Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 76: Is Your Anxiety Sabotaging Your Relationships?

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Have you ever felt insecure about something that’s happened with your partner and got yourself worked up in your mind? I have. Many times. And when this has happened to me I know I’ve not brought up the issue in a productive way. In fact, I’ve often approached the subject in a way I later regretted. What about you? Have you said something you wish you hadn’t? Reacted in a way you wish you could take back? It’s a horrible feeling when we “sober up” emotionally, the cloud of angry or upset subsides, and we are left with this sinking feeling that somehow we’ve just messed it all up. If you can relate to being the kind of person whose emotions and anxieties can be easily triggered in a relationship, this episode is really going to help you. My aim with this video is not to guarantee you never get anxious again (would you even believe me if I said that was possible?!). My aim is to ensure that even in those moments where your fears and anxieties become inflamed, you have a way of calming them, and approaching your partner in a way that brings you closer together, rather than hurting the relationship. Let’s take back control over those emotions and put you back in the driver’s seat. And let’s learn to use our moments of friction to make our relationships even more beautiful. Follow Matt: @thematthewhussey Follow Stephen: @stephenhhussey

Hello there, pickles and peppers. We are back with the Love love life podcast i am your host steven hussey and we are going to have a calm chat about our old friend today anxiety specifically anxiety that could mess up your relationships and triggers from old wounds that can come back and turn pointed like their own sharp rapier-like weapons on your current partner if you're not careful but if of course you follow the wise words of my brother Matthew Hussey in this clip, then you will begin the journey of hopefully healing some of those wounds, maybe figuring out where they come from, locating the source, and moving forward with a better knowledge of how to avoid those problems in the future. So we are going to pass over to Matthew. Before I do, I still want to hear about your New Year's habits, your 30-day habits. We've had some coming in. I'm going to read some on the next episode.

This is basically, for those of you who didn't hear the last episode, I'm talking about 30-day habits you could adopt right now to kick 2021 into a new gear straight from the beginning? So what's like two to three habits you could take on in the next 30 days? They could be tiny. They can be cleaning your bathroom. They could be going outside for a walk. They could be one of my ones which is moisturizing and doing four yoga sessions in the next 30 days whatever it is i want to hear just if it could improve your life one percent two percent it would just make you feel good each day something productive it can be anything you want but let me know uh you can email that podcast at matthussey.com or you can DM me on Instagram at Stephen H Hussey. Just shoot me a DM and let me know what your two habits are.

And yeah, we'll talk about them. Okay, that is it from me for now. I'm going to jump back on after Matthew's speaking because I think there's a few things I want to kind of sum up and add to the conversation he starts in this episode so I'll see you on the other side are you sabotaging your relationship have you in the past been responsible for sabotaging a relationship it's okay if if you have. We've all done it, haven't we? We've all done something that we wish we hadn't said something in a way where we think, God, if I'd have thought that out more, if I could go back, I would have said that differently. I would have had that argument differently. Or maybe if I'd have approached it in that manner, we would never have had an argument in the first place. If you are the kind of person who perhaps leans into an anxious attachment style, we've all

heard, well, many of us, I suppose, have heard that concept in the book Attached about the three different attachment styles, avoidant, secure, and anxious. If if we find ourselves with that anxious attachment style then one of the things that we can be guilty of is seeing something that we don't like or perhaps is just reminiscent of an experience we've had in the past that we didn't like and now this is triggering us in a certain way our brain very quickly concocts a story about what's happening. It could be that your boyfriend goes to a party and doesn't contact you for perhaps most of the night whilst at that party and the anxious part of your brain latches onto this

and starts immediately calculating what this means. We have this amazing ability as human beings to construct story very quickly. I think it's one of the best and worst parts, I suppose, of being a human being is that we have this supercomputer that makes deductions and calculations at this extraordinary rate. And in this situation, especially if we're someone who has a kind of anxious mindset, we can make lots of very rapid calculations about what this thing means. They're at this party and they're not texting me because they've met someone and they're flirting with this person. And now we get jealous and angry and hurt. And that leads to the feelings of I'm not enough.

This person is going to abandon me. This person is going to abandon me. This person is going to hurt me. This person is selfish. They're a terrible person. They're not who I thought they were. All of this can happen before we've even got a chance to talk to this person and find out what the situation is. We might actually talk to that person and they go, I was just with my friends. Our brain can take a small piece of information, a small piece of data, and the supercomputer splices that data with our demons, with our wounds, with the experiences we've had in the past, our biases based on the ways that we've been hurt. And it uses that to form the DNA, the story. It's sort of, there's a Jurassic Park element in there, Harry. You know,

they take the dino DNA and they, you know, need to complete it with something else. So they splice it with frog, you know, and boom, dinosaur. That was good. Pretty good pterodactyl. What this means is we very quickly start to have these emotions based on not reality, but the story that we've created in our minds. So when our partner comes back to us, we're ready for a fight because that pain that we're feeling, the fear, the hurt, the sadness, the I'm not enough of it all has been converted into anger. And anger means we now arm ourselves with our weapons and we attack. Now, we all have our favorite weapon, right? Your favorite weapon might be giving someone the silent treatment. Your favorite weapon might be passive aggression. Your favorite weapon might be giving someone the silent treatment. Your favorite weapon might be passive aggression. Your favorite weapon might be sarcasm.

Your favorite weapon might be attacking someone head on. Now, in that moment, what happens is unless someone is incredibly perceptive, which it would, I suppose, be unreasonable to expect our partner to be this perceptive. They don't see the hurt that's going on beneath that. All they see is you brandishing your weapons and them trying to stop themselves from being decapitated or shot. In other words, they're in danger of sustaining damage themselves right now. If we attack their character, their judgment, their intentions, if we call them bad at their core, then they're dodging bullets, right? You can't save someone else when you're dodging bullets yourself. And of course, this is one of the great

ironies, that we don't get to see how they could show up for us, how they could help come together with us to heal our wounds because they're too busy focusing on defending themselves. What it turns into is just animosity that blinds both parties to what's really going on. A lot of relationships end not because someone couldn't handle our wounds but because they couldn't deal with our weapons. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because a lot of people have this feeling, it's almost like an entitlement that someone has to be able to take me as I am.

They have to be able to deal with me, baggage and all. There's a grain of truth to that in that we do want someone who can come along and help heal us, right? Great relationships should help heal past wounds in some way because it's two people who make each other feel safe, feel loved. But what we can't do is blame someone for not being able to handle our weapons. We have to take personal responsibility for communicating our wounds in a vulnerable and real and authentic way that doesn't attack the other person but gives them a chance to truly show up for us. If all we do every time we're hurt or scared is try to wound our partner, we'll never see what their true

potential could be in coming to our aid. Oh, there it is. There it is. Thanks so much for watching everyone. And by the way, so many of you are still not subscribed to the YouTube channel. Hit subscribe so that you never miss a video and I'll see you next week hello it's Stephen here back in the room so that's a lot to chew on all that all that stuff mass said there about your deep inner wounds and uh not lashing out at your partner uh i think there's some really interesting things to sum up from that if you want some like nifty takeaways these are kind of my own notes if you like from that um the first big one is just labeling uh the idea that you can't if you have to be really careful in when you're sort of triggered by an argument there's something you've experienced before in a previous relationship

you have to be so careful about labeling your current partner and saying that they're being disloyal they're untrustworthy they're being selfish because especially if that's something that we've dealt with previously it's often likely that we're calling them something that we're actually scared of happening ourselves even if it hasn't actually happened yet we might just say i knew i knew you couldn't be trusted you're untrustworthy they may not have actually proven they're untrustworthy at all but that may be our big fear so I think we have to be really careful of labeling the second thing is keeping your past relationships out of the house of your present relationship if you think of your current relationship like a big old

house and you're always creating memories in that house and different rooms with different parts of that relationship you have to kind of decide what comes through the door of that and what doesn't and one thing that hopefully doesn't come through the door is your ex or your ex relationship and i think just having a rule that you're not gonna allow that that previous dynamic you had some unhealthy some toxic dynamic some deep wound or big fear not saying that's not allowed in the house that we have to take this house as it is and look at the things that are good and bad about this house of this current relationship but what we don't do is let people in from an old house and let them come and mess up this one and do damage in it. The third is that it's okay to have wounds, but we can't use them as an excuse to attack others.

I think that should be quite a simple rule to take on. It's a very difficult rule to take on for us when we have that you know that weakness that that thing that if someone does it it brings up a load of pain and we lash out like like a cornered animal you know we just suddenly get the claws and just swipe and do whatever we can because we're because we think hey i've been here before or this might be the same as last time you don't always you know there's always a chance this is the same behavior again you've seen last time but you don't know so you always have to wait until you actually see there's is there actually a pattern of bad behavior here or am i just responding to one thing that set me off and I'm being completely unfair and allowing a wound to become a weapon. I think

that's crucial. And the final thing is the importance of stories or maybe the danger of stories where stories can determine our emotional reaction as much as the event itself. It's often not the event itself. It's what we cause that event to mean. It's like if someone in your family does something today and it triggers some old argument you had with them 10 years ago, but maybe the thing they did today was not intentional. It was not really related to something in the past,

but you've suddenly, it's just triggered an old emotion in you and you think oh god i knew this see this is this is how it is with us and this is how it is with you and it may have just been an honest misunderstanding it may have been a very small fixable mistake and it's the same with new people you know if someone does something you know that you've just met and it reminds you of some like bitter friendship you had and you think, I know who this person is. That's the story coming out. It's a story and not the event itself. So I think whenever we feel that surge inside of us of just instinctive anger or jealousy or

insecurity or whatever it is, we always always have to say what am i really responding to here what pain is this what is its source because it's very unlikely that it's come from this exact moment and when we can trace the story we can at least come to the situation with some sobriety with some some detachment detachment, some healthy detachment, and just assess the behavior in front of us and say, hey, when you did that thing, it, you know, it upset me because, or, you know, it hurts when you do that, or, you know, this is something I want to talk about, this is what I need, you can come at it in a much clearer way and then that person goes oh okay I didn't know you you know when you say it in a much clearer calm way it actually gets through better

than suddenly lashing out and starting a fight then someone's defensive instinct kicks in and they think why am I being attacked you're the one who does blah blah then you're in a fight and often not much productive comes out of that so yes stories as well i think locate the source of the story and see if that story actually still makes sense um all right that is gonna be me wrapped up in a bun for today thank you as ever for joining us and we'll be back later in the week and i'm even recording an episode with matthew himself we're going to be having a conversation tomorrow so if there's any particular questions you'd like me to ask matthew again email us at podcast at matthewhussey.com or dm me on instagram at steven h hussey and we'll add it to our question list um all right pickles and puddings i'll see you very soon you have a lovely week bye I see the blog sites. Got a new wife. Shorty got a new boo.

Yeah, love beautiful. I'm looking for love.