"I don't love the chaos but chaos loves me". Why I attract negative relationship patterns

Transcript

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Welcome to the Relationship Success Lab, the place for relationship empowerment and actionable tools so you can heal from trauma bonding and create secure loving relationships. I'm Dr. Sarah Award-winning expert clinical psychologists and co consultants, helping high achievers to have happy and healthy relationships. let's get into it, because today we are talking about how you might not like to attract the chaos, but you do. And so. You attract it because you are familiar with it. And this is often a conversation that I have with my clients where they will come to me and they'll say, oh, I just want the chaos to stop. And they are in such distress. They are so frustrated, they are upset, they are anxious. They are so shattered. They're exhausted from the chaos. But for some reason, they're still living very chaotic lives, whether it be chaos in work, people in work, in their love life, in their relationships, but ultimately they are constantly cycling through this chaos, and all they're wanting is safety. All they're wanting is compassion. They're just wanting to feel secure. They're wanting to feel held. They're wanting to feel appreciated and loved, like they matter. They're wanting to feel close. But they don't. They just experience chaos. And I'm going to talk to you about why it is you might be attracting chaos. And it's fascinating because so many of my clients will say, I'm definitely not attracting that. It's the chaos that loves me. It's not that me living the chaos. And I'll kind of look at them and say, okay. Okay. Hmm. Let's get into it. Um, but, but the truth of the matter is, the reason why you get attracted to chaos is it is a subconscious process. So if you imagine an iceberg, an iceberg is representative of our consciousness, you only ever see the tip of the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg being. Our conscious mind, the stuff that we know of, that we're aware of. So it's a part of you that knows you don't want the chaos. It's a part of you that knows the chaos is not healthy. And guess what? That's only 5%, 5% of your mind. Whereas 95% that is under the water of the iceberg. That is your subconscious and unconscious mind in operation, and it's 95%. Of your subconscious, of your unconscious mind that governs your behaviors, which ultimately govern your life. So under the surface of the water, the 95% of your mind, it tells you what it is that you believe about yourself. What you believe about other people and about relationships, how you should interact with other people. It tells you beliefs about your future and what that will look like. It tells you how it is that you should feel in certain situations, and it also influences every single action you take your choice and partner, your choice in friends, your choice in what you wear that day, your choice in career, your choice in absolutely everything. 95% of that comes from your subconscious mind. And the reason why it's subconscious is if you think our brain is so complex and it is constantly processing data, not even to talk about the basic things that it has to do, like keeping us breathing and keeping our lungs going, keeping the blood flow, keeping our heart pumping. But our brain is constantly processing data. It is working very, very hard and. It needs to find ways of being as efficient as possible, and the way that it does efficiency is it will take familiar situations from the past. It'll recognize in its own backlog of database, Hey, I recognize the situation and that time long, long ago, I dealt with it doing A, B, and C, and so I better do A, B, and C now. Boom. And we end up acting exactly in the same way that we are familiar with in the present day simply because it is our brain's way of being efficient. So if it worked for us back then worked, but if it worked for us back then, then surely it should work for us now. And, and the brain doesn't take time to assess and process, Hey, is this really the appropriate thing for me to do right now? It might have been what I needed back then to help me survive, but do I really need it right now? The brain can't quite do that unless if we bring conscious awareness to it. So the way that we really process this, and this is something that I do day in and day out with my clients and in my program, is we're looking at the iceberg. We are looking just under the surface of the water, and we raise that into consciousness so that we can assess it, so that we can process it, so that we can change it. And. We go down to the next layer of what is underneath the iceberg and the next layer of what is underneath the water in the iceberg, so that we're constantly raising awareness to what is subconscious. So we don't operate from a place where we're just oblivious, where we're repeating old, unhealthy, chaotic patterns because that is ultimately the life that we end up entering. So it's really about understanding the subconscious mind in terms of why it is that you are attracting chaos and actually why is your subconscious is attracted to chaos. So I'm going to boil it down to two domains. And I've got here my little baby girl who has decided to join us for a few moments. Are we gonna say hi? Hi. I'll be. Okay, now that my daughter is taken care of, uh, you can see the challenges of recording at home sometimes compared with a studio. But let's get back into it. So there are two main things that I really want to talk about when it comes to why is it we attract the chaos. The first category is the subconscious mind. In the second is our nervous system and neurological wiring. So let's begin with the first one. Subconscious mind, like I mentioned, we are like an iceberg, but the stuff that forms the bottom of the iceberg is really created before the age of seven. So it is really our early years and in that period of time in our lives, we are so egocentric. We look up at the big people and we. Hope, and we believe, and we expect that the big people around us will show us the way, will show us the right way in life. They will inform us of how it is that we need to act and behave in certain situations, how other people see us and our value in the world. So when we're looking at these big people and we see their behaviors, we never. Interpret them as being an issue to do with them whenever we see something harmful. But actually we interpret everything to be about us. We are so egocentric, and so if we see the grownups, if we see our caregivers, our parents arguing, somehow we make a connection for it to mean something about us, that if they're arguing, it's because. There's something dangerous, and so I better do something to fix it, and that's when people pleasing traits are born. That's when achiever traits are born. That is when protective traits are born. The rescuer trait is born where we identify somebody as a victim and we have to go in and save them. These are where harmful traits are born, but those traits. Are carried out throughout the rest of our life with us, unless if we bring conscious awareness to them and we can process them. So everything that we experience before the age of seven, we interpret it to mean something about us that we have to operate in a particular way in order to survive. And ultimately the way that we get programmed is around survival. It is not around what makes us happy or what is going to get us further in life, but it is basically how can we survive? So that is really the primary focus. And so all of these subconscious beliefs get created and they get formed and solidified into certain programmed codes. By the time we are seven years old, six or seven, sometimes eight years old. And the way that these programs get formed is that we start to create interpretations of what it means about us, what it means about other people, and what it means about our future. And so, for example, if we see that. Our parents have really high expectations and really high standards of performance, and they do very well in terms of their work, or they work really hard. Then what we might see is that if we work really hard in school, they give us a lot of praise. Or if we do really well in school, they give us a lot of praise, and if we don't, they might not necessarily criticize us, but we can definitely feel the disappointment. And so in that moment, we then start to believe and interpret these as conditions of our worth, that if we do good, they're gonna be really happy. If we don't do so good, they're really not going to be happy. And so I better work really hard to do well in order to keep them happy so I can feel happy. So I can be good enough. So in that example, you can see how we then start to create these conditions of worth about ourselves based on how other people treated us or how people are themselves. But we have such a huge interpretation of our worth, and also how it is that we need to interact with other people in order to maintain the peace or to maintain happiness, to maintain relationships. So fast forward into adulthood. How does that mean that we create chaos or that we attract chaos or that we like chaos? Well, if we were brought up in a household where there were a lot of expectations, a loss of high demands, and with that there was criticism, there was a lot of expressed emotions. There were a lot of uncontained emotions. And we did something. We either pleased everybody around us or we did really well. We avoided upsetting anybody, and we just regulated ourselves to manage all of that. What ends up happening is that that programming gets set in our subconscious mind, and as we grow older, we expect it to happen again. We believe that that is normal behavior. For from us, but also from other people. We believe that it is normal for other people to be emotionally uncontained. We believe that it is normal for other people to be critical, for other people to expect really high standards, for other people to be attacking, to be critical, to be harmful, to be damaging, to need the rescue. We expect other people to be victim, and so in that. Method in that storyline, we also expect us to be the rescuer. We expect us to have to come in and save the day. We expect ourselves to have to regulate other people in terms of their emotions and what is going on for them. We expect. Ourselves to work incredibly hard to avoid the negative criticism, to avoid the judgment, to avoid the disappointment, the disappointment in other people. We get programmed with all of these conditions that influence our sense of self and our being so that we can maintain the peace. So in a way, if we have experienced a lot of chaos in our younger years, that gets programmed into our subconscious. And whether or not we like it, it's familiar and that's all that the conscious and subconscious mind look out for is what is familiar. So when we grow up. The 95% of our co subconscious mind, which gets us to choose who it is that we want to hang out with, who our partner is, who our friends are, the type of career that we go into our day-to-day actions, that 95%. Is geared to look for what is familiar and subconsciously, it is actually our mind's way of trying to solve past traumas and past wounds in the present moment. So if we've had a lot of chaos in the past and that chaos was never resolved, and it raises a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear inside of us. We go throughout life and into adulthood, hoping to resolve those old wounds in the present moment with the people around us. But it's also. Up to us and up to the person in front of us to elicit that chaos as well, to give us the chance to resolve the chaos of the past so we can never resolve the chaos of the past if it is not elicited in the present moment. So that's the reason why we are constantly trying to seek the chaos again, we are trying to recreate it subconsciously, not intentionally and not maliciously, and we're not. Attempting to injure ourselves through self-sabotage. That's not what we're trying to do, but ultimately that is what we are doing. Ultimately, our subconscious mind is trying to attract the chaos so that we can resolve it, and it's resolving it for now, but also resolving all of the past wounds. But guess what? You will never feel that resolution. If you do not bring conscious awareness to it, so it is crucial that you do the work like I do with my clients in terms of raising that conscious awareness from the subconscious so that we have an opportunity to process it in present day and. This is why the mind is always attracted to the chaos. Even if consciously we don't like it, but subconsciously it's familiar. We know how the story goes. We know how it is that we're meant to act. And from the efficiency part of our brain, the brain says, Hey, you know what? I noticed this pattern before. So this is what you need to do, and it is also pilot. We don't even have to think about our actions'cause the script for our actions is already written. And all of this happens way before we get a chance to sit down, slow down, and process really what's going on so that we can make a wise decision. We are already acting from an automated place, from a habitual place. So let's move on to the second category, the nervous system and neurologically. When I was talking about subconscious mind and how these programs get formed, these programs are literally imprinted into neural circuits in the brain and in the nervous system, so it runs throughout our entire body. If in the past you experienced chaos, whether it be massive, intense in your face, chaos, where there may have been big T traumas. Or if you experienced regular, frequent, but smaller levels of chaos or smaller traumas, that would all get registered somewhere in our brain and in our nervous system. So the big T traumas may have been if there were significant instances of violence, of physical abuse, of emotional abuse, perhaps a parent was. Va it was, was absent entirely and they had left the family household without any warning. Or it might have been a really messy upbringing. It might have been that you were attacked or you experienced one of your parents being attacked. Either way, those are big T traumas that will live in our mind and in our nervous system. In our brain. It literally gets imprinted. But so do small, low levels, but frequent traumas. So these may be instances of frequent criticisms, even if they were small, even if they were subtle. But these get registered. So for example, if you, uh, were compared to another sibling and the other sibling was seen to be doing better academically or they were more physically attractive, or they were just better at pleasing other people at a pleasing adults. So if you were compared to a sibling. That also gets registered in your nervous system and in your neurological wiring because ultimately the message is, well, you are not good enough. Hey, look at your sister. Look at your brother. They're doing a lot better than you, so why aren't you like that? And the way that we interpret that, the way that it gets registered is we're under threat because we're not seen as valuable. We're not seen as important, we are not appreciated. And fundamentally, the way that I am, the who of who I am is not okay and I need to be somebody else in order to survive. That gets imprinted into our neural circuit, that gets imprinted into our nervous system as a threat. And even though these may be low level, subtle comments and some people, often I see people don't even register them as traumas because they think trauma has to be a big thing. Well, guess what? I'm here to tell you that I would argue. Those subtle, yet frequent comments of degradation, of being, uh, patronized, of being criticized, of being demeaned. Those subtle comments, I would say are far more dangerous. They're far more risky because we don't register. We don't consciously register them, or we're very quick to dismiss them, and we're saying, Hey, no. At least it wasn't as bad as. What it could have been, and logically that might be true, but neurologically, the nervous system, it doesn't matter because it still gets registered all the same. So we have all of these imprints, these circuits, these neural circuits that get. Formed in our brain and in our nervous system that ultimately activate our our fight to or flight response. It ultimately activates our sympathetic nervous system, the part of us that detects danger, and the part of us that says, Hey, we need to do something. Fast in order for us to survive. It might not be the intelligent action, but it is the survival action. And so we're constantly registering all of these experiences as threats and we're having to just survive. We're having to do whatever it takes in order to survive. So whether that be we are surviving. By keeping quiet, whether we are surviving by running away, whether we are surviving by attacking, by keeping people at a distance, by doing more and more and more, whatever it might be. But we figure out something in order to survive and our nervous system very much gets elicited. But here's the problem. The problem is that when we have all of these circuits being created. It is not a hundred percent bad. What I mean by that is somehow there are hits of love or hits of affection or hits of good things, good feelings that we experience along the way. So we may experience chronic low level criticism. Or high level criticism, but we might experience that. But somewhere in the middle of that, somewhere kind of dotted about. We are also going to be experiencing approval. We're going to be experiencing praise, we're going to be experiencing some level of validation. You see, the criticism forces us to work incredibly, incredibly hard so that hopefully someday we can experience validation. And when we do that. When we do experience it, it's kind of like a drug. We are on the low, we are on the crash. We are so, so much in pain and we're working really hard. We're scrambling to try and get that hit that that high from the other person. And so we, when we get it, it feels so good until the next crash. And that confusion between the good and the negative, the, the validation and the criticism, that all gets imprinted as well into our nervous system and our neurological wiring. And what that ultimately says is that, hey. Relationships, interactions with other people. It is normal to experience the chaos because somewhere along the line you will also experience the dopamine hit. You'll also experience the validation. But if this is imprinted neurologically in our nervous system, that chaos is normal, you are going to experience stress. Relationships are inherently associated with stress and you know, somewhere along the way you will get the dopamine hit. You will get a hit of a oxytocin, not frequently, but you know, you will get those hits of feel good hormones, the bonding hormone, the love hormone, at various different points. But the baseline is elevated stress, and that is what then gets considered to be the norm when we're entering a relationship. So when we are interacting with people, when we meet somebody for the first time, our subconscious mind, 95%, and our nervous system both detect how much is this person going to activate? The chaos, how much are they going to activate to old wounds in this interaction? Because our subconscious mind and our nervous system is so intelligent, we are able to pick up on cues so much faster than your brain will ever have a chance to do. So we pick up on cues such as the tone of voice, their facial expression. We even pick up on their pheromones. What is their level of quarters are like, what is their level of adrenaline like in their system? W we pick it up and so the moment that we're able to detect something that feels uncomfortable, hey, Presto, that's also familiar. And so we end up being attracted to this very individual. The individual that we say actually they're a bit chaotic, and I really don't like the chaos. Sure you might not like it, but if your nervous system and your subconscious mind are both. Geared for it. If they are familiar to it, then you will be attracted to it because it is your body's way of trying to resolve old wounds. So from the nervous system point of view, the limbic system, which ultimately registers traumas and memories and it gets a bit messy, but, but ultimately it's the system that is trying to regulate and trying to heal itself from past traumas. That does not have a timestamp either, and so anytime it detects familiar chaos. It gets activated and it activates your fight or flight response. So it says, Hey, I need to resolve this trauma, whether it be 20 years ago, whether it be yesterday. It can't tell the difference. It just knows that it needs to resolve that trauma with the situation, with the person that is in front of you in that moment. And I need to mention, thank God that. We are able to change our neural circuits. Thank God for neuroplasticity because many years ago, scientists used to believe, well, if we get wired a particular way, then that is it for for life, and we can't change anything. But actually that is completely inaccurate. We are able to change. Change is possible both from a neurological perspective and also from a subconscious level as well. But it is up to us to take the action. And I see this change happening so many times in hundreds of my clients. I see this all the time, and the change is profound.'cause when you change. No part of you is the same. It's almost like all of the synapses in your body change. They become different. All of your neural wiring becomes different, that you actually get to a point where you don't identify with chaos either from a subconscious perspective or from a nervous system and neurological perspective. You just don't identify with it. It's not familiar. You don't really care for it. And so it gets zoned out. It's almost as if it's off your radar entirely. And what is on your radar is calm, is acceptance, is compassion, is serenity, is security, is safety, and that is ultimately. What we are all striving for, and this is absolutely possible to have. So if you get the chance to please start the work now because you don't want to be wasting any more time in your life, living in chaos, why would you when you can start to have a peaceful, safer, and more secure life, particularly in your relationships. If you've enjoyed what we've spoken about today, please like and follow and share this with a friend or a family member because if you found it helpful, I bet you that one of them will do too. And please, most importantly, take care of yourselves. Until next time, I will see you on the other side.