One of the human characteristics that really mess up our relationships are the stories that we tell ourselves. There are two main things that contribute to this.

First, as we grow up we turn our experiences with our family into stories about how the world works. We learn what mothers do, what fathers do, what kids (us) are supposed to do and we have stories to go with all of that. Some of these stories are liberating, and some of them are critical and limiting. In our mind they are all the truth.

Later, as we get old enough to begin to sample relationships we create some new stories based on our experiences. These experiences, of course, are created within the framework of the stories about ourselves from childhood, and within the framework of what we learned about relationships from watching our parents.

Most of the time we’re completely ignorant of the stories that we’re bringing to our relationships, or to life in general. If you want to get a start on cleaning these stories up, first you’ve got to figure out what they are.

Ask yourself some questions. What are men like? What do men like? What are women like? What do women like? Who makes decisions? How are you supposed to argue? Who handles the money? Is there enough money, or is it always scarce? How do most men treat women? How do most women expect or need to be treated? What are you good at? What are you never going to be good at? Pick any subject like those and write down your story. Go with the first answer that comes up.

If you’ve had relationship problems, the answer to them is NOT in finding the right person, but changing your story. Start there.

What do you do if you find that your Significant Other is keeping secrets? Not just the little ones that we all do from time to time, but big ones – like finances, appointments, mail, phone calls, etc?

Well, the first question I would suggest you ask is how did a person that secretive became your significant other? Why were you willing to overlook that unwillingness to be open and honest? Remember, when you have serious relationship problems like this, it’s NOT the other person’s problem!! Yes, it’s their behavior, but the problem is that they’re in YOUR life, YOU put them there, and that means it’s YOUR problem.

If you don’t figure it out, you’ll do it again. Because it’s a sign that you have a subconscious attraction to people like that. You see, it’s not that you didn’t notice it before, you either ignored it (when he/she sees how wonderful I am they won’t do that any more) or it was actually what attracted you to them.

Whatever you do, don’t try to fix the other person. You can’t, only they can, and usually they don’t want to. You should at least have a discussion about how you feel, calmly, and see how they respond. No demands, just your feelings. Then you’ll know what to do. If you can’t work together, in open and honest communication, saddle up and hit the road.

To fix yourself, counseling or a group like CODA (Codependents Anonymous) can be life saving. Don’t get another relationship without doing the work.

Another great relationship story culled from the advice columns. A daughter with a history of relationships with men “who treated her badly” is now in a relationship with a “really nice guy.” So the parents do a little background check and find out everything the guy told her about his back ground is false!

As Louie said in “Casablanca”, I’m shocked!

If this daughter has not done any good work on herself, with a counselor or therapist hopefully, there is no reason to expect her to make different choices in men. Her subconscious programming that drives her choices will accurately pick out a lying, cheating scumbag in a room full of altar boys.

Her parents, who taught her everything she knows, will continue to “hope” she makes better choices, but it’s like hoping that your car won’t roll downhill with the brake off.

I repeat, the reason you feel strongly attracted to someone (not just sexually) is because that person fits your subconscious program. If the program is warped, all your choices will be warped and you’ll be wondering “What are they all like that?”

Don’t look for another relationship until you fix the program.

It seems like there is no end to the stories from women who are allowing themselves to be mistreated, and seem to think that it’s normal. Here’s a brief synopsis of  a recent one:

“My dad said he’ll bless our marriage..few weeks after that my bf pulled back and got cold feet ..said he wasn’t ready for this kind of commitment. He didn’t even say goodbye, said that he could never have the courage to say that to me  and that it would kill him..he just sent me a txt msg with what he felt and then his mom whom I’m in a very  good relationship with told me how he feels about all that and how he loves me but he can’t get married  not now at least..”

So after this immature and “momma’s boy” behavior, she still asks me this:

“I know how much he loves me ..up to this point I’m not mad at him..my bf can never live without me, and I can’t either…its been almost 2 weeks now and he’ll call me very soon, I’m used to that:) but should I forgive what he did now and get back to him when he decides he’s ready?”

So my answer went something like this: “Your problem is this – why are you attracted to an immature man who treats you so badly? Do you not have pride in yourself as a woman who is worthy of being treated with respect?
If you don’t learn to respect yourself, it won’t matter if you go back to this same guy or not. You’ll find another guy, and he will disrespect you, too. You are a wonderful human being and you deserve to be treated right. Please do not settle for anything less in a relationship. Remember, when you are dating, the man is showing his best side. It will NOT get better after you marry.”

So what causes this? What the woman learned in her family. She learned that she isn’t important and waiting for the man to be nice is normal. She watched her mother be treated this way and she was treated this way by her father. To her it was normal. So now she has a guy who treats her like that and she is hoping that she can be good enough to be worthy of some attention.

How sad.

I got a question recently on the Story form asking “how do I find Mr Right?” I think that’s a common question that many men and women have, so I thought I’d reprint my answer here.  I’d love to hear from you, so please comment on this post if you have something to say about it.

Here’s what I said:

Quit trying! If you’re “looking” for Mr Right, you’ll be coming from
a place of neediness, and you’ll be attracting men looking for
needy women. That’s not Mr Right, for sure!

Be sure that you fully love and appreciate yourself. If your self
esteem is not strong, then see the first paragraph again. Be
confident in yourself and comfortable not being in a relationship.
Fill your life with what you love. Do a job you love, volunteer where
you can serve, take play time doing what’s fun for you. Hang out
with good friends who are happy and loving life too.

When you’re a happy, involved, serving and giving person, loving
yourself and life to the fullest, you become Ms Right. And at a time
when you least expect it, Mr Right will find you.

PS – Any other plan will get you Mr Wrong. Trust me on that.

I believe that this process will work for men as well as women. I firmly believe that we have the best chance of finding compatible partners if we’re active and doing what we love. After all, compatible people will be doing what they love and if it’s the same as ours, well then, there you are!

The worst advice anyone can give you is to tell you “where the men (or women) are” unless all you want to do is hook up for the weekend.

Here’s another family situation where relationship patterns are at work  and the advice columnist missed them.

A teen girl runs off with a 27 year old ex-con, has his baby, and he gets caught with another woman. Naturally the girl takes him back even though he’s still living with the other woman, and wants to move him back in with herself and the baby with her parents. The parents object.

Now the advice the parents get from the columnist is just to practice “tough love” and say no. What’s missing is any seeming understanding of the girl’s real problems. A normal woman with healthy self esteem wouldn’t put up with a scumbag like that for a microsecond. Why would she do it?

More importantly, where did she learn it? Where did she learn that women have to put up with mistreatment, need men to feel complete, have no right to be treated with respect, etc? Let me make a wild guess – at home with Mommy and Daddy???

My guess is that the mother who wrote the letter has no idea that she is reaping the reward for letting her husband push her around and demean her and the daughter for all those years. The daughter learned that she has no real value somewhere, and Mommy and Daddy are usually the models for both good and bad behavior. And since the lessons are learned in the child’s mind, which can’t make the distinctions that we can as adults, it can be seemingly small things that make big impressions.

The daughter needs counseling, but so does Mom.

I like to read the advice columns to see what kind of problems are showing up, and I pay particular attention to relationship issues of the kind I talk about here. I’m distressed by the number of times the columnist misses big clues to the real problem.

Today it was Dear Abby, who got a letter in which the woman said that she and her husband had a fight, he left for 3 hours and when he came back he screamed at her for an hour before he went to bed. So the wife went though his text messages and his email and found he was telling his ex-wife he still loved her.

All Abby talked about was the supposed infidelity. I thought that was the least of the woman’s problems.

First, why would anyone want to stay with someone who screams at them for an hour? Why would this woman choose a man like that? Second, why would the wife be checking his mail? Is there a trust issue, perhaps? It’s silly to think that this behavior on both of their parts just started with this fight.

My question to the wife would have been, “Why did you create a relationship like this? What’s in it for you?” And if she denied creating it, my next question would have been, “Then why have you stayed? Do you think relationships are supposed to have lots of screaming, yelling and infidelity? Why did you ask for advice when a healthy woman would have just ended the relationship?”

The woman obviously has a dysfunctional relationship pattern going on. She still thinks it’s him that’s the problem, and when she marries the next one who’s just like him she’ll think all men are like that.  All men aren’t, but all the men she picks will be, unless she gets better help.

I wish Abby had a clue about patterns.

There’s lots of reasons to have lust at first sight – mostly overactive hormones – but there’s only one reason for love at first sight. That’s because your subconscious has connected that person to the picture you carry in your mind, the picture of the person you want to resolve your old issues with. Love at first sight is always a danger signal!

One of the ways to tell if it’s a danger signal is if you find yourself wanting to move the relationship along unusually quickly. Do you want to move in together after the first couple of dates? Are you thinking about marriage before you even know the other person? Or the worst danger sign of all – telling your friends “I feel like I’ve known him forever!”

If you feel that way, you probably have a really close match to that image in your subconscious and all those old issues from childhood will be coming out to play.

Fortunately, there are two kinds of matches – behavioral and physical. The behavioral is the one to watch out for, because it’s based on the old issues. In my life I found myself attracted to intelligent but emotionally distant and controlling women like Mom. I tried to make them warm and cuddly, and for some reason they didn’t appreciate it! Go figure.

When I was first dating my wife, I was ready to leave at one point because “the spark wasn’t there” and I hadn’t yet realized that that was a good thing! The “spark,” of course, is the sign of a match in behavior to the stored image. Fortunately I decided to stay and see what happened. Imagine my surprise one day, after she had cut her hair really short, when I saw her across the room just right and saw my mother’s face! Yep, with short hair she was a match.

My subconscious had known all along, but I had no conscious realization of the resemblance. This is good – you can have a physical match without the behavioral issues that cause the pain. The attraction is not nearly as strong as the behavioral match, but true love can grow and create something beautiful. Real love always takes time. Instant attraction should make you run, not walk, to the nearest exit!

Got any good stories about instant attraction? Put them in the comments.

I’ve talked in other posts about how childhood issues can wreck relationships, one after another.  But there’s another way they show up in  successful relationships, as recurring issues.

In a lot of cases these recurring issues surface as something that causes a spat or fight in the relationship. You’ll hear one party say “Why do you always……?” and the battle will be on. Or the crying will start. Or both. Here’s a couple of things to notice about this.

First, if somebody says “you always..” it’s a hot clue to the fact that this is an old issue to the complaining party. By old issue, I mean real old – like childhood. Psychologists call words like “always” global terms, meaning that they go beyond the current situation and even beyond the individual being accused.

Even without “always” if the issue is a repeating one, with the same behavior, same language, same complaint, you can be sure that it’s the same type of repeating childhood issue for one or both of the parties.

In fact, it’s one of the things that attracted the two people to each other! As I’ve said in other posts, we (our subconscious) seek people who will recreate the situations that hurt us as children so that we can resolve them. If you have two people who can understand this situation and work together on it, you can have important healing. If not, you just get repeating conflict.

When my wife and I got married she was really sensitive to anything that made her feel devalued or unappreciated, and I didn’t understand how easy it was to push that button. That led to some major upsets. However, when we figured out what was going on, she began to work on her self esteem and I worked on thinking before I spoke! By working together and understanding what was going on we were able to heal the situation, and we haven’t had that problem for years. Without understanding what was going on – the childhood issue – we probably would have just blamed each other, as many couples do.

So if you have this kind of a repeating issue, now you know what it is. It’s there in your relationship to be healed, and both of you have a part in creating it and a part to play in healing it. It’s not just one person’s problem, even though it often looks that way, it’s both of your’s.

So get started! Talk it over, make a plan, get to work.

This is an all-too-common type of story that I get from people:

“The first man I married cheated on me. Later I met another man who seemed really nice, but eventually cheated on me, too.  The man I’m with now hasn’t cheated on me that I know of, but he’s lied to me on many occasions.”

The question that immediately comes up for most people is “why would anyone put up with people who treat them that way?” The answer is “self image.” Women (and men) who grow up being treated disrespectfully have a self image that sees them as the kind of person who is not good enough to be treated any better. They may not like it and may deeply desire to be treated better, but they will continue to choose partners who treat them badly until they deal with the underlying self image.

As I mentioned in another post, they will choose abusers and try to be good enough to get the abusers to approve of them. This is not a good strategy, to say the least. What’s required is a change to that mental label that says “I’m never good enough. I’m being treated this way because that’s what I deserve.”

A person with a self image like this, created in a dysfunctional family, can sometimes do something even stranger. They will have a supportive belief that says “all men (or women) are this way” and if the partner doesn’t cooperate by behaving badly, they will find ways to push them in that direction. Does this make sense? No, of course not, but that’s the power of these subconscious beliefs.

It’s been said that before the age of 7 we’re not ‘learning,’ we’re downloading experiences and creating our story about reality from them. Then for the rest of our lives we’re making sure that we experience that reality. That’s certainly true about relationships and self worth. Fortunately we can change our story, but first we have to become aware of it – to know that it’s just our story! Once we really GET that, we can begin to write a new one.