(Where a word or phrase is underlined, you can follow the link to another Clinical Guide for a fuller explanation of that topic. Feel free to follow them as your questions arise—they're designed to help you build a fuller understanding at your own pace.)
Related Clinical Guides
CLINICAL GUIDE 2
(if you have any questions at all having read our clinical guides simply call on 07702155267 and we would be pleased to help).
WHY DO I KEEP ENDING UP IN TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS?
A trauma informed clinical guide to the underlying childhood reasons and attachment patterns to explain why we become attracted to personalities who harm us rather than love us.
Hello… Yes, there are reasons and there is hope…
Being and living in a world where relationships keep turning sour and our hopes lie in ashes is a miserable and lonely place. So often we will end up feeling that we are to blame despite experiences that have perhaps been explicitly cruel, coercive, manipulative or abusive in other ways.
At the heart of our work at CCRTT, and what drives us, is our compassion for the repetitive pain that exists in broken and abusive relationships and maybe this is why you are reading this right now. No-one should be treated this way in a relationship and we should all be able to expect and experience a relationship that is nurturing, affirming, tender, kind, gentle and with all the qualities that represent this word we call ‘love’.
At CCRTT our experience is that through a greater understanding of ourselves and our early life experiences, you will be able to learn the underlying causes of this pattern and will be able to form reliable mutually loving relationships.; our Clinical Guide 1 contains further in depth information you would like to learn more about this pattern.
Why do toxic relationships seem so familiar - How does this happen and keep happening?
Have you ever had the experience of being charmed off your feet, thinking that I am so lucky to have found this person, quickly formed a relationship, perhaps quickly moved in together and then tell tale signs creep in? Signs that at first you put down to the partner ‘having a bad day’ or perhaps blaming yourself. Signs that include constantly being questioned; perhaps being told that you are wrong or undermining you in other ways. Getting to a stage where you lose all confidence and worth. Perhaps all or some of this relationship pattern is recognisable.
One of the terrible ironies, perhaps tragedies, of the combination of our minds, our experiences and our personalities is that we tend to continue doing what is most familiar to us even if continuing to that thing is profoundly unhelpful to us. Our minds can panic if we attempt to change something about our behaviour to something different even if it is seemingly much better for us.
Furthermore, our minds are also attracted to familiar patterns that can exist without us being aware of them. i.e: I'm not attracted to these people because they're good for me. I'm attracted to them because something about them feels familiar is what seems to be going on in our minds. For example: The person that at first sight is charming and can meet our need to be noticed turns out to be the underconfident person who masks their own internal world. A toxic relationship world of anger and hate and, who then treats you in the same way that may be so familiar and which comes from their own unmet need to be noticed and valued.
Bad behaviours are always bad behaviours
One of the most difficult things perhaps in this pattern is finding ourselves constantly in a position of wondering what we have done wrong; or, wondering how it is that our partner could have behaved towards us in this way or that way, told us things about ourselves that we just didn’t recognise.
Most horribly perhaps we came to believe some of these things that have been said or to questions ourselves and who we are. How could that person who seemed so nice and charming and lively and kind and generous become this person who ignores me, shouts at me and abuses me in other ways. Perhaps they might be right.
NO. A BIG NO. Abusive behaviour is always abusive behaviour. You were not responsible for what was said and done to you. But the question remains: how did I do it again and can I be helped. To which the answer is an equally big YES.
This is not your fault
What is often so difficult is that being deceived and let down becomes a constantly recurring theme. You hope to find the partner that will give you everything you have always hoped for and yet constantly fall into the trap of your hopes being dashed on the rocks of someone who appears plausible but who is incapable of being in a healthy loving relationship and in fact for you it is a deeply unhealthy relationship.
How this happens is a complicated combination of two personalities meeting: one of who hopes to give and to receive and one of who knows only to destroy and take. What makes it especially complicated is that this all goes on at an unconscious level. Unravelling, making sense of and healing these relationship patterns and processes lies at the heart of the work of CCRTT.
How early experiences can shape relationship patterns
At CCRTT we work with individuals and couples who are having these problems. The way we work is to help our clients to understand how relationships are formed and driven in these ways by what we call ‘the unconscious’ and are seemingly, inevitably, repetitive. by what we call ‘the unconscious’.
While we make initial contact with a potential partner by assessing the person we meet ‘in the moment’ what is more subtle is that we are also meeting them in our unconscious experience. By this we mean that much of who we are in the present and what we make of the present was shaped many years ago. This includes, especially, how we perceive others and then relate to them. There is more about the formation of these unconscious patterns in our Clinical Guides.
We can think of the unconscious as all our past experiences recorded in our primitive ‘limbic’ memory system that have come to shape our view of others. Importantly those assumptions also shape our own view of our world, our place and understanding of ourselves with others and, vitally, our needs in and from the world.
This is especially true of relationships and especially those relationships which we would like to be characterised by more than companionship and acquaintanceship; for more on the subject of relationship and abandonment see our Clinical Guide 3 here. We can become misled into having our latent ‘out of awareness’ needs met through and by someone else.
These needs will have been around for a long time, usually since infancy and will have shaped our way of being often for many years without us ever being aware of the patterns.
Understanding the origins of your pattern
The pattern that you may be suffering from is perhaps especially difficult to come to terms with because our partners always seem to start off to be so amazing. One of the most difficult elements of therapy is to help you to understand how life has left you susceptible to such partners without you feeling somehow that you were to blame.
At CCRTT we have significant experience in helping our wounded clients, as you might be feeling as you read this, to come to terms with the underlying reasons that such people were so attractive to you. These reasons will often come from your own wounded inner world of unmet needs that exists perhaps outside your awareness in your unconscious world. In our Clinical guides you can read more about how this unhelpful world comes to exist.
This unknown inner world may be why you sometimes suffer from anxiety or a low sense of worth (more information on low self worth can be found in our Clinical Guide 4: Why do I have low self esteem) without really understanding how or why you feel like this. You meet someone who lavishes you with attention and it feels like everything will be alright. Someone really does love me and care for me. And I show my love and care for him or her. The most difficult thing to understand perhaps is that this person may well have learned how being Mr or Mrs Charming means that they can have their own unmet needs resolved … through you.
Sadly for you, in their case, you will never be enough. After a time, not necessarily that long, you will be cast aside: nothing that you can do or say ever seems to be enough or make any difference any more. And you feel even more worthless and hopeless. This is a toxic, unhealthy, potentially harmful relationship pattern.
In a nutshell you would never be able to be sufficient for the type of personality in this example and sadly they would never be able to think genuinely of anyone other than themselves: everything is always done for their benefit… including hooking you.
They will cease to care; such personalities may constantly undermine their partners and in other ways the relationship can even become coercive and abusive. You may have experience of this as you read this. It is possible to recover from toxic relationships and to understand how you may have come to be in them.
Finding healthier relationships: can these patterns change? – there is hope.
CCRTT are experienced at working with clients who suffer from repeatedly getting drawn in to these toxic relationships. This is the practical application of applying Psychotherapeutic principles to healing relationship difficulties.
At the heart of working with our clients Psychotherapy enables us to come to an understanding of the pattern of relationships and the similarities between the personalities that may have been so attractive. How could I have been so attracted to that abusive toxic person?
How hope can become expectation- The Phoenix from the ashes.
The key issue that comes out of this first stage work is an understanding of what you may be hoping for and why from a relationship. In therapeutic terms what we are seeking to establish are those parts of our clients (your) own personality that will have been susceptible to the potentially toxic or abusive partner.
Perhaps the most important element is to establish the unmet needs of our client that they are hoping (unconsciously) will be met from the partner of which they may be wholly unaware. What it is really important for you to understand is that this is never, absolutely never, your fault. It is however the case that at some level and to some degree everyone is left with behaviours and feelings that we do not understand and that can be unhelpful when it comes to deciding who would make a suitable life partner for us.
How Psychotherapy can help
In working with you in this way we help you to develop an antenna that is not only more aware of yourself but also how to discern whether or not a potential partner will be healthy for you. We help you to develop an understanding of what may be helpful to discern about the person and how to do so.
We aim to provide you with a greater awareness of you and your potential partner informed by training that we incorporate into the therapy. This has proved to be a successful grounding for successful and healthy relationships.
Critically we will help you to perceive yourself and other with much greater awareness and understanding and what signals to look out for that someone may be suffering from a disordered personality or may yet be your true life-partner. Just as crucially we help you to understand fully who you are and to centre yourself in your own world able to draw appropriate boundaries and not only to be able to look after yourself but to know that you are valuable enough to look after.
What shall I do now?
You may well be hurting right now and have been prompted to search for answers because you are faced by yet another relational problem. It may seem like a very hard first step to trust someone who is a complete stranger to help you to be able to trust others and make different choices.
At CCRTT we would say that you owe it to yourself to be in touch, to take a risk that patterns and perceptions can change with experienced Psychotherapeutic support. Our experience is that Psychotherapy can change lives and we would like to help you to change yours.
If aspects of this guide reflect your own experience, psychotherapy can help you understand how these patterns developed and, importantly, how they can begin to change.
We offer psychotherapy both in person in Cheltenham and online throughout the UK. If you would like to discuss whether this approach feels right for you, we welcome you to get in touch for an initial conversation by using our contact form or simply call 07702155267.
