Is Your Anxiety Sabotaging Your Relationships?

Hello there, pickles and peppers. We are back with the love life podcast. I am your host, Stephen Hussey, and we are going to have calm chat about our old friend today, anxiety. Specifically, anxiety that could mess up your relationships and triggers from old wounds that can come back and turn pointed like their own sharp, rapier-like weapons on your current partner. If you're not careful. But if, of course, you follow the wise words of my brother Matthew Hussey in this clip, then you will begin the journey of hopefully healing some of those wounds, maybe figuring out where they come from, locating the source, and moving forward with a better knowledge of how to avoid those problems in the future. So we are going to pass over to Matthew. Before I do, I still want to hear about your New Year's habits, your 30-day habits. We've had some coming in. I'm going to read some on the next episode. This is basically for those of you who didn't hear the last episode. I'm talking about 30-day habits you could adopt right now to kick 2021 into a new gear straight from the beginning. So, what's like two to three habits you could take on in the next 30 days? They can be tiny, they can be cleaning your bathroom, They could be going outside for a walk. They could be one of my ones, which is moisturizing and doing four yoga sessions in the next 30 days. Whatever it is, I want to hear. Just if it could improve your life 1%, 2%, it would just make you feel good each day. Something productive. It can be anything you want. But let me know. You can email that podcast@matthewhuston.com or you can DM me on Instagram @stephenhhussey, just shoot me a DM and let me know what your two habits are and yeah, we'll talk about them. Okay, that is it from me for now. I'm gonna jump back on after Matthew's speaking because I think there's some a few things I wanna kind of sum up and add to the conversation he starts in this episode. So, I'll see you on the other side.

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, while 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 gonna abandon me. This person is gonna 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. It's sort of, there's a Jurassic Park element in there, Harry, you know, they take the dino DNA and they, you know, need to complete it with something else so they splice it with frog, you know, and boom, dinosaur. That was 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 one 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, right? 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, right? 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. oh, there it is. There it is. 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.

Hello, it's Stephen here back in the room. So that's a lot to chew on all that stuff Matt said there about your deep inner wounds and not lashing out at your partner. I think there's some really interesting things to sum up from that if you want some like nifty takeaways. These are kind of my own notes if you like from that. The first big one is just labeling. the idea that you can't, if you have to be really careful in when you're sort of triggered by an argument or something you've experienced before in a previous relationship, you have to be so careful about labeling your current partner and saying that they're being disloyal, they're untrustworthy, they're being selfish. Because especially if that's something that we've dealt with previously, it's often likely that we're calling them Something that we're actually scared of happening ourselves. But even if it hasn't actually happened yet, we might just say, I knew you couldn't be trusted. You're untrustworthy. They may not have actually proven they're untrustworthy at all, but that may be our big fear. So I think we have to be really careful of labeling. The second thing is keeping your past relationships out of the house of your present relationship. If you think of your current relationship like a big old house and you're always creating memories in that house and different rooms with different parts of that relationship, you have to kind of decide what comes through the door of that and what doesn't. And one thing that hopefully doesn't come through the door is your ex or your ex relationship. And I think just having a rule that you're not gonna allow that that previous dynamic you had some unhealthy, some toxic dynamic, some deep wound or big fear. Not saying that's not allowed in the house. We have to take this house as it is and look at the things that are good and bad about this house of this current relationship. But what we don't do is let people in from an old house and let them come and mess up this one and do damage in it. The third is that it's okay to have wounds. But we can't use them as an excuse to attack others. I think that should be quite a simple rule to take on. It's very difficult rule to take on for us when we have that, you know, that weakness, that thing that if someone does it, it brings up a load of pain and we lash out like a cornered animal, you know, we just suddenly get the claws and just swipe and do whatever we can because we're because we think, hey, I've been here before, or this might be the same as last time. You don't always, you know, there's always a chance this is the same behavior again you've seen last time, but you don't know. So you always have to wait until you actually see, is there actually a pattern of bad behavior here, or am I just responding to one thing that set me off and I'm being completely unfair and allowing a wound to become a weapon? I think that's crucial. And the final thing is the importance of stories, or maybe the danger of stories, where stories can determine our emotional reaction as much as the event itself. It's often not the event itself, it's what we cause that event to mean. It's like if someone in your family does something today and it triggers some old argument you had with them 10 years ago, but Maybe the thing they did today was not intentional, it was not really related to something in the past, but you suddenly it's just triggered an old emotion in you and you think, oh God, I knew this is how it is with us and this is how it is with you. And it may have just been an honest misunderstanding, it may have been a very small fixable mistake. And it's the same with new people, you know, if someone does something You know, that you've just met and it reminds you of some like bitter friendship you had and you think, I know who this person is. That's the story coming out. It's a story and not the event itself. So I think we, whenever we feel that surge inside of us of just instinctive anger or jealousy or insecurity or whatever it is, we always have to say, what am I really responding to here? What pain? is this? What is its source? Because it's very unlikely that it's come from this exact moment. And when we can trace a story, we can at least come to the situation with some sobriety, with some, some Detachment, some healthy Detachment, and just assess the behavior in front of us and say, hey, when you did that thing, it, you know, it upset me because, or, you know, it hurts when you do that, or. you know, this is something I want to talk about, this is what I need. You can come at it in a much clearer way and then that person goes oh, okay, I didn't know. You know, when you say it in a much clearer, calm way, it actually gets through better than suddenly lashing out and starting a fight. Then someone's defensive instinct kicks in and they think why am I being attacked? You're the one who does blah blah blah. Then you're in a fight and often Not much productive comes out of that. So yes, stories as well. I think locate the source of the story and see if that story actually still makes sense. All right, that is gonna be me wrapped up in a bun for today. Thank you as ever for joining us and we'll be back. later in the week and I'm even recording an episode with Matthew himself. We're going to be having a conversation tomorrow so if there's any particular questions you'd like me to ask Matthew, again email us at podcast@matthewhussie.com or DM me on Instagram @stepenhussie and we'll add it to our question list. Alright pickles and puddings, I'll see you very soon. you have a lovely week. Bye-bye.

I see the vlog sites. Whoopie whoop.

Got a new wife.

Shorty got a new boo.

Yeah, love.

Beautiful. I'm looking for love.