How Us Stuck in Relationships That Don’t Work

As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth.” ~Charlie Chaplin

When I was eight years old my father burst into my room in the middle of the night, high on drugs, and threw my dresser drawers all over the place.

“Stop your crying!” he screamed. “Stop your crying!”

There was a crazy man in my room and I was terrified.

“Now clean up this mess!”

I was shaking. What on earth could I have possibly done to deserve this? With a slam of the door he was gone.

For years my father annihilated me like this. He shamed me in public and raged at me behind closed doors. He was emotionally abusive and sometimes physical too.

He taught me to believe that everyone was out to get me and that everything was my fault. He taught me to believe that I was a worthless piece of you-know-what and that I didn’t deserve any better. Seriously, how else is an eight-year-old supposed to interpret this kind of adult behavior?

Raise of the hand, excuse me, Dad, but what you’re doing is messing me up for the long run. I was a kid. I assumed I was getting the parenting and love I deserved.

Growing up I took what my father taught me out into the world and perfected it. The first girlfriend I ever had cheated on me with another man, yet I stayed with her because I thought I didn’t deserve any better.

My best thinking (at the time) told me that nobody else would ever love me, so I stayed and allowed her to treat me badly.

I lived in a one-bedroom apartment for four years even though every time I needed something fixed the landlord would yell at me. She would yell at me as if I was the problem, yet I stayed and paid my rent each and every month on time. I had no self to esteem and allowed her to treat me poorly.

See my pattern? I stay in and return to painful, destructive relationships. In fact, I’m in one right now.

I have stayed in the same painful relationship for the past thirteen years. It’s a relationship that no longer works for me, yet I keep going back to it as if one day, magically, things will change. Shake of the head, things never change.

I have been yelled at, threatened, and taken advantage of. I’m undervalued, underappreciated, and constantly miserable. Take, take, take, that’s all the other side does.

Each day leaves me emotionally drained, mentally distraught, and in a fowl mood. It’s obviously an unhealthy relationship, yet I stay because my stinking thinking tells me I don’t deserve anything better. I’m talking about my job.

I hate my job. Okay, maybe hate is a little over the top. Let’s just say I don’t like my job.

Yet each day I get up, shower, put on my uniform, and return. Voluntarily, mind you. And that makes me sad.

Sad because by staying, I’m allowing myself to be that scared little eight-year-old all over again. By staying, I’m telling myself that I’m not good enough and that I don’t deserve anything better. I’m ‘parenting’ myself the same way I was parented by my father.

I should’ve left my first girlfriend when she cheated on me, but I didn’t know how to take care of myself then, so I stayed. A healthy person with healthy boundaries would’ve been out of there. I wasn’t healthy.

I should’ve told my landlord that it wasn’t okay to yell at me, but I didn’t and I stayed. I didn’t have the tools to stand up for myself and therefore allowed her to bully me.

We do this, don’t we? We stay in and or return to painful destructive relationships when we deserve so much more. We do this with family members, boyfriends/girlfriends, friends, and yes, we even do this with jobs.

But why? What’s the payoff for staying? (Trust me, there’s always a payoff.)

For me, it’s about sympathy, which fuels my low self-esteem. If I complain loudly enough someone will ultimately sympathize with me, which in return validates my pain. Look at me, I’m a victim!

Trust me when I tell you, I complain a lot. I complain at the bank, while driving in my car, at work, at the movies, at home, on vacation, at the grocery store, and so on. All so I can validate my childhood belief that I don’t deserve any better.

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Painful Unhealthy Relationship Patterns

I knew that I had a deep capacity to love, or so I thought, but that somehow wasn’t enough. I always ended up feeling taken for granted or fighting desperately for my partner’s attention after the initial attraction phase wore off.

I couldn’t help becoming someone else, someone I thought I needed to be, in order not to get abandoned. This, of course, backfired because it lowered my self-esteem even more and caused me become even more neurotic and clingier.

It was hard to not get down on myself for who I became in relationships. I didn’t know how to process the end of a relationship or how to separate what was theirs and what was my stuff, so I walked into the next relationship with accumulated anger, resentments, and taller walls around my heart.

It was easier to blame the guy for being emotionally unavailable, withdrawn, selfish, and all the other names I called him. This went on for over a decade.

Still, somehow my divorce was peaceful and I even called my ex-husband in despair at times after a break-up, crying, “He doesn’t want me anymore.”

He’d jokingly say, “Well, you shouldn’t have divorced me.”

I knew what he meant. And I knew why I called him. It was the only relationship that didn’t blow up in my face at the end. I needed to see that I wasn’t a complete and utter mess and that I had something good to offer to a relationship, even if it didn’t last forever. We were able to remain friends who talked a few times a year.

After my third heartbreak, I knew that something had to give. I became very depressed and lost hope for being able to have a happy relationship that didn’t end in divorce or a dramatic break-up.

I kept asking the Universe, “Why am I not healing? What is wrong with me? Why do I end up falling in love with unavailable men and then cling onto him for dear life?”

I prayed all day, every day. My hope was eroding fast and my self-rejection was growing in leaps and bounds.

The answer came in the form of one word: forgiveness.

To be honest, I was not interested in forgiving anything or anyone. I wouldn’t even know where to begin or who to forgive. Instead, I just added more toxicity to my pain by letting resentments turn to hate. This gave me a false sense of power and the illusion of protection from further pain, disappointment, deception, and betrayal. I felt like I’d had enough of all of these.

In my mind, forgiveness meant that I would die without receiving compensation for the ways I’d been wronged. That was just not okay.

I sat in my throne of righteous indignation for a few more weeks. In the meantime, I was twisted up in knots due to the guilt of having hurt all my partners, which I didn’t know what to do with either.

I wrote an email to my last boyfriend, which he didn’t respond to. That hurt even more. I got to feel what it’s like to not be forgiven for the mistakes you made.

Non-forgiveness may feel like power and protection, but it ends up becoming a lonely, self-made prison cell. At that point, I knew that I was creating more unhappiness and loneliness for myself.

I finally gave in. Even though it took weeks for my ego to calm down and open to the idea of looking at who and what I needed to forgive, the thought of it alone started making me feel lighter.

Since my biggest pain revolved around men, I started with my father.

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Love Someone Who Doesn’t Match Your Fantasy

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I’ve always been a dreamer. A really big dreamer. For the most part, it’s served me well. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college. A private college, magna cum laude, while raising four children alone. I don’t do mediocrity.

I worked hard and brought our family out of poverty singlehandedly. We moved to a better neighborhood, built a nice house, and went on vacations. I was no ordinary woman. I’d much prefer to raise those kids alone than to settle for the companionship of a mere mortal man.

The man I sought had to be equally well-educated, ambitious, successful, attractive, and generous.

I also would have preferred that he not want any children and would be happy to help me raise mine since I had so many.

Finally, he had to be well-read, close to my own age, and not addicted to television. I froze out the older men who would have been happy to date me.

Guess what happened? I raised those four kids alone while reading every self-help book I could find and begging every deity I could think of to send me a mate. I absolutely refused to “settle.

It’s very common for people who’ve been single for a long time to say that they won’t settle. They maintain that they could have been married or in a relationship by this time if they’d settled, but they are going to hold out for the best.

How about you? Are you holding out for a “package,” a person who possesses all of the qualities on a list you’ve made?

If so, I’d like to encourage you to consider the value of having a flesh and blood human being in your life to love you, care when you’ve had a bad day at work, or bring you soup when you’re sick. You’ll have the opportunity to experience loving this person back and sharing your life with them. It’s tough to cuddle up to a list.

The truth is, dating someone who doesn’t possess every quality you wish for isn’t the same thing as settling. You probably don’t have every trait your would-be mate desires and whether you realize it or not, you’ve already been settling.

Being open to dating outside your type is not settling. Most of us understand that we’re not going to get every single thing we want in life and it really is okay.

You don’t refuse to find a place to live just because you can’t afford a ten-bedroom mansion. Instead, you buy or rent a place within your means and go on about your business. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and most of us are fine with the concept until we consider dating. Then we insist on “having it all.

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