Why Your Relationships Are Failing

Alright guys, welcome to part 2 of Hannah Talks About Things. So for this video I'm gonna stand, makes me a little less uncomfortable, but I am still going to take my glasses off so I don't have to see myself. So the second thing that I really wanted to talk about today is the article that I titled "Why Your Relationships Suck." This is gonna be a little shorter than my long tirade about shame and processing shame. But I just think that relationships are this one area of life that most of us struggle with. So alcoholic, addict, recovery, not in recovery, depression, anxiety, childhood trauma, no childhood trauma— most people struggle in relationships. Now in the last video, I talked about how we accept the love we think we deserve, which is a quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. So what I've noticed— again, all of this kind of research, which is very informal, comes from my personal or professional experience— what I've noticed is that all Oftentimes if we have gotten into one bad relationship, and bad can mean whatever it means to you, right? Toxic, unhealthy, abusive in any level, being with someone that's emotionally unavailable, always choosing people that just don't have the capacity to give us what we need. If we have been in one of those, chances are we've been in multiple because we are so much more likely to recreate these same patterns of behavior, which goes back to my first video about shame narratives, right? If I don't believe I'm worthy of love, and you come along and you love me and you are healthy and you are loving, what am I going to do? I'm going to sabotage it. I'm going to push it away. If you've ever asked yourself the question, why am I still with this person? Sorry, that was a— I was going to say typo, but it's not a typo because I'm talking. That was an error. If you've ever asked yourself, why are they with me? Why do you love me? That has nothing to do with them and everything to do with your lack of self-worth. And so in the relationships article, Why Your Relationships Suck, I talk about the different kinds of people in relationships. And obviously I've whittled it down to be like really specific, and you may not relate with any of these people. But my favorite one to talk about is the kind of person that says, "I'm just bad at relationships." You know, "I'm bad at commitment," or, "Oh, I just, I pick the wrong people." And so instead of just stopping there, which is what most humans do, like, "Oh, this is just who I am." No, it's not. It's how you are and it's how you've been. That doesn't mean you have to keep being that way. So we need to look at why. What is your self-image? Have you ever just stopped and asked yourself, "What do I think that I'm worthy of? What do I think that I'm deserving of?" I heard someone say last night, you know, I have this great boyfriend, but I don't deserve him. You know, I don't deserve love. I don't deserve happiness. In my head, I was like, who says? Like, who says you don't deserve that? And the reality is that maybe we've been told that throughout our lives, like, you suck, you're not smart enough, you're never gonna be with someone that loves you. But for the most part, we construct our own barriers saying, I'm not worthy, I'm not deserving because I've done X, Y, and Z, or because I put you on this pedestal. I think that I'm less than and I don't deserve you. And while that may sound like you're being humble, you're not. Because being humble is not— and this is not my original idea at all— being humble is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less. So it's still unhealthy ego if you feel like you're the biggest piece of shit in the room and you feel like you're worse than everyone else. That's just as much unhealthy ego as feeling like you're better than everyone else. So it's just something to think about, especially for my friends in recovery who are like, "Oh, I need to be humble. I can't say that I love myself and I can't acknowledge my strength. I'm just, you know, I'm just a piece of shit. I'm not special." Like, fuck that. I know I'm swearing a lot more today, but whatever. Fuck that. You are special. We are all unique. It doesn't mean that we can't benefit from the same kinds of things, but at the same time, like, what's going to help you recover emotionally from whatever pain you've gone through might look different for different people. So that first case conceptualization is, "Oh, I'm just bad at relationships." The reality is that you weren't made that way. Right? It wasn't like you came out of the womb— this is just my opinion— destined to be awful at relationships. There could be a myriad of reasons why relationships have been difficult for you, or commitment has been terrifying for you. I'm a child of divorce, right? And so I have this schema, have had this schema, which is another fancy clinical word for like worldview, that all relationships fail and that's just how it is. I didn't know that, right? But so going through my life, after every single breakup I went through, it was like, oh yeah, valid, valid. Dallin, all relationships fail because I'm a child of divorce. I don't believe in love. I don't believe in commitment. I don't believe in marriage. That was my narrative in the past, and I don't feel that way anymore. Um, but I do feel like if I don't work on certain things, then I will recreate the same patterns and I will sabotage over and over and over, just like I talked about in that last video. So that's one of the reasons, right? Let's say your parents got divorced, and so inadvertently you don't believe in love, marriage, sustainable relationships, commitment, etc. Maybe you watched a parent cheat on another parent, and so you just feel like that's what you're gonna do because you over-identify with a parent, right? There's so many different reasons that we can start to really internalize this core narrative of I'm bad at this. Or maybe, you know, I talked about in the last article, like, getting dumped when I was 16, and it's like, trivial as that is, at the same time, like, it did something to me, or I did something to myself as a result of that experience where I was like, oh my 'Oh my God, I don't ever want to feel this level of pain again, so I'm going to put this massive wall up.' And I'm going to do one of two things. I'm going to push you away so that at least I have control of the situation, and if our relationship ends, it's because I wanted it to. Or I'm only going to attract people and be with people that I don't really feel that serious about, which I haven't done in like years and years and years. But in the past, like especially in college, like I would date people that, you know, worst case scenario, if it didn't work out, it wouldn't be the end of the world because I still had my wall up. And that kept me safe and protected. So for those of you that are like, "Oh, I'm just bad at relationships," like, stop. The only common denominator in all of your relationships is you. And so rather than looking at what was wrong with all of those different people, maybe start to turn that huge magnifying glass inwards and say, "What is it in me that is drawn to these kinds of people?" A. Or B, "What is it in me that is blocking me from intimacy?" and vulnerability and allowing myself to truly connect with another person. Often it's fear, right? But it's easy to be like, "Oh, just let it go." My least favorite thing that anyone can say to another person is like, "Why don't you just let it go?" Like, thanks. That's like telling someone with clinical depression to just not be sad or like telling an active alcoholic, "Have you tried not drinking?" Like, thanks pal, you just totally cured me. So next time you want to help and someone's going through pain or going through this like paralyzing fear, don't tell them to let it go. If it was that easy, they would have done it. One of my favorite quotes in the world is by the Persian poet Rumi, and I quote it every single time I lecture, every time I run a group counseling session. I'm like, huh, I'm like in there. Excuse me. Hopefully I can edit this out, but my editing skills are like not so great. So the Persian poet Rumi says, your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. So I'm gonna say that one more time, a little bit slower, and I'm— a little bit more slowly, and I'm going to kind of deconstruct it. So your task is not to seek for love, right? Our job is not to go find the right person. Your task is merely to look inside and seek and find all the barriers that you have built against love, which is actually really empowering. I mean, it's kind of deflating because it's like, wait a minute, I thought I just needed to find the perfect person and they would fix me and I would fix them and it would be fine. No. Our task is to say, okay, what in me has been blocking me from emotional health? What has been blocking me from being vulnerable with another person? For me, it was fear of a relationship ending. It was this really core belief that I was unworthy. Again, go back to the shame video to hear more about that. And it was also like a defense mechanism, right? A safety blanket was to keep my walls up because God forbid I'm ever truly authentic with you, because what if you don't like what you see, you know. And again, that has so much less to do with the other person and so much more to do with me not liking what I see internally, or me not knowing who I am and my identity and self-worth being contingent on anyone and anything outside of myself. Again, social media, which I touch on in the relationship article— social media is so corrosive to our self-worth because what we do is we lose our identity by promoting this highlight reel of our lives, and our identity can become contingent on the amount of likes that we get. I said in my last vlog, like, you know what, whether or not you like this video, I'm free. Like, yeah, I'm still human. And I ended up checking over and over and over if anyone was liking and commenting on my vlog because it was so vulnerable. And then I had to take a step back and remember, like, A, it's probably not gonna go viral and that's okay, but B, whether or not you get something out of this, I still get to live my life and practice these concepts and these techniques and all these different things to make myself as healthy, healthy as possible, you know? And like, whether or not people like my video does not make or break who I am. I am as a person, which is why it's helping me to get more comfortable making these, because I'm no longer paralyzed by the fear of like, what if I don't sound good? Or like, what if I look weird? Like, I, I mean, I'm still like, I'm not wearing my glasses because I don't want to look at myself because then I'll get focused on what I look like rather than what I'm saying. So in any case, social media is also really corrosive in relationships. I have this working theory, and it's super judgmental, that when I see a couple that is constantly posting about each other and their relationship. In my mind, the more you post, the less secure you are in the relationship. That might piss a lot of people off that are watching this, but like, you know, I heard someone say once, "My job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted." So that— kind of like taking that on. Like, if you just pause and check your motives for a second, why do you need the world to know everything about your relationship and everything you do? I mean, I just got back from Spain with my boyfriend, and of course I like posted pictures and stuff, but I didn't do it until after the trip. And I asked myself too, like, I paused— it was like a week after, and I was like, should we post those pictures? Because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't like, I need the world to see how happy I am. Like, I'm not saying like you shouldn't post pictures ever, but I'm saying pause and check your motives. So I mean, I know people that will get in these huge blowout fights with their significant others and then post this thing about how grateful they are once they make up, like how grateful they are for their significant other. And I'm just like, Who are you trying to prove that to, you know? And so I think that's another thing we need to think about in relationships. I've been in relationships before where I didn't want to break up with the person even though I knew in my gut that like that was a thing because of our like social media presence and following. Like, what? This is like a while ago, but still, it's, it's really interesting. And so I'm— again, like, this is not super organized and it's pretty scattered, but this is how I think and speak and write. But basically, to summarize, why your relationships suck— we can whittle it down to a lack of relationship with yourself, you know, as kind of corny as that sounds. And looking at what barriers have I built against healthy relationships? Why am I only attracted to people that treat me like shit, right? That's a really common narrative I hear, you know. Why am I— why do I get bored when the honeymoon stage wears off and I seek excitement elsewhere? Or I try to create fights and arguments so that there's something for me to fix, or there's something like adrenaline. There's so many reasons for that. Go to therapy. Like, I cannot stress that enough because we can't think our way out of these patterns. Again, like, believe me, I have tried. So anyway, this is an 11-minute video, so it is 20 minutes shorter than my last one. Um, and again, it's just kind of like a stream of consciousness about relationships, but I hope you got something out of it. And the cool thing is, if you didn't, um, You know, I do care, but like, it's not gonna ruin my day. Alright, bye!