It’s Not You, It’s Me: Getting to the Core of Your Relationship Saboteurs

As we progress through Part 1 of The Turned-On Couple, which is focused on love and relationship dynamics, you’re getting an idea of how many aspects of your relationship can impact your sex life.

Building a strong, secure foundation as a couple allows for honesty, trust and the security to explore and grow together.

Many couples will begin coaching with the goal of creating a better sex life. What they often discover is that sex is just one branch of their relationship tree.

Power dynamics, conflict management, communication skills, attachment patterns, are also branches of that tree. A relationship is one beautiful system of interdependent parts, working together to create harmony and sustain love.

So, let’s look in the mirror and consider our old coping strategies. What are they, and how do they undermine our relationships today?

Most couples who seek out intimacy and relationship coaching have one thing in common: they want to know how to get their partner to change.

They’ve become so used to paying attention to their partner’s shortcomings that they’ve forgotten — or have chosen to ignore — their own 50 percent of the relationship equation.

Getting to the core of our own strategies and behavior patterns in relationships is crucial if a couple seeks lasting love. It not only improves their intimate relationship, but every relationship in their lives.

Our patterns of relating to others run deep. Most of us don’t recognize how those patterns unconsciously dictate our behavior and impact those around us.

We want a better relationship, but rarely do we delve into the core strategies to assess the role they play in our relationship with our partner.

Chronic conflict, finger-pointing, complaining, judging, and blaming are all byproducts of unhealthy patterns and old programming.

Before I work with a couple on their sensual and sexual life, I ask them to spend time doing some core relationship coaching with me. Understanding the patterns partners bring to their relationship is often the key that unlocks the door to deeper love, better sex, and authentic desire.

What do I mean by core relationship coaching?

We’re all born into environments that challenge us, to a greater or lesser degree.

As children, we quickly develop strategies to cope with those challenges (and even survive). Even in the best families, no child escapes the experiences of fear, insecurity, sadness, and self-doubt.

These challenges are built into our human development. Pull out an old photo of yourself under the age of 10 and take a good look into the eyes of that child. That child (you) had already developed complex coping strategies when that photo was taken.

That 10 year old had formed belief systems about their competence, and their self-worth. They have already begun to armor themselves from the pain that comes from being human.

In the beginning, our coping strategies appear to be our helpers. They protect us from the small pains and come to our rescue with the larger pains.

But, here the thing. These childhood strategies can develop over time to become our greatest saboteurs. Let’s use bullying as an example.

If we were bullied at home or on the playground, our inner helper may have shown up as introversion, to keep us alone and thus away from the threat of others. It may have shown up as aggressiveness, to fight back, perhaps becoming bullies ourselves. We may have learned that pleasing someone was a strategy to ensure that others will like us and keep us safe. Our inner helper may have shown us that hyper-vigilance would keep us safe, so we became suspicious and mistrustful of other’s motives. or perhaps identifying as a victim would help us to feel validated gaining the attention or sympathy we feel we deserve.

Our innate ability to survive as children was tailored to our environment and sometimes modeled by those closest to us. By observing our parents, our siblings, and our community, we learned ways to cope with the challenges life threw at us. The fact that we grew into adults proves our helpers did their job.

Question: When do our adaptive childhood helpers turn into our maladaptive adult saboteurs?

Answer: When the same strategies that helped us cope as children create obstruction to intimacy and connection in our adult relationships.

What literally felt life-threatening when we were eight years old no longer poses the same threat to us as adults. We may have successfully protected ourselves from the pain of bullying, but we’ve consciously or unconsciously decided to keep those helpers around long after they were needed.

Our childhood protector is no longer our ally. It’s now one of our saboteurs that reminds us with old painful memories and feeds us with out-dated beliefs.

Even though we no longer experience bullying on the playground, our strategy of being introverted, aggressive, pleasing, suspicious, or victimized has become an ingrained part of how we operate in our relationships today.

What was once adaptive and helpful in protecting us at eight years of age has become maladaptive and harmful in our adult relationships.

Until we recognize the nature of our maladaptive strategies and how they sabotage our relationships, we’re locked into unconscious programming and reactivity that can cause a lifetime of conflict and disconnection.

If you’ve ever seen a profile photo of an iceberg, your maladaptive programming is the large mass of ice below the water line. It’s huge and, as we know, not visible from the surface.

This is what relationship coaching uncovers. It reveals what’s under the surface and gives us powerful tools to clear our life of old programming that no longer serves us.

It helps support self-awareness and self-compassion by acknowledging the usefulness our old helpers once offered, and it welcomes in new programming and belief systems that support harmony in our adult relationships.

Relationship coaching shows us we’re always able to choose our thoughts. It’s just that most of us are so adept at choosing the negative thoughts, we may have forgotten we have a choice in the matter!

Insights empower us, but it’s what we do with them that generates actual, tangible differences in our day-to-day life with our partner.

That’s why my couples incorporate brief daily practices that rewire neural pathways in the brain. Just like going to the gym to increase our physical strength, we build emotional strength and capacity, replacing old limiting patterns with the wisdom that comes from awareness and practice.

Relationship coaching is like looking at your partnership through a brand-new lens. When conflict arises my coaching couples approach it as an opportunity to use their new tools, rather than more proof that they’re their with the wrong person.

They draw on a common language to understand themselves and each other better, and they realize (often for the first time) that happy, intimate relationships aren’t mysterious accidents that only happen for the lucky ones. Happy relationships are grown through education, self-awareness, humility, empathy, and a whole host of tools you never learned in sex education.

It’s ok, no one teaches this stuff in high school. I wish they did. But if you work with a couples coach at some point, you’ll discover that building a happy relationship is not about luck, it’s about learning.

If my weekly writing is valuable to your relationship, and you can afford the price of a cup of coffee once a month, I’d be so grateful for your paid support.

See you next week where we’ll learn about The Curse of Confirmation Bias.

And if you want to learn how Relationship and Intimacy Coaching couple benefit your life with your partner, let’s talk.