Mon 25 Jan 2010 |
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 After his marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones, actor Michael Douglas remarked, “You have to be secure to be married to someone as beautiful as Catherine.” The truth is you have to be secure to make a good relationship work with any woman and herein lies the issue. The reasons so few relationship really work can be traced back to our early life experiences, our teenage formative years and much of what our current expectations are and many of these fall into what I call the four personal traps: The Performance trap – This is an easy one to fall into. We tell ourselves that we must meet certain standards in order to feel good about ourselves. This runs the entire gamut of self-destruction, from people who set impossible standards for themselves and therefore set the stage for their own failure to those who will not even try because they are caught up in a self-destructive cycle of bad behavior which then justifies their failure and the label that they are somehow ‘failures’ and ‘bad’. The standards here are imposed either by our own ideas of what is acceptable by society, or rather our own social circle, or by our own private belief system which itself has been created through the upbringing process we have undergone. The Approval Addict trap - This is the part where we feel that we must gain the approval of others in order to feel good about ourselves. Whether it’s parents, co-workers, siblings or supernatural beings the point is that we are caught up in a trap of constantly striving to please those who may not even be aware of our striving, therefore castigating ourselves on an eternal treadmill to nowhere. The Blame Game trap - This is a solipsistic logic issue where we see ourselves failing and feel that we are then unworthy of love and deserve to be punished. Those of us who are trapped in this loop never manage to set any kind of target which makes us feel about ourselves. Subconsciously we are setting ourselves up for failure because that feeds the poor view we have of ourselves. The Shame trap – This is where we tell ourselves: “I am what I am. I cannot change. I am hopeless.” And the moment we say that we also commit ourselves to being unhappy, dissatisfied and never achieving anything we set out to do in our lives. When it comes to our inner world nothing is ever neat and black and white. The four traps I have outlined here are just a convenient way of looking at our behavioral patterns and assessing where we are and why we do the things we do. Many times our behavior will fall between two of the behavioral traps I have outlined above. The point is that by using these tools we can understand ourselves a little better and we can then begin the slow, arduous process of change which is required in order for us to improve. Is that easy to do? No, and many who do not decisively stick at it, eventually fail. But those who understand why they are the way they are and take the decision to change manage to establish relationships which are not self-destructive, which actually help them build the bonds that strengthen them rather than weaken them, and that is what relationships should be all about. Tags: 
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