Do you keep sabotaging your relationships?
Most of us have sabotaged a relationship at some point.
It’s not the healthiest decision, and whether it’s what you intended or not, it can disrupt the relationship and cause serious issues.
If it’s a pattern you keep repeating, and you want to put a stop to it, you need to work out why you’re doing it in the first place. Here are 6 common reasons.
1. You have low self-esteem.
If you don’t really like yourself, let alone love yourself, you might question how and why anyone else could ever love you.
You may think you’re not good enough for them, and convince yourself that they are not with you for the right reasons. You may tell yourself that they’re just using you until someone better comes along, for example.
And so, because you convince yourself that the relationship is doomed, you decide to accelerate the eventual breakup by displaying some of the signs below.
2. You’ve been rejected in the past.
If you’ve experienced heartbreak in the past, you’re probably terrified of being rejected again.
This is a form of abandonment issue and it sends you into defence mode from the get-go. You might start putting up walls or pushing people away before they can hurt you.
When things start to get serious, you might panic and worry that it will all end and you’ll be heartbroken again. You push them away so that, if things do end, it was because you decided they should, and not because another person rejected you again.
Your past rejection may not have been a romantic relationship, either. Maybe one or both of your parents treated you poorly, failed to show you the love a child needs, or was absent for all or part of your childhood. This can have a huge impact on how you approach relationships in your adult life.
3. You fear intimacy.
You might not have been in a serious relationship before, or you might have had a tricky childhood or some intimacy issues with past partners for whatever reason.
If you’re not sure how to cope with affection and love, you might find yourself rejecting it.
That could mean you push your partner away, pick fights for no reason, or just totally shut them out and essentially stop them from showing you attention or affection because you don’t know how to trust or process it.
4. You fear commitment.
For whatever reason, the idea of committing to someone for a long time – possible for life – terrifies you.
You feel claustrophobic when a relationship reaches a certain point, perhaps when you move in together. You feel as though you have lost yourself in the relationship, with your independence and identity taken from you.
And so, you fight back and push away from your partner to get some space. Ultimately, you sabotage things because genuine, loving commitment is just a step too far for you.
5. You’ve grown up with drama as the norm.
Not all childhoods are full of love and stability. If yours was, instead, full of conflict and drama, you might have had to engage in that drama to get the attention you wanted.
After all, if positive attention isn’t forthcoming, negative attention will sometimes have to do.
Now, in your relationships as an adult, you might still go looking for negative attention from your partner because that’s all you know.
And so you lash out, start fights, and cause drama because that’s what you think life and relationships are like. But this, ultimately, risks damaging those relationships beyond repair.
6. It could be your gut trying to warn you.
Never underestimate the power of your gut instincts! Sometimes, we know that things aren’t quite right in our relationship, but we forge ahead anyway.
That could be because we love the person despite knowing that the relationship isn’t healthy, or it could be because we’re scared to be alone or don’t want to end things for some reason.
We sometimes act out and sabotage things because our subconscious minds are so fiercely trying to find a way out!
If we’re not ready or willing to consciously end things, our subconscious will make us act in a way that will probably end the relationship for us.
