How to Transform Your Toxic Relationship and Thrive
Identify triggers, increase self-awareness, and grow
Congratulations. You’ve attracted this amazing partner in your life.
In the first months, you have surfed the waves of being in love, you are enjoying each other's bodies in a wild and exciting sexual exploration, and you continue to show the very best of you. You might have found the partner of your life!
The true heart's desire is to lose ourselves completely in the object of our desire. To drown in endorphins when we make love, to present our heart on a silver plate. To let our ego drift shipwrecked to be freed by love’s erratic call. To come home in this insanity that we call love.
That’s why we fall in love, we love to lose control and let our hearts roam free on the highway of unbound passion, attraction, and sexual polarity.
I know.
I am talking about Romantic love here, the love that fills many Netflix series, bouquet novels, and the one that is idealized by our society.
The truth, for every relationship, is that this amazing partner that you made perfect, is going to trigger you in the long run. And that’s great too. Why?
Triggers in any relationships are amazing keys for personal growth.
Sadly, they also can become the doorway to hell.
To seemingly uncontrollable anger, passive-aggressiveness, hurting the other, firing of bitchy poisonous arrows, giving the other the silent treatment, walking away when things heat up, all the way to abuse, domestic violence, emotional hijacking and manipulation.
How to avoid love from becoming a battlefield?
What do you do when your relationship is dragging itself from fight to fight, and you just can’t find a way together to grow out of it? When your relationship becomes more and more toxic, and the hurt and unsafety that comes with this become bigger than your initial love and respect for each other.
There is a way to deal with the triggers in your relationship. There is a way to become more conscious of what actually triggers you, to start owning what you feel in the moment you get triggered instead of blaming the other for it.
In fact, there are many ways. I’ll show you how to become more conscious of what triggers you in your relationship and to transform your triggers into personal growth, and your relationship to mature beyond harmful toxicity.
On Your Way to Become More Present, Real and Connected
What I am about to explain to you has its foundation in the work of Tej Steiner, a pioneer in the work of heart circle’s and authentic relating, and accelerating awakening retreats I participated in with Christian Pankhurst, founder of the HeartIQ method and author of Insights to Intimacy.
The cornerstone of both their approach to relationships and personal growth are these 5 ways of being: Being Clear, Present, Real, Connected, and Heart-Directed.
For helping you to move out of toxicity in your relationship, the aim of this piece, I’ll use some of their exercises around becoming more present, more real and more connected.
Using these 3 cornerstones of authentic relating in my past relationship changed my world. It helped us enormously to get out of toxic patterns, transforming them into life force, complete acknowledgement and transformation of pain points, and ultimately more compassion and love. I do hope this writing can ignite a similar journey for your relationship.
First Step: Agree on Growth
Agreements ensure that being together is enjoyable and productive — Tej Steiner
Before any growth can happen in your relationship by cultivating more awareness around toxic patterns, it helps when you both embrace the intention or wish for personal and relational growth.
This starts with agreeing on the fact that you feel both stuck, that your relationship feels like dead water that starts to turn greenish. It’s not moving to new spaces, it’s not nourishing your souls and hearts nor brings you to deeper levels of intimacy, maturity and expansion.
An open talk about this is a beautiful starting point.
Remember though, neither of you should blame the other for things gotten sour. You are in this together, and the clear and outspoken intention for growth should come from the both of you. This agreement is key.
Second Step: Identifying Your Safe Zone and When You Get triggered
Let’s get clear on what exactly a trigger is first, and more importantly, what it can do to you.
We all have a safe space within ourselves. Let’s call that our capacity. By being in our capacity, we can listen to our partner with an open heart, we feel safe and we can hold space for our partner, in every situation.
Imagine this capacity as a bandwidth. According to Pankhurst, triggers appear when you feel pulled out of that capacity. You start to feel unsafe. What happens next is that you either freeze or you feel attacked and you move into defensive action.
Your defence, for example, can become daggers of hurtful remarks. You probably know the pain points of your partner and now you suddenly find yourself using that against her or him. When you consider yourself a spiritual person, you might switch on something I call ‘Spiritual Spitfire’. Your artillery is loaded with super sharp hurtful spiritual righteousness.
Either way, it's a contracted space that pushes you both out of your capacity to stay open. Triggers make us close our hearts and contract.
It makes perfect sense that when you attack your partner from feeling unsafe or ‘hurt’, she or he will feel attacked and probably start blaming and shaming you, going into defence and trying to hurt you. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
It all started with a trigger.
For many people, triggers just happen. Following a trigger often means losing control. There is often a part in yourself that feels good about defending yourself simply because you felt attacked. Your ego taps you on your back, even while your partner just left the room shouting or crying. Or both.
Your higher self probably doesn’t like what you just did at all, I mean, you just hurt yourself and your partner. For growing out of your defensive reaction pattern, you’ll need is to recognize when you feel the victim. For this to happen, you’ll need the ability to take a step back and signal victim behaviour red flags.
This starts with cultivating more awareness.
Getting more aware is a hard thing to do out of nothing. You’ll need a tool, a structure you both agree upon. This structure will provide the two of you some breathing space while staying connected to your safe zone longer. It will allow you to become more present to what is happening inside of yourself, the first cornerstone of the 3 ways of authentic relating.
Third Step: Getting Structure into Place to Increase Safety
Structure is king — Christian Pankhurst
The next step is to create a structure in where a more authentic way of communication can take place in the moments you start to get triggered or you feel you move into a victim position.
Remember, when you get triggered, you move off the safe space of your capacity. The agreement you have made will function as a time out. You can use a code word for example when this happens, like ‘Time-Out’, or ‘Break’. Use the Time-Out sign by making a T with both hands.
More awareness of when you get triggered and getting more conscious of exactly when you feel a victim in a fight with your partner, combined with the time-out agreement, will lead to widening your capacity, your bandwidth, your safety zone.
The most elemental thing is to get more aware of when you actually get triggered.
This starts with identifying the victim red flags. These are the moment that you start talking in black and white and say things like: You always do this…Or you close off completely because you believe you are being treated very badly by your partner so you give the silent treatment, nod your head and say something like: Here we go again…Or you say: Why are you shouting at me? and you walk away feeling the beaten dog. All these comments don’t acknowledge what your partner is going through and often leads to a game of shaming and blaming ping pong.
Notice your body when you feel you get triggered, turn the attention to yourself, not your partner's words, what happens inside of you? Maybe your energy level is dropping, you feel more contracted around your solar plexus, you start breathing shallow and faster.
This is the moment, ask for the time out as agreed. You are now owning where you are at and not responding how you used to do. You are ready for the next step, doing a check-in.
Keep on breathing.
Fourth Step: Check-in With Each Other When One Of You Gets Triggered and Stay Present
What follows when you are in your agreed time-out safe space, is doing a check-in with each other. This is a structure provided by Pankhurst to become more real to what you feel and experience at the moment, our second cornerstone of authentic relating.
Pankhurst advises practising these check-ins as much as you can. Also when you don’t feel triggered at all. Key is that you give full presence to your partner and that you don’t try to fix, heal, or coach the other. Just be present.
Keep on breathing, put your feet firmly on the ground, stay heart connected and track the sensations in your body while presencing your partner. Maybe your body heats up, you feel your heart or other parts in your body contract, you feel anger rising or you feel a freeze into the flow of things. Just be aware of those sensations, don’t judge them, don’t flip back in your mind.
The check-in exercise is a great way to slowly take away any resistance of feeling deeper. While your partner holds space for you, you can finally sink into what you really feel in the moment beyond the initial trigger. To become vulnerable.
You have succeeded in the first cornerstone — you are more present with what moves within you after feeling triggered, and you respond not from the trigger, but from that awareness.
Congratulations, That’s a major step.
Now let’s move to what you can do next.
Fifth Step: Become Real With Yourself and Express What You Feel
Being Real is about my willingless to settle conflicts before they crystallize into the hardening of my heart — Tej Steiner
You are aware you got triggered, you made the Time-out and agreed on a check-in. You are more present with what moves inside yourself then ever. Amazing !
The next step is the third cornerstone: to name what moves within you. You are becoming more real with yourself.
It is very important not to directly relate what you feel with what your partner just did, or not did, his or her behaviour that triggered you. Avoid this: You didn’t do the dishes again and now I feel this irritation coming up in my chest. Or, what you just said really hurt me, I feel my heart contract.
When you notice saying things like that, you are falling back into being the victim. When this happens, don’t beat yourself up for it, just start again.
Keep it with yourself. Own what you feel.
In my own relationship, I was sometimes terrified to just express what I felt in the moment. I was so afraid of being judged, or that I was just not good enough, or that I failed my partner. During practising the check-in, I came to the awareness that these were all my own limiting beliefs, coming from my own pain. My partner’s actions or words had nothing to do with that, they only triggered my own insecurity and pain.
Becoming more able to just speak out what was moving through me at the moment, without making myself wrong, was a huge release and a giant improvement of our relationship. I started owning what I felt and expressing it. It felt like finding the key to a magic box of growth. I finally got it. It took us 2 years of fights.
Be patient with your process. See it as an emotional hygiene gym. The more you work out, the more check-ins, the easier it gets to become more present, real, and connected.
Now it is time to bring it a step further.
Sixth Step: Name What You Need, Feel Deeper
Congratulations, you find yourselves sitting in front of each other, you just named what moves in you and your partner is fully present with you. You feel safe because of this structure and the agreement of the time out. Probably the dark cloud that moments before appeared at the horizon of your harmony is already changing colour because you are not directly becoming your trigger. Instead, you took distance by naming what moves within you.
When you move through your days together, and alone, there always will be moments that you’ll feel low. In most cases, what happens is that your deeply stored away pain is asking for attention. Or any kind of feeling or emotion that is uncomfortable for you.
What you resist, persists — Christian Pankhust
You made this part of yourself wrong. You’ve put layers of shame or self-blame around it. This disconnect, or separation from being in touch with your core, causes much of your pain.
Nobody really likes to feel pain, so we develop mechanisms to look the other way, to become super active, to get into an addiction to numb ourselves out. We start eating a lot, we become super spiritual and there are another 1000 things to avoid pain. Relationships have the potential to let this all come to the surface with your triggers as the secret doorway.
Naming what you need will give you more space to become more vulnerable and real with yourself. The beautiful thing here is that you make space for yourself to get in touch with deeper feelings and emotions inside yourself. This will allow you to start unzipping the triggers and to explore what lies underneath.
It comes with a price.
When I am cut off from emotions like grief or rage, I often close down the pleasurable feelings like joy and wonder. Feelings are strung together in a unified system, like those old Christmas three lights, where when one light goes off, they all go off — Tej Steiner
Your journey of feeling deeper and expressing yourself, of becoming more real, present and connected, will depend on how much space you can hold for yourself and your partner without losing being present and have a fallback into being triggered.
The result?
You are expanding both your safety bandwidth and you allow yourself to feel deeper, to expand your emotional range. You are becoming more of yourself and this will allow your partner to do the same. Now more realness, connection and presence can move into your relationship too. You feel more alive and everything gets juicier. A fresh wind is blowing through your relationship and from this new found openness you sex life will get a boost too.
Mastering the above-mentioned steps might take you years. This depends on how often you and your partner decide to visit the emotional hygiene gym, how much stored away trauma there is, and definitively also how much love and respect you feel for yourself and your partner.
You have clear tools now to move out the muddy waters of toxic behaviour.
When you and your partner feel ready in your life and relationship to commit to emotional growth, great! That’s the first step. You decide on a code word or gesture for the trigger time out. This will avoid you or your partner to move into victim behaviour and attacking the other. Instead, you stay in your safe zone and make space to do a proper check-in. This structure will provide both of you to express what moves deeper inside and what you need.
Here you go, you now get access to deeper stored feelings and emotions that in this safe space can come out, you are becoming more real with yourself. You realize that you were avoiding your pain, which means you were avoiding to look and feel deeper, through layers of self-shame and blame.
Now you start integrating essential parts of yourself that have been stored away all of your life. No need to project them anymore, you own them. You are emotionally more mature and your relationship starts thriving on all levels.
This emotional maturity is the opposite of cultivating toxicity in your relationships. Eventually, it will bring you more heartfelt connection, nurturing each other's souls while experiencing more joy.
Sources:
Tej Steiner — Waking up with everybody around us Christian Pankhurst — Insights to Intimacy
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Lucien is writer, blogger and author of “The Wisdom Keeper”, a heroes journey about the need to fall in love with earth again and be humbled by the wisdom of our earth keepers.