Confession: I Was A Toxic Lesbian Girlfriend. Here's Why.

Hi there. Hi. I want to talk to you. I'm kind of scared right now actually because I want to talk to you about something that is so painful in the lesbian community, which is this way that we get into relationships that we experience as toxic and Most of the time, certainly in my experience, it starts out so beautiful and amazing with all of this connection and sweetness and passion and fun and laughter and sparks and all that stuff. And I've been thinking a lot lately about a relationship that I had 19 years ago. Which started out that way and ended within 6 weeks with the woman who had my girl— been my girlfriend really convinced that I was toxic, that I was damaging, that I was destructive, and that I had kind of lured her in and broken her heart. And that hurts my heart even now, in some ways especially now because it's been 19 years. I've got a lot of distance from it now. And I actually, believe it or not, teach lesbians and queer women from all over the world now about healthy, happy relationships, how to do this dating thing and this love thing in ways that really work, that really fill us up and nourish us and bring us joy and are sustainable. So this has become my life's work. 19 years ago, I did not have any idea that I would someday be doing this. I don't know whether my ex-girlfriend even knows now that I'm doing this, but because of the role that I'm playing in our community, it feels even more important for me to wrestle with what happened and, and try and explain it. So Let me back up a minute. My name is Ruth Schwartz. I am the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy. I've been running Conscious Girlfriend since the very beginning of 2014, so it's 8 years now. And in that time, women from 25 countries have taken my classes, and I have pages and pages and pages and pages of the really beautiful emails that they have sent me. So many women tell me that My work has changed their lives and made it possible for them to understand what happened in their past relationships and date in a whole different way and recognize who's wrong for them and who's right for them and deal with the feelings that come up and then create a relationship that is actually what they've wanted. You know, some of the women that write me are in their 70s. They've been wanting this for You know, 50, 60 years. Other women are in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s. Some of them are just coming out. Some of them have been lesbians for decades. It's never too late, and it's never too early. But let's go back in time and look at where I was 19 years ago with a woman I will call Nina, because believe me. So much of what I teach, I have learned the hard way. I mean, I also have a PhD in transpersonal psychology. I did 3 years of training as a sex and relationship coach. I have a lot of other coach training. Um, but I'm also just a person, you know, with my own messed up childhood history. I'm 60 years old. I came out when I was 20. It's been 40 years of trying to get this thing right, of loving women. I did not have good role models as a kid, and of course my parents were not lesbians, as most of our parents are not. They were, they were straight, and they had a pretty difficult relationship. And so I emerged from my childhood, as so many of us do, really, really, really hungry for love, hungry to love and be loved. And when I started being with women, it was like, you know, best thing ever, except that it also quickly got very emotionally complicated. So this relationship I want to talk to you about with Nina happened 19 years ago. So this is like halfway through my career as a lesbian at that point. I was about 40. And Nina and I were attracted to each other the minute we laid eyes on each other. It was like this kind of familiar Familiarity feeling. You know, she walked into the room and I was like, "Whoa!" And and I found out later she felt the same way. And so, for various reasons, circumstances in our lives, we were trying not to go for it. But you know what it's like. And eventually we took a camping trip together. We were going to just be friends on the camping trip, and then we found ourselves sitting there late at night, gazing into the. Fire and our arms were touching and it wasn't just the fire that was crackling. I can't even remember what happened that night. I think we just crawled off into our separate tents, but we both knew it was intense. And so I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, we got together shortly after we got back home from our camping trip. And so we started out in a blaze of goodwill and good wishes and good intentions and good feelings and sparks. And, um, and about 2 weeks later, we, we were making love on a sheepskin rug in front of her fireplace. And it was, you know, pretty wonderful. And then afterward, we were lying there having a conversation, and she said to me, we need to talk on the phone for at least an hour a day, and I need to be able to feel you thinking about me even when we're not talking on the phone. And I freaked out. I really liked her. I don't know, you know, I might have even thought at the time that I loved her. At this point, I would say, hey, it was like 2 weeks in. I didn't love her yet. Love takes longer than that to develop. But certainly when you are feeling all those good feelings and, you know, flirting and sparking and laughing and touching and, you know, Kissing and making love and all that stuff we were doing, it sure felt like love. I mean, that's why they call it making love. It— when we get sexual, it elicits those feelings of love. So I was really into Nina at that point. But when she said, we need to, or you need to do these things, this is how it has to be. Some big walls came up in me, and, you know, we can certainly talk about my childhood and where some of those walls probably came from, but we each have our own story, right? And if you're watching this video, my guess is that you may have been on Nina's side of it, where what you were asking for from your girlfriend felt perfectly Normal, natural. Of course, this is just what people in relationships do or should do, and this is also what you want. I have been there. I have been on that side. And if you're watching this, you might have also been on the side that I was on in that moment with Nina, where I was like, wait a minute, you know, does being girlfriends suddenly give you the right to tell me what to do with my time? What am I getting into here? Is this more than I bargained for? You're not only trying to tell me how often we need to talk, but also like what needs to be happening, happening inside my mind. I need to be thinking about you all the time, and you need to be able to feel that. And so I started putting up walls. And as you can imagine, well, depending on which side of this you've been on, If you've ever been on Nina's side, you can imagine this was really painful for her. And I know how painful it was because I have been on that side in other relationships, and it feels like a sledgehammer in the chest or in the gut. It feels like, here I am being so open and vulnerable, and I'm just showing up wanting to love you, And be loved by you, and you were slamming this gate in my face. And what the fuck is wrong with you? I'm pretty sure that's how Nina felt. And I have felt that way with girlfriends. Whereas on my side of it, there was also a little bit of a, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? We've been girlfriends for 2 weeks. Um, don't I get to have boundaries? And I think I said something like that. I said, well, what about healthy boundaries in a relationship? And Nina said to me very firmly, there should be no boundaries in a healthy intimate relationship. And then she said, you're just scared of intimacy. You haven't known how to do intimacy in the past. I know how to do it. I, you know, This is how it's supposed to be. And God, at this moment, I have to say, I have so much compassion for both of us, which I did not have at that time. I mean, at that time, I felt kind of like a deer in headlights. Because I really liked her. I wanted to be with her. But what she was saying didn't feel true to me. It didn't, you know, I didn't know anywhere near what I know now about healthy relationships, but the idea that there should be no boundaries didn't feel right to me. And yet she was saying it with so much passion and conviction. So I didn't really know what was right in that moment. All I knew was what was happening inside of me. And what was happening inside of me was like this, whereas, you know, half an hour before I had been like this, you know, and then I was like this. And of course Nina felt that and got scared and upset and angry, and then the more that she got scared and upset and angry, the more like this I felt. Have you ever been there? Like, on either side of this? Have you experienced this? Because it is actually super common among lesbians. We can go to these really intense places so fast. And God, I mean, there's just a lot of pain there. So that night I went home. We, we realized we were not going to be able to work it out that night. And to tell you the truth, we, we actually continued to date for about a month, but we never got through the kind of shattering scarring that began that night. You know, and I went and did some reading about relationships, and I tried to come back to her and say, well, look, this is what I read. And she went and did her own reading, and, you know, she actually read Eckhart Tolle. I forget which of his books it was, but you know, the Power of Now guy. And she found a way to come back and quote him at me in such a way as to show that I was wrong, or try to prove that I was wrong. And I was like, wait a minute, this guy is a non-dual teacher. I don't know that you're supposed to be using his words to prove that I'm wrong here. But, but this is what, this is what happened that really unraveled things between us. She just got more and more hurt, more and more angry. I got more and more walls up. She began in, in her mind, and I imagine with her friends, to tell stories about, you know, Ruth is so toxic, Ruth is unavailable, why am I with another unavailable woman, I deserve better than this, what I was asking for is perfectly normal, this is what people should do in relationships. This is, you know, what's wrong with her for objecting to this really normal thing that I asked for? Just talking on the phone an hour a day and thinking about each other all the time, because that's what we do when we're into each other, you know. So that's what I suspect Nina was thinking, and I've been there. I have so been there. I mean, that's why I'm here to make this video now. I could tell you another story, and I will sometime, about when I was on the other side of the equation and, and feeling and saying those same kinds of things that Nina was saying to a different girlfriend of mine. But on my side of it, what I was feeling was, wow, like my autonomy is being taken away, my personal space is being taken away, I'm being controlled, I'm being told what to do. I'm not being listened to. There doesn't seem to be any curiosity or empathy here about actually what I want. It feels like I'm kind of being slotted into a space here. This is what Nina has decided a healthy relationship should be, and I got to give it to her or else. And that didn't feel good to me, and it didn't feel like love. And of course, you know, the more I backed up The harder and stronger she pursued me, and the harder and stronger and more intensely she pursued me, the more I backed up. And so I started to think, well, what's wrong with her? You know, who's who's the toxic girlfriend here? Is it her? Is it me? Is it both of us? And what I would say now. That I did not know then is that I don't believe either Nina or I was actually a toxic girlfriend. Maybe those people are out there. But I think a lot of times when we start saying, you know, so-and-so was toxic, or that was a toxic relationship, what's actually true is that we have found ourselves in a toxic dynamic. And once a toxic dynamic starts, or, you know, what I often talk about as a push-pull relationship dynamic, where the harder one person pushes— well, actually, maybe it's not push-pull, because the harder one person pushes, the more another person backs up. So that was the toxic dynamic we were in. And neither one of us had a clue About how to break through that dynamic and get back to all the good feelings that we had been sharing and all the hopes and dreams and that we'd had for our connection and all the potential that we had sensed and how excited we were about each other. And, you know, I will never know because that relationship ended 6 weeks into when it began. I will never know what potential we could have actually had together. If we had been able to untangle ourselves from that mess. So the reason why I'm making this video now, first of all, I want to apologize to Nina, not her real name. And I want to apologize to my younger self too. And I want to send a message to, to you, to everyone out here. Watching this video now who has been on either side or both sides or in anything that resembles this kind of dynamic I'm talking about, because what I really want you to know is there is hope, but the hope does not lie in making your girlfriend wrong. And that's part of where both Nina and I got caught, got snagged. Because it was really easy for her to point the finger at me, you know, you're the one that's scared of intimacy. And it was easy for me then to point the finger at her, like, you know, you're the one trying to, you know, force me to do things. And there was no cheese down that hole. There was no love to be made. We, we had the start of love, And we destroyed it without knowing what we were doing, without meaning to. And that's what's so painful. So what I know now that I didn't know then is that what Nina and I got caught in was attachment style differences, attachment wound dynamics. Psychology talks about attachment styles that form in us Very, very early on unconsciously as a result of our adaptation to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in as infants. Our attachment styles form in the first 18 months of life. And often what happens— I myself have a pretty complex attachment style, and that's why I have played out both sides of the dynamic in different relationships. You might also. have a complex attachment style. Many, many of us do. You know, I think when you're a smart person and a highly sensitive person and you were born into an environment that was challenging, it makes sense that you developed a lot of different adaptations to help you deal with whatever you needed to deal with to help you survive. And I like to say you did it. You know, you survived. The fact that you are here watching this video now is proof that you survived. But most likely you survived by developing attachment strategies, because when we're infants, when we're under 18 months old, we will literally die if big people don't take care of us. Human infants are not able to make it on their own. And so some of us will develop what's called an anxious attachment strategy, You can also call this a wave where the anxious baby just figures, okay, if I cry more and I cry harder and I cry louder and I fuss more, eventually I will get taken care of in the way that I need. And, you know, fast forward that to adult life, that's what Nina was doing. You know, she was crying more, louder, harder. In attachment style work, they call that attachment protest, like this other person is not giving me what I want and need, I will protest harder. The problem is that with Nina, I was acting out the other side of the polarity, which is called avoidant attachment. And avoidant attachment comes about For an infant, when you have cried louder and harder for a long time and it didn't work, you did not get your needs met no matter how loud and hard and long you cried. Or in some cases, if you were in an abusive household, you might have actually had worse consequences than just not getting your needs met. You know, you might have actually gotten hit or harmed in some way as a result of your crying. In my case, my mother was 18 years old when I was born. She had never held a baby before. She was not abusive and she didn't intend to be neglectful. She just literally had no idea what to do with a baby. And she didn't know that you were supposed to burp a baby. And so I got colic and I cried all the time because my little stomach hurt, because, you know, you got to burp babies. They can't do it on their own. So I was in distress all the time, and my mom would just sit there next to me and cry too because she didn't know what else to do. And so the avoidant side of my attachment style Probably formed then, where I have a survival defense of you know when things are rough going inside. I can't trust anybody but myself. I'm going to have to deal with this on my own. Self-reliant. Both of these attachment styles actually have strengths. You know Nina's style of like. Ask for what you need and ask for it insistently is a kind of a superpower when you can learn to do it in a way that is beneficial to a relationship. And, and the style that I was playing out there, the avoidant style, is also a superpower because we all know it's great some of the time to be able to take care of ourselves and be independent and be self-reliant. And sometimes there really isn't someone else to take care of you in the way that you need it. So it's great to be able to go within and do it for yourself. The challenge is that, that when you have either an anxious attachment style that Nina was playing out at that point with me, or an avoidant attachment style that I was playing out at that point with her, or many of us switch back and forth between the anxious and the avoidant. Either we switch in different relationships or sometimes we even switch within the same relationship because we are complex beings. Some people call that fearful avoidant, some people call it disorganized. I like to call it just a complex attachment style or a hybrid attachment style. But when you're locked in either the anxious or the avoidant or the flipping back and forth, or the complex mix of them, there is a brittleness as opposed to a resilience and flexibility. So in the attachment world, what we want to go for— a few of us came out of our childhoods fortunate enough to have this secure attachment style baked into us because we got most of what we needed most of the time from our parents. Many of us didn't. And so what's really exciting in attachment theory is the understanding that because our brains are plastic. We have neuroplasticity. We can rewire our brains. We can change the working models that we carry around inside of us from these painful models. You know, Nina's working model was the person who I am vulnerable to is going to back away and not meet my needs. That's a fucking excruciating model. My model is, what's the point of being close? Because The person's not going to be able to be there for me. It's also an excruciating model to have to be carrying around in my head and then replaying with the women that I want to love and who want to love me. And the promise of attachment work is that when we realize what's happening and we realize the real root of what we play out with our girlfriends. We can stop taking it personally. We can unlock from these places of mortal combat where Nina was trying to prove I was wrong. I was feeling like, well, she must be crazy. She was probably seeing me more and more as a toxic person. I was starting to feel like she was a toxic person. It was a mess. And, you know, that's why it ended. After 6 weeks, and we haven't talked to each other since then in 19 years, after so much promise at the beginning. So with what I know now, what would I say? What would I advise my younger self and that version of Nina now? What could we have done if we had understood attachment style differences and attachment First of all, it would have taken a lot of self-compassion. It would have taken a lot of self-responsibility and a lot of vulnerability. But what I can imagine is the possibility, and you know this depending on who you are and how much inner work you've done in your life, what I'm about to say might sound nuts. You might think, who does that? Nobody does that. I can tell you now, some people do it. I, I do it now in my relationship. Definitely not perfectly, but so much more than I used to. And in the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, I actually teach women to do this kind of thing. We have a beautiful community of lesbians and queer women, women who love women, who come together and talk about this stuff week after week and practice it and come to classes and do role plays. And, and then it becomes more possible. So if Nina and I had had this knowledge and these skills and this kind of supportive community behind us, it might have played out something like this. You know, there we are lying on the sheepskin rug after making love. Nina might have said, wow, I notice I'm just getting really scared because I'm feeling so close to you, and that's bringing up all this fear that maybe you're going to leave me, or maybe you're not going to be there enough for me. And then had she approached it that way, and had I known then what I know now, I might have been able to say, oh God, I understand totally. God, I get scared too. In fact, I'm a little scared right now. And, you know, it's so vulnerable what we're doing. And, you know, it's so— our connection feels so special. And, you know, and then she might have relaxed a little bit if I had been able— if we had both been able to have that conversation. Or maybe she would have said, you know, would it be okay if I asked you for something? And I would have said, yeah, of course. She would have said, well, you know, I think it might help me if we could talk on the phone every day. How would that be for you? And I might have said, yeah, a lot of the time I would love to talk to you every day. And sometimes I might have so much going on that I wouldn't really feel like I wanted to or be able to. But I could maybe text you on those days, or I could email you, or I could— we're talking 19 years ago. I don't think we had text or email back then. But You know, or I could have said, what else could I do if there are days when I don't actually have it in me to talk on the phone? How else could, could we work this out so that you feel safe? And, and then she might have said, oh, honey, thank you so much for your compassion. you know, I love you. Some of this is just mine to deal with. I'm going to go back to therapy, or I'm going to, you know, do more meditation and work with these feelings of fear. And I might have said, oh, sweetie, I love you so much. You know, I love that you're so growth-oriented. And, you know, and then we would have had this flow between us that could have kept opening. And This kind of issue, when it comes up early in a relationship, usually repeats. My guess is if Nina and I had stayed together, we would have continued to revisit this theme again and again. But as the relationship researchers John and Julie Gottman say, you know, what happens in the first 5 minutes of a conversation generally determines how that conversation is going to go. And that's true both within an individual conversation and also within, you know, the first conversation that 2 people have about something. It often will tend to predict something about how all the other conversations on that topic will be. It doesn't absolutely have to. I mean, this is the great thing as human beings, we have Tremendous power to change available to us, but we often don't know how to use it because we get stuck in these stories. So I have so much more to say about all this, and this is why I teach classes all the time in the Conscious Girlfriend Academy. So if what I'm saying resonates for you, I would love to have you come to the Academy. Check out our schedule, consciousgirlfriendacademy.com. We have a free ebook that you can get when you sign up on the mailing list called Five Heartbreaking Mistakes Lesbians Make and What to Do Instead. There is so much information available to support you, and and we as a community, we can go so much deeper. We can love each other. so much better. We can have so much more chance at, at finding and creating the love we want when we can recognize that most of the time, rather than being toxic people, we get caught in toxic dynamics, and there's a way out. So I'm speaking to you as someone who I'm pretty sure Nina thought of as her As a toxic girlfriend and then her toxic ex. I have done that same thing inside of myself. I have psychoanalyzed my girlfriends. As you might imagine, I know a lot about psychology. It's a dangerous weapon when somebody is feeling hurt or angry or scared. I've done it too. And you've probably done it. We're all just doing the best we can. And my work exists, my Conscious Girlfriend Academy work exists so that we can learn to do it better. Thank you so much for being here and listening. I'm really, really passionate about our being able to have the healthy, beautiful, joyful lesbian love that, that we want and deserve. Thank you.