The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why the "Good Enough" Relationship Beats the "Perfect Partner"

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Fairy tales and Hollywood rom coms have taught us to expect perfection from a soul mate, but sex and relationships therapist Todd Baratz says we need to be more comfortable with the idea that a "good enough" partner will do.  Todd once bought into this perfection myth - wanting a boyfriend to meet all his needs without even being told. These expectations helped end the relationship. Now Todd (author of How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind) says we need to accept that our loved ones will be just as flawed and human as we are. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Todd Barrett's knew exactly how his boyfriend should be treating him. The right standards were very clear. They'd been set out in all the fairy tales and Hollywood rom-coms that he'd grown up with. I had certain expectations for how he should be treating me. I was thinking, well, he should just be asking me how my day was. He should just be doing these things. And the reality is, is that it's a much more complicated dynamic than that. Many of us share this kind of naive view of relationships. We expect near perfection from our romantic partners and assume that accepting anything less would be settling.

We want a soulmate who understands us, a rock who supports us in all we do, a therapist who heals us when we're hurt, and a lover who fulfills all our desires and makes us feel incredibly attractive. These rules, these lists, they're infiltrating our relationships from day one to year 10. These are things that we've internalized and they become indistinguishable from our voice compared to our culture's voice. They just feel like absolute truths. The eventual collapse of Todd's 10-year relationship was a wake-up call. Todd had been demanding way too much from his boyfriend. It was more than any real person could reasonably deliver. So Todd decided to recalibrate

in his future relationships. Sure, he'd be thrilled if he met the perfect partner, but he'd also be okay with a kind yet fallible and flawed human. He was ready to find a partner who was simply good enough. But Todd says this isn't just a personal decision. It's advice he wants us all to consider. You see, Todd Barrett is a sex and relationships therapist. He's also the author of How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind.

In his practice, Todd sees countless couples tearing themselves and their relationships apart thanks to impossibly high expectations. So in this final episode of our season looking at happiness and love, we'll explore how so many of us ended up becoming way too demanding about what a partner should be, as well as unwilling to accept the inevitable flaws that come with being human. We'll also hear Todd's advice for finding not the perfect relationship, but one that's just good enough. Forget the fairy tale and get real.

That's the subtitle of Todd's new book. In it, he makes the observation that we spend more time as children learning to do long division than we do learning to identify our emotions. The lack of social and relational guidance in our culture is outrageous at best, Todd explains, and harmful to survival at worst. Without the right guidance, a lot of powerful ideas have bubbled up to fill this void.

Romance novels, TV shows, rom-coms, and now social media. And Todd says that these ideas often create problems. All those listicles and memes convince us we need to find a perfect partner and that we ought to reject anyone with any potential flaw or defect. The reality is that people don't have so many places to go for relationship advice. You know, we primarily get our relationship advice implicitly from our family and culture of origin. Oftentimes, as I said, it's implicit.

It's not like this is how healthy relationships work. It's observational learning. It's experiential and emotional. In school, we get absolutely no education. We don't get good sex ed. We don't get a relational ed. We don't get an emotional ed. We don't get a human ed. But what's so interesting about the Instagram stuff, social media, TikTok, is it is actually the only places that people, at least culturally in this moment, that we get information. And that's the beginning of the problem. And some of the content's great, just like any TV, film, any kind of media. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. But the biggest thing for me that I would want people to really slow down with how they're

consuming the content and think deeper about it. There is no nuance. There's no complexity. Often, sometimes the posts are literally black and white. We're looking at information that's really lacking the context that gives life to information. It's empty information, really. And nothing can really be applied without fully understanding the context, nothing can really be applied without fully understanding the context, especially the therapeutic information and psychoeducation that we are now seeing all over social media. And so in my own kind of glimpses at what's going on on TikTok and Instagram, my sense is that a lot of the language that people use to talk about relationships seems to be really clinicalized, but clinicalized in this way that maybe people are like getting wrong. You know, so I'm thinking about terms like codependency and narcissism and gaslighting. Is this something

that you've noticed? Are there spots where some of these kind of online therapists might not be getting exactly the clinical context, right? Yeah. I mean, all of the posts are marketing, so it's information, but it's marketing. It's coming from a place of, I want you to read my content so you can subscribe to my channel. And so I can monetize it in one way or another. I mean, that's really what it is. I mean, and that's fine. This is the world we live in. But words like narcissism and toxic gaslighter and toxic this and red flag and situationship and even trauma, these words are trending. And so people are often using these words to get people's interest. And so oftentimes, what happens is that things get really watered down. And that's what we're

saying is that, you know, these terms are being watered down to apply to literally anything at this point, any bad behavior, any sign of dependence. And to me, what it does is that it increases people's anxiety, because it keeps us on alert and it keeps us hypervigilant to be looking out for certain signs, certain behavior, as opposed to better understanding ourselves. So I think that, yes, we might want to know some of these terms, but the most important thing we can do in our relationships and in our lives is not diagnose somebody, is not look out for the top 10 red flags of a narcissist or if your person is toxic, but to better understand ourselves. The content is training us more to understand and analyze someone else's shitty behavior than our own. And that's a problem. It also really changes the standards

that we bring to kind of relationship shopping, right? If we're kind of looking for all these red flags, it seems like we see our job as kind of trying to suss out these red flags in a way that probably makes the entire dating landscape seem kind of terrifying. I mean, is this something you've experienced with the people that you talk to and that you work with as clients? This shapes the entire experience of how we think about even someone on an app we haven't even met. I see individuals and I see couples. The individuals, it's mostly, is this person that I'm dating going to be the wrong person for me? Are they going to hurt me? And most of the couples that I'm couples, the individuals, it's mostly is this person that I'm dating going to be the wrong person for me?

Are they going to hurt me? And most of the couples that I'm seeing, you know, they have some kind of fear that they're with the wrong person. So these expectations are literally physiologically shaping the way we react and prime ourselves to experience connection. Or rather, what it is, is really disconnection. and what it is, is really disconnection. Because the more we are focused on the top 10 lists of what to look for, the less present we are. And the less present we are, the less capable we are of connecting and the less capable we are of being vulnerable. And the less capable we are of being vulnerable, the more alone we're going to feel. And so how did we get in this position? Because it seems like this is kind of something that seems to be pretty new in like modern love. It

seems like we've kind of gone like really capitalist when it comes to kind of thinking about love and thinking about dating. Like, how did we get here? People have a variety of different theories, you know, going from we're now really, really independent and we stress independence and we don't necessarily have to focus on marriage for survival. I mean, there's a whole historical basis for where love is today, which is something I talk about in my book. I interviewed my mom about love and what it was like growing up for her. And for her, it was just get married by 21, have kids very soon. She's like red flags. What is that? Toxic? What is that? Narcissism? She kind of had an idea, but it wasn't part of the relational discourse, whereas now it is. And I think it's a good thing. I mean, I don't think this is bad, but it's something that's full of meaning that we need to understand better. So we're not just on autopilot expecting certain

things and discounting our role in all of the dynamics we exist in. So it seems like on top of these kind of new expectations we have for our partners, you know, we're kind of worried about red flags and trying to suss them out. At the same time, it doesn't seem like our same high standards have been applied to like our own behavior and kind of the way that we bring ourselves to relationships. It seems like if anything, like those expectations have gone down. Is that the sense you get from kind of talking to your clients and engaging with some of this work? Well, what's interesting about that is that people have high expectations of themselves and they're really, really hard on themselves. But when it comes to relational dynamics, most people are particularly disconnected from that in terms of, you know,

we want a partner who will do certain things for us. And in that focus, we fail to realize that we interact with them, will determine whether or not they do the things that we think they should be doing for us. The interesting thing is that people want to put in the work, but oftentimes people, myself, we can feel so convinced that it's not us. And people are resistant to understanding the role that they play in relationships because it touches upon a very vulnerable and scary place that we're limited, that we have issues ourselves, that we are difficult to be with, and that we play a role, a very big role in our lives. But many of us default to this place where we just want our partner to rescue us and to do

these certain things for us to make us feel valued and validated. And there's another trending word that drives me crazy, validation. We expect our partners that to be their job without, again, understanding the role we play. So people really want to work hard, but they don't want to work hard unless they think their partner is working hard in a similar or same way. And they definitely don't want to work hard if they think their partner is to blame. Which most people do. Which most people do. So you've really argued that we need to unlearn some of these rules that we've been getting from modern love, that the act of unlearning these rules and coming up with new ones can help us do better. And one of the rules you talked about is this idea that we really need our partners to

change. When we look at relationships, I think there's this idea like, oh, if only my partner could do X, Y, and Z, or if only this person, you know, I just started dating would, you know, do this sort of thing, then everything would be better. Talk about why our partners changing isn't necessarily the best answer to our relationship woes. One, I mean, it's a prison. If we say that someone else needs to do something in order for us to be happy, that's a pretty scary, powerless place to be. And that's the parallel to childhood, where we needed our parents to do something specific for us. And that was the reality in order for us to be happy. But adult partnership is a completely different ballgame than early childhood attachment. When we're responding to our partners not doing something for

us, we're responding to a dynamic that we're integral into shaping and creating and eliciting the reaction from our partner that we want them to be doing. But it's a big piece of the book, which is I say, and many other therapists and people say, change yourself first. Stop trying to get your partner to change and work on changing yourself. And most people hate that because they're like, in the self-righteous place of I didn't do this, they should be doing this. I deserve, I'm entitled to whatever. It can be really hard to think, accept and understand that if we can make the change, that can have an impact on a relationship that we actually have more power in our adult partnerships than our reflexes might be telling us. And so one of the forms of that change that

you really advocate is that we need to look back at our past to really understand where our current tendencies are coming from. You've argued that we need to explore our emotional ghosts. So what are emotional ghosts and why do we need to explore them so much? Emotional ghosts are basically any historical experience that was traumatic, hard, challenging, whatever, that's left a mark, that's left a wound, that's been a big part of your story. A lot of our needs and relationships come from never receiving those needs

due to trauma, neglect, abandonment, a lack of nourishment from parents, et cetera. And they're emotional ghosts and they're with us. And those are the things that will come to shape our relational dynamics as adults, like literally will shape them. And it's important to become aware of that, because oftentimes what gets mixed up in our own emotional ghost is, again, my partner is doing this. When it's usually both, it's usually some version of our attachment trauma, our earlier experiences in our family of origin,

these emotional ghosts, these triggers, wounds, et cetera, that are coming up in the present of a dynamic that feels very similar to what we grew up with. That doesn't mean our partner isn't doing something. They usually are. But the power with which we respond is coming from these earlier scary ghosts. I know this is something that you navigated with your relationship with Alex,

which you talk a lot about in your practice and in your book. So maybe first off, who is Alex? And where are some spots where in that relationship, these emotional ghosts came up? The relationship ended about like six years ago, which is wild. We were together for 10 years, you know, huge learning experience in my life. But like, it was really hard for me to acknowledge, even though my therapist was saying, Todd, this is about, you know, your father.

But even when being told about this, I was like, no, Alex should be doing this. He's limited in this way. But, you know, I was convinced. And on the one hand, I wasn't wrong. But the way that I was seeing him, the perspective that I was or that I had of him was based on my earlier experiences. Now I know that, you know, I had wanted him to do certain things that I had of him was based on my earlier experiences. Now I know that, you know, I had wanted him to do certain things that I actually didn't need him to do in terms of the

emotional caretaking that I was expecting. And, you know, these are things that I could have done on my own as an adult. In our quest to sort of figure out our emotional ghosts, you actually have a practical suggestion that I found quite striking, which is that we need to dig into the past a little bit more. And that might really involve talking to the people who often make up the situations that cause our emotional ghosts, namely our parents. So talk to me about this advice and what you did in your situation and why it can be so powerful for kind of digging up those things that are from the past that might be affecting us so much. A big part of our story, we can't fully know it without fully knowing our parents and our history and our generational stories and our ancestors and as much information as we can possibly get. So what I did was I interviewed my mom and my dad. I asked them both a lot of questions about what love was like, what dating was like, what growing up was like, what their

parents were like, what their relationships were like. And what I found was that a lot of their experiences paralleled what I went was that a lot of their experiences paralleled what I went through with them in terms of maybe some of the neglect that I felt. And I was neglected by my parents. And then when I talked to them about their story, the neglect they experienced and weren't even able to acknowledge. And then when I asked about their parents and their grandparents, I mean, it was literal war and death. So oftentimes our stories have real, real intergenerational basis and we can't fully understand ourselves and our relationships without fully understanding that. The challenge with some of these interviews and interactions with

their parents is they don't want to talk about it sometimes. I push a lot of my clients to do this and they say they do and their parents will only talk about the positive relationships they had despite their parent having a lot of emotional problems. So the challenge with some of these generational traumas is they've been kept under wraps. And sometimes if we ask our parents, they may also continue to do that. But it's really important. I would really encourage anyone if their parent is still alive, their grandparent is still alive, to write out a set of questions. And it's not an interrogation. It's not therapy. It's an interview.

And to ask questions about, you know, what was love like for you? What was independence like for you? What was affection like for you? What were the expectations you had? Were your parents present? Did they have a drinking problem? Did they do drugs? Did anybody die?

Were there any relational breaks early on? You know, all of this stuff, because you can really learn a lot about yourself and you can humanize your parents, which is a really big piece of the story. Because as we talk and learn about our own early traumas with our parents, we can often view them as our perpetrators, which sometimes they are, or as the people who didn't give us this thing and who deeply hurt us and all of that, which can be true. But the other side of that story is that they're human beings who had very, very deep stories just like ours and experienced challenges and are the way they are for a reason. And so if we can understand that reason, it really can help to humanize them and connect with them as a human being rather than this person who mistreated us when we were 10 or 15 or didn't give us what they

should have given us. I really encourage people to do it. So understanding our own stories and those of our parents and grandparents can be an important first step in finding greater stability in our romantic relationships. But Todd says there are also some narratives that we need to better understand and challenge, specifically our persistent myths about fairytale romance. We'll hear more after a quick break. Sex and relationship therapist Todd Barrett sees many clients who began their idea of romance as kids from reading the usual happily ever after fairy tales. Todd writes in his book, people date with the goal of finding their perfect match, the one. We all want someone special, but our ideas of the one can get kind of extreme. The one has to be 100% emotionally available,

stable, healed through years of past therapy, and able to communicate. They've got to be motivated, funny, growth-oriented, and mature. They've got to have motivated, funny, growth-oriented, and mature. They've got to have a good job, an impeccable taste, got to love travel and dogs, plus be in shape, oh, and a foodie, and have no imperfections or red flags whatsoever. Just chemistry, connection, and love at first sight. Oddly enough, in his youth,

Todd felt a bit detached from these expectations. Growing up gay in the 90s, you know, the idea of the one and being with someone forever wasn't really on my radar. But after the painful end of his 10-year relationship, Todd unhappily found himself back in the dating pool and searching for that perfect mate. It'd be so great to just find one person to be done with it and, you know, not to have to worry about that ever again.

But the reality is that relationships are ending. People get divorced. This is a thing and it's normal and it's okay. I do see that as kind of the biggest problem and the biggest part of the fairy tale that we need to let go is the idea of happily ever after. The one where everything is just going to work. It doesn't exist. It really doesn't. And it really ends up just adding anxiety work. It doesn't exist. It really doesn't. And it really

ends up just adding anxiety to dates and to our relationships. So let's start with the idea of how we can overcome this idea of the one. You had this lovely practical suggestion that I've heard you mention before, which is that we need to sort of switch what we're doing in the search for the one. Rather than getting all anxious, we need to get a little bit more curious. What do you mean by getting curious? Curious about who the other person is. Curious about who we are when we're with them. I try to reframe dating not in terms of who we can find, more so what we can find out. Taking it one singular date experience conversation at a time. The power of being present might sound cliche, but it's really important, especially when it

comes to relationships and getting to know somebody. If your mind is, are they going to satisfy me in 20 years? If your mind is there on day two, you're not going to be seeing them as who they are. You're not going to be learning about them and you're not giving yourself the opportunity to let them get to know you. But this is what we grew up with. This is what we see in movies, you know, that people are together forever and there are certain things to look for that may not fit that criteria. You had this term that I love, normal marital hate that you talk about. You had an example with your dog that I love. Oh, that was Terry Real. It was a quote of Terry Real's book, Us.

Normal marital hate. Great line. Everyone is intolerable to an extent. Everyone is going to disappoint us. Everyone is going to annoy us. I talk about my dog and even my dog was so cute. Her name is Ellie. She's a Cavapoo and all she wants to do is cuddle, but she's really annoying sometimes. And sometimes I just want her to leave me alone. And our partner, no matter how cute and sweet they are, they're going to get on our nerves. They're going to disappoint us. Happily ever after, just, you know, unfortunately it's, it's not a thing and it's a really big disappointment. And the challenge is, is really learning how to. And it's a really big disappointment. And the challenge is really learning

how to embrace our partner's limitations and honor them and understand them as a human being without seeing those limitations, disappointments, frustrations as a way to understand them as a whole. Everyone's a little disappointing, including myself. You talk sometimes about this idea of the good enough relationship

or the good enough marriage. What do you mean by good enough here? And how can we find that? Yeah, people hate that. Whenever I post about that on Instagram, people come for me. But yeah, something that's good enough. I mean, and this applies to practically everything in our life. I'm looking for a house now and I'm like, but I want this and this. And meanwhile, I live in New York City and nothing is going to be what I want it to be. But we're talking about relationships. So good enough, meaning we don't need 100%. We don't need our partners to be perfect. We need them to be there for us most of the time. We need a relationship that's good enough. And good enough includes

limitations, problems, fights, conflicts. That doesn't mean an unhealthy relationship. It doesn't mean an abusive relationship. It just means a relationship that's mostly satisfying. But part of the fairy tale is that we will find a relationship that's fully satisfying, that doesn't require work, and that you are entitled to a love that dot, dot, dot. I see so many memes like that. The reality is where no one's really entitled to anything when it comes to love in that sense, because it's hard work. We can't just sit there and have these things appear. We have to do the work. And part of that work is tolerance and forgiveness and forgiving ourselves and forgiving our partners. And it's really, really hard and can be disappointing. It's so interesting that you

get pushback for this idea of the good enough relationship. And it kind of makes sense given how much we push people these days never to settle. But my sense is like, this is also a new thing about modern love that we're so obsessed with not settling. This isn't the way our parents dealt with it, right? I mean, like I was telling you with my mother in her interview, she settled and, you know, she chose somebody that was extremely abusive. But because culturally, you know, as a woman in the 50s, she was told to stay, told to get married and told to settle no matter what for a sense of security and because family was the most important thing. And so I do think that this pendulum having swung to the exact opposite direction of never settle is due to, you know, a lot of intergenerational trauma where we've

come from parents or grandparents or histories where people were really hurt and were told to settle because that was the cultural narrative. Settle down, you know, that's what people were told. And now, you know, the pendulum has swung the other direction. Andettle down. That's what people were told. And now the pendulum has swung the other direction. And I'm not suggesting that it's wrong. I'm just suggesting that we should take that pendulum and put it a little bit in the middle. The only way we learn about ourselves in relationships is by being in them. And so if we're constantly waiting for this perfect person, one, they don't exist, but two, we don't get the opportunity to, one, have a relationship, experience attachment and love, but to really learn about what it is that we want in the first place. So what I think

is more important is for people to settle down, but not to settle down for a shitty relationship, but to settle down with somebody that's good enough and to see what you can develop and to see what the connection is like and to see what happens when you have conflict and to work through that. And also what's important is to end a relationship. I do believe that having the experience of being able to have a relational ending at least once in your life is a very important experience to have in terms of personal growth, self-awareness, and development. At least for me and a lot of my clients, a big, big problem with a fairytale relationship is when it comes to endings, relational endings, that people think they should last forever. And when they don't,

they failed. They blame their partner. They blame themselves. People often don't think about grief and loss. When people do get to the end of a relationship, they think it should just feel like a hiccup or a sneeze and then they decide to end it. When the reality of relational endings is so much further from what we see in a rom-com and what we see in some of these expectations on Instagram and on terms, cut them out, go on a trip, get back to yourself, be single on purpose, get to know yourself better. That's the model for relational endings that we see. We celebrate love and we totally avoid the topic of any kind of relational ending, including pain, ambivalence, regret, years of hard work and tears. We often think about a

relational ending as on this day, I decided I wanted to end my relationship. And then next week, I'm going to go on a vacation by myself, I'm going to do yoga, and then I'm not going to start dating for another three to six months until I'm healed. And then I'm going to start dating again. And I'm going to look for someone who fits these criteria with no red flags like my toxic ex. And it is nothing like that. You know, when I ended my relationship, it was a horror show. No one prepares us for what it's like when you think about yourself as someone who's a we. And even the language is different. So I think the fairy tale about the way relationships begin,

the way that they feel, and the way that they end infiltrated the way we experience and expect love to feel. It's a real challenge because it just creates more shame, more anxiety, more confusion. And in that space prevents us from fully understanding ourselves, which is really what we need in the beginning, middle and end of a relationship is self-understanding, self-compassion, empathy. So the fairy tale I see is this kind of black or white portrait of love and it doesn't fit, whether we're talking about the beginning, middle or end of a relationship. And this gets to another rule that I think we need to unlearn, which is this idea of manifesting. You know, when I look on Instagram and TikTok, I think there's this idea that like, I'm just going to manifest the perfect relationship as if it doesn't require

any work at all. Talk about why we need to overcome this idea of manifesting. Manifestation plays a really big role for a lot of people. And it's, I don't want to say it's worked for them because I don't know what work means. I do believe though, that, you know, one piece of manifestation is the energy we put out is the energy we get back. I do believe in that. And that gets back to change yourself and you change your relationship. You know, if we are putting energy out with our partner that is non-critical and warm and kind and empathic, we're likely to receive a similar response.

But in terms of just magically manifesting a partner, that's not something that I think can happen through inaction or just thought. Like I had a friend once tell me to clear out a closet and make space for my partner. And I was like, I don't know if that's gonna necessarily do it. I need to go on dates and put effort into meeting and growing a connection.

But relationships take work, not manifestation. Relationships are built over a long period of time, and that requires patience, effort, tolerance, forgiveness, all the stuff I was just saying. One of the key observations in Todd's book is this. As our expectations for love have soared to unprecedented heights, Todd writes, our commitment to doing the necessary work to sustain that love has plummeted. So after the break, we'll unpack the facet of love never mentioned in fairy tales, all the work it requires. The Happiness Lab will be right back. As a therapist, Todd Barrett sees clients who are deeply unhappy with their relationships.

But many of those clients are also either unwilling to do the work needed to fix things with their partner, or feel like it's just not their job to do the necessary repairs. It's a self-sabotaging mindset that Todd knows only too well from his 10-year relationship with his ex, Alex. There was a dynamic with Alex and I where I'm the therapist, but I was waiting for him to bring certain things up. I was waiting for him to do certain things before I took any action. And if I was upset about something, I would just stew in frustration and disappointment, or I would spiral and feel sad and alone as opposed to engaging and as opposed to verbalizing myself as opposed to really taking an active role in the relationship. Basically, I was going silent.

I was retreating and I was withdrawing, which is something I did as a kid, something I learned to do with my father and my family and the role I was actually encouraged to take on as a child, which was to be quiet. When I was upset, when I was hurt, no matter what, be quiet. And I was doing the same thing with Alex.

The difference was, is I was doing it in response to Alex not taking care of me in a certain way, him not fulfilling my needs in a certain way. Instead of me saying, hey, you know, could you do this? I would go quiet. And so that's the dynamic and that and the reaction of me not taking up space caused him to take up more space and overlook me more, which made me feel more alone, which was the same loneliness I experienced as a kid. And so I was playing a huge role in creating a dynamic that contributed to my own lack of satisfaction and misery. And so that's not to say that Alex wasn't doing certain things and he could have done other things, but it is just to say that this was the role I was playing in shaping my relationship and it wasn't working for me. And the same thing came up last night

with me and my new partner. Can you unpack what was the situation that came up a little bit? Yeah. It was something similar to I wanted to be asked questions about something specific or to have more interest be expressed. But I still, as a therapist,

I tend to default to the space of asking questions, of not taking up space, of listening, or just shutting down. If someone doesn't ask me, I shut down instead of just start talking. And I shut down because I get disappointed. And this is a common thing that I see often in the couples with my friends, is that people are wanting interest to be expressed, but they're not willing to express themselves. And so this is, in terms of change yourself, change your relationship. As I attempt to try and change myself here, I'm hoping that it'll create a different dynamic

in terms of I will take up more space and therefore I will receive more space. And another part of kind of understanding yourself to understand the relationship, to understand this kind of co-created dynamic is to really dig into something that might be very painful, which is your triggers. And so explain what a trigger is and why understanding them for yourself can be so

powerful for relationships. When you're feeling something really powerful, like if it makes you feel really sad or really disappointed or to a point where you shut down, you can be sure that you're being triggered. Triggers are any kind of stimulus that pulls out some kind of emotional reaction. And sometimes it is just about the present, but oftentimes it's about both the past and the present. And so the past being these earlier wounds from our family of origin and culture. And so they're really important to become aware of because it deepens the story and it often will help us elicit a better reaction from our partners when instead of blaming them and criticizing them for not fulfilling our need, we can understand first why we're feeling so intense to have that need

fulfilled and where those responses come from. And we can approach them much, much better from a place not of desperation, not of entitlement, not of objectifying them to be our need-fulfilling machine, but as a human being with experiences that have contributed to why we want what we want. Sometimes our triggers wind up making us behave in ways that don't necessarily make sense for our current partners. You told a story about this with Alex when you had a little bit of a fender bender

in Alex's car. We're curious if you'll share that story. I completely wrecked his car and I was petrified. I was so afraid he was going to scream at me, reject me, leave me. I thought I was in big trouble. I'm the least handy person. I was so afraid he was going to scream at me, reject me, leave me. I thought I was in big trouble. I'm the least handy person. I literally can't fix anything. But I was freaked out so much that I went to the auto store and I bought car parts and I started to try to fix the

car. He came out and he found me and he was like, what are you doing? I know you can't do this. I don't care. Really, it's not a big deal. And it was really reparative for me to know that I could make a mistake. I could even damage his car and I could still receive love and it wouldn't get punished. And so these are moments that are extremely reparative with our partners. And it was a sweet moment and it was hot. But our triggers can bring out the opportunity to really work through something powerful. And this is how we hear people say we heal in the context of our adult relationships, and this is how we do it.

We can relearn that we can make a mistake, we can be ourselves, and we can still be loved. This sort of sensitivity to our own set of triggers means that we might need to extend the same courtesy to our partners too. We might need to recognize that they have triggers, and sometimes when they're responding kind of really intensely, it might not be about us. It might be about something that happened in the past. So talk about how we can kind of navigate our partner's triggers and do that a little bit better.

It's really hard. And I call this emotional karate or mission impossible. You know, we're all a little narcissistic and we all do think that everything is about us. And if our partner is going to act in a certain way, it has certain implications on who we are or what they think about us. But we really have to become a bit more curious when we see our partners struggling, getting really angry, feeling really sad, looking really withdrawn. We all have a tendency to feel, why are they doing this to me?

Why are they in this mood? I don't like it. So we view our partner, their behavior, their thoughts, their feelings, their reactions through a lens of what they're doing to us or how it relates to us, as opposed to how it relates to them. So it's really important and helpful to get into the habit of empathy. Is everything okay? What's happening? Where does this come from? Do you have an idea about why you're feeling so upset right now. So it's really important to first go a place of curiosity rather than blame, criticism, contempt. I did this with Alex. He would get into a bad mood and instead of just asking, is everything okay? I would get annoyed. I'd be like, this is annoying. I don't want to be with someone who's in a bad mood. Or I would feel threatened if he raised

his voice, not to me, but like we're driving and he was having road rage, which sure it's not pleasant, but like it had nothing to do with me, but I made it driving and he was having road rage, which sure, it's not pleasant, but like it had nothing to do with me. But I made it about me. It was like, this is unpleasant for me, as opposed to, you know, letting him be a human being who has his own histories, who has his own anxieties, his own triggers, and trying to understand that. And part of the understanding also seems like you needed to ask Alex about what was going on. You needed to get curious, but also to maybe have a hard conversation that involved him delving into his past. And so how can we normalize this idea that conversations aren't always easy and fun,

that sometimes they're hard and that can actually be healing in the long run? Yeah. I mean, also that fighting isn't necessarily bad. Conflict isn't bad. Again, you know, conflict for all of us is a trigger. So that's how you do the conflict that really makes a difference. And it's really making sure that, one, we can have the conversations that feel hard, but they don't have to involve scary screaming, yelling, things that are unsafe. You can insert humor, touch, eye contact, caring expressions, caring responses. It can be fighty, that's okay too.

Don't get into the contempt and the name calling and the screaming and the real mean stuff. But if we don't have these conversations, it will lead to future resentment. It will lead to disconnection. It will really impact your relationship. So it's just kind of one of those things you have to do like going to the dentist,

which sorry dentists, but no one wants to go. As we talk about unlearning all of these rules, I'm cognizant that you're both the therapist and the expert on this, but also someone who yourself is dating and engaging in relationships. Has unlearning all of these rules helped you out too? I have friends that, you know, when we first met, they thought I was a therapist and had it all figured out and didn't experience challenge. And my traumas remain. They don't go away. No one's trauma goes away. I've learned to understand my traumas and understanding my traumas and expanding my conscious awareness of who I am has helped me better understand what happens for me in relational dynamics. I'm better at understanding it. I'm better at not just reacting right away or sending

that text message that I might have sent that was really not helpful to send. But in terms of understanding my trauma, there's no cure for that, like I was saying. And so, you know, this is part of life that often gets missed in Instagram is that part of it is feeling pain. Part of it is feeling happy and wonderful. You know, there's an entire spectrum of emotion, just like there's an entire spectrum of weather. And while all of this information and insight has been crucial and helpful and really helped me de-escalate the anxiety and panic I can feel at times with a partner, it still comes up. But I think from a much calmer place than I used to. I think is particularly important because the amount of people that I get questions from, how do I know when to end it? Questions like that, they're so complicated. That's really helpful to think about, not just dating, not just love in general while we're in it or conflict or reasonable disappointment, but also the idea that relationships do in fact end. And they don't end

in this fairy tale kind of period at the end of a sentence kind of a way. Sometimes grief goes on forever. It's goes on forever. It's hard, etc. So what's some of your best advice for somebody who's ended a relationship? How can they give themselves some grace and self-compassion to navigate that ending? I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is stop evaluating yourself or your partner. All of that is resistance to just feeling our pain. Relational endings are incredibly painful, incredibly painful. And evaluating it, looking back, thinking about our ex, spiraling about one thing or another, it's just resistance to pain. And the best thing that people can do when they're going through a relational ending is grieve. Let themselves feel their emotions to let themselves be where they

are. If it's, like I was saying, I ended my relationship and three years later, I was still having nightmares, nightmares about my ex, these ghosts, you know, these things, they follow us and there's meaning behind it. So stop evaluating yourself, let yourself feel things, which is so hard to do and not the response that people want. They want a top 10 list of like, these are the things you do, be with friends, do this, which you can, but the reality is to get through a breakup and heartbreak requires tolerance and courage and patience and self-awareness. And so any tips on how to make that hard decision

about whether a relationship needs some work and will continue on versus it's over and you should give up on it? I get asked this question so much. When do I know? When do I leave? What I usually tell people, and it's so counterintuitive, but I tell them to work on it. Go to couples counseling. If you're at this place, that doesn't mean that you're going to repair your relationship. But I truly don't think that people are really equipped at times to fully know how to move forward, which is why they're

feeling so confused. And so having someone to help you and your partner work through this, because it's a couple's issue., relational endings are a couple's issue. Even if only one person is initiating it, that can be really helpful. Of course, not everybody has access to or even wants to go because they're feeling so hopeless, which fine. But even still, sometimes if you're not there to pull the trigger, which most people are not, it can take years sometimes of ambivalence and confusion, is still to work through it as best as you can with your partner. It's often through those steps that you're going to get more information about what it's like to

work through your disappointments with them. What it's like to bring up that conversation of, I'm thinking about ending this relationship and to see how they respond and to have a conversation about it. Sometimes people do have some light bulb that goes off. Most of the time that when I'm seeing a client in my own experience with Alex, it's really confusing because these are people at times we've been with for years that we deeply, deeply love.

And it's not just a matter of they're terrible. I don't want to be with them anymore. And sometimes even when they are terrible and you don't want to be with them, it can even still be difficult because of your life's context. So I mean, the direct advice is to try and work through it and to go to counseling to get help.

We didn't do that, me and Alex. and I really actually do regret not doing that. Not because I think we would have still been together, but I think it really would have been helpful to work through the ending together. And I think that's often a very scary step to take again because of hopelessness and it feels counterintuitive, but it's one really helpful way to approach an ending. Speaking of endings, we've now come full circle with our short season on happiness and love. We've talked about happier dating, happier long-term love, happier arguing and repair, and finally now, happier breakups. But hopefully you won't be thinking of ditching us for someone else, because the Happiness Lab has many new shows in store. We'll soon be celebrating World Happiness Day with a few special episodes and some very special guests.

The Tour de France guys are out there like all day for like weeks. It's insane. They're like risking their lives. They're losing 20 pounds. Their butts sore. They're back.

I mean, it's just like incredible like what they go through. The whole thing is just nuts. It's just nuts. But before that, I'll take you on a strange happiness journey high, high up in the sky.

I don't know why you get back to the patient, huh? If you listen to Yeager's cockpit recordings, his fear is very obvious and his relief is palpable. I can't say much more. I got to say this. He knew he was in trouble. Right.

That's still to come on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.