me. This person is going to hurt me. This person is selfish. They're a terrible person. They're not who I thought they were. All of this can happen before we've even got a chance to talk to this person and find out what the situation is. We might actually talk to that person and they go I was just with my friends. Our brain can take a small piece of information, a small piece of data, and the supercomputer splices that data with our demons, with our wounds, with the experiences we've had in the past, our biases based on the ways that we've been hurt and it uses that to form the DNA, the story. There's a Jurassic Park element in there, Harry. They take the dino DNA and they need to complete it with something else so they splice it with frog and boom, dinosaur. That was a pretty good pterodactyl. What this means is we very quickly start to have these emotions based on not reality but the story that we've created in our minds. So when our partner comes back to us, we're ready for a fight because that pain that we're feeling, the fear, the hurt, the sadness, the I'm not enough of it all has been converted into anger and anger means we now arm ourselves with our weapons and we attack. Now, we all have our favorite weapon, right? Your favorite weapon might be giving someone the silent treatment. Your favorite weapon might be passive aggression. Your favorite weapon might be sarcasm. Your favorite weapon might be attacking someone head on. Now in that moment, what happens is, unless someone is incredibly perceptive, which it would, I suppose, be unreasonable to expect our partner to be this perceptive, they don't see the hurt that's going on beneath that. All they see is you brandishing your weapons and them trying to stop themselves from being decapitated or shot. In other words, they're in danger of sustaining damage themselves right now if we attack their character, their judgment, their intentions. If we call them bad at their core, then they're dodging bullets. You can't save someone else when you're dodging bullets yourself. And of course, this is one of the great ironies that we don't get to see how they could show up for us, how they could help come together with us to heal our wounds because they're too busy focusing on defending themselves. What it turns into is just animosity that blinds both parties to what's really going on. A lot of relationships end not because someone couldn't handle our wounds but because they couldn't deal with our weapons. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because a lot of people have this feeling, it's almost like an entitlement, that someone has to be able to take me as I am. They have to be able to deal with me, baggage and all. There's a grain of truth to that in that we do want someone who can come along and help heal us. Great relationships should help heal past wounds in some way because it's two people who make each other feel safe, feel loved. But what we can't do is blame someone for not being able to handle our weapons. We have to take personal responsibility for communicating our wounds in a vulnerable and real and authentic way that doesn't attack the other person but gives them a chance to truly show up for us. If all we do every time we're hurt or scared is try to wound our partner, we'll never see what their true potential could be in coming to our aid. Thanks so much for watching everyone. And by the way, so many of you are still not subscribed to the YouTube channel. Hit subscribe so that you never miss a video and I'll see you next week.