You’re about to invest in a high-conflict partner

Before you make the leap into serious commitment, make sure you’re not investing in someone with a high-conflict personality.

by: E.B. Johnson

The people we choose to spend our lives with make a big difference in the quality of future we build for ourselves. When we choose partners who are stable and emotionally aware, we end up with mature relationships which are able to stand the test of time. Going the other way can bring an entire host of issues, though. Investing in people who are immature and high conflict can lead to serious disconnects and disruptions that undermine our happiness and overall joy in this life.

We have to invest in the right people.

Building the right relationships takes a lot of time, but it also requires that we select the right partners too. We should look for people who value us, but also those who respect us and the journey that we’re on. To build a life together, we have to be willing to compromise and grow together. That only happens when both partners are open, honest, and at peace with where they’re going.

We have to invest in the right people — people who want to see us thrive and people who want to build a peaceful and stable life with us. When we bring conflict-prone people into our lives, we invite their conflict in with them. These issues splinter our partnerships and erodes our self-esteem and our sense of self and purpose.

Are you about to make a serious leap with someone who could be dangerous for your mental health? Are you falling with someone who is abusive, threatening, or otherwise absolute in the way they approach life and relationships? Love is about growth, and it’s about finding deeper ways to connect. We can’t do this with someone who is at war with the world and at war with themselves. Invest in the right people and avoid high-conflict partners altogether.

The warning signs they may be high-conflict.

Are you about to invest in someone who is going to introduce a great level of conflict into your life? Before you detonate your happiness, ensure you’re not going in deep with threatening behavior, absolutist thinking, a lack of responsibility, or unhinged emotion.

Absolutist thinking

Absolutist thinking is toxic and doesn’t make for happy or well-adjusted partnerships. Does your love interest have all-or-nothing thinking? Does the world exist only as they see it, with no room for growth or anyone else’s experiences? The absolutist is someone who always comes with conflict. It’s their way or the highway, and they don’t care who they have to remove to get there.

Threatening behavior

Investing in someone who is abusive or threatening is always a bad bet. Whatever behavior they show to others is the same behavior (or worse) that they will use with you. Never waste your time with partners who try to control you, abuse you, or threaten you with danger or tangible and intangible harm. Getting hurt or losing your life is not worth the validation of someone so broken. You can’t fix them.

Zero responsibility

In order for us to be happy in this life, we have to take responsibility for our own lives and the future that we’re building. Personal accountability is how we grow and how we come into our own as individuals. If you waste your time by investing in someone who blames everyone else for their mistakes, you’re going to run into a lot of conflict and a lot of heartbreak.

Unhinged emotions

Emotional awareness is everything when it comes to building a happy life. Our emotions are powerful, and they can overwhelm us if we don’t learn how to identify them and manage them. Beyond that, we need to be able to listen to our emotions and the underlying truths they hold for us. When we aren’t aware of our emotions, we lose control of them and start communicating through conflict and major blowups.

How to protect yourself and find the right partner.

Don’t allow yourself to get derailed by a high conflict partner. Protect yourself by establishing boundaries and investing in your self-worth. You deserve to share life with someone is balanced, well-rounded, and aligned with the same values and behaviors. They’ll only come into your life when you actively make room for them, though.

1. Establish self-worth

People with high self-esteem don’t allow themselves to be taken in by people who don’t want the best for them. Those who believe in themselves are those who don’t settle for relationships with high-conflict people. They invest their time wisely, and they invest in people who are on the same track. If you want to become one of those people, then you need to focus on increasing your self-esteem.

Stop looking to other people to give you a sense of validation or self-worth. Until you value yourself, the world will continue to devalue you. Understand that you have a right to happiness and the type of future that provides you with comfort, peace, love, support, and fulfillment.

Believe in yourself. Believe in your right to be happy with someone who is themselves a happy and self-fulfilled person. Learn to love your body. Celebrate every inch of it and fall in love with the person who loves it inside and out too. You are smart, and strong, and capable of learning anything you need to thrive. Embrace your power and see yourself as worthy of more than a subpar intimacy.

2. Build better boundaries

When we think of boundaries, we have a tendency to think of the lines we draw between ourselves and other people. Those aren’t the only boundaries we have to set, though. When it comes to good relationships, we also have to set boundaries for ourselves. There are lines you can’t allow yourself to cross, and behaviors you can’t allow in your aura.

Set some limits for yourself, especially when it comes to a love interest that needs to be out-of-bounds. If you can’t cut them out of your life entirely, then you need to limit their presence so that you can heal and move on. Remember, theses lines are only set in stone for a little while. Once you’ve moved on with your life, you can always come back and reassess.

Consider your feelings and what triggers might lie between the two of you. Limit the time you spend with high-conflict people. Don’t put yourself in compromising positions in which you are forced to engageg. Build walls where necessary and seek peace over chaos. Don’t accept excuses and don’t allow yourself justifications. None of those will pay off when you end up heartbroken or alone.

3. Don’t allow settling

Your determination to be with a dramatic partner isn’t an accident. Our tendency to settle is — more often than not — tied into our patterns of self-sabotage. When we hate ourselves, we punish ourselves through bad behavior and worse choices. We set ourselves up for failure, and way we do this is by investing in toxic and high-conflict partners.

At some point, you’re going to have to make the decision to see the patterns and stop them. You’re going to have to stop settling for less than you deserve, and you’re going to have to do it both consciously and with action.

Be compassionate with yourself, but stern. You can love someone and still know that they aren’t good for you. On some rare occasions, you can even keep them around in limited spaces in your life. The person you decide to build a life with, though, should be someone who can give as much as you give. Partnerships that last require give-and-take. They also require emotional and physical presence.

4. Analyze old patterns

Before you put more time and energy into someone else you’re unsure about, you need to analyze your old patterns and the root of your issues. Why do you keep running back to the same toxic partners? Do you find comfort in the chaos? Comfort in the conflict? By analyzing our history and our past patterns and habits, we can get to the bottom of what’s going wrong in our lives and our relationships.

Take a step back from the situation that you’re in and assess where you’re at. How did you get here? How have you gotten to the point that you’ve fallen for someone who is aggressive, or threatening, or mean? Start where you are and work your way backward. Where did you learn to settle? Who taught you it was okay to give yourself to bad people?

This is a process which takes a lot of time and energy to process. You don’t get all your answers overnight, and you may even need the help of a relationship or mental health expert to get there. There’s no right or wrong way to find your answers, but you need to give yourself enough emotional space from your current relationship to look at things clearly. Be brutally honest with yourself. These lessons aren’t serving you, and they never have.

5. Re-prioritize your relationships

Are you someone who has put relationships above everything else in the past? Do you see love and romance as your top priority? While relationships can certainly provide us with aspects of happiness, they alone aren’t enough to create the kind of happiness that lasts a lifetime. If we truly wish to build equitable partnerships, we have to reshape our priorities and put romance in its rightful place so we lose our willingness to settle.

Put romance in perspective in your life. It is not the be-all and end-all to joy. True happiness can only be found from within, when we are content with who we are as an individual and the environment we’ve built for ourselves. Happy relationships come when we’ve already figured out how to be happy people on our own.

Stop obsessing over something you can live without. Whether you find the right person right now or in 10 years, you can still be happy, whole, and filled with excitement. See romantic relationships as a piece of your happiness rather than the centerpiece of it, and you’ll be so much happier in who you are and the quality of partners you attract. There is so much love in this world and it will fill you up if you let it. Value all the love in your love, not just the intimate connections you form.

Putting it all together…

Are you getting ready to settle down with a potentially high-conflict partner? Before you invest in something that brings you major disconnects and unhappiness, it’s important to reassess what you want and the quality of life you want to lead. You don’t need to settle for someone that doesn’t have what you need, but avoiding that is going to take some action.

First, establish some self-worth and rebuild your self-esteem and sense of confidence. You need to believe in your right to thrive in order to build better relationships and avoid conflict. Build better boundaries for yourself and for others, and stop allowing negative and destructive people to take up space in your lives. At some point, you’re going to have to make the decision to stop settling for partners who don’t have what you need. Analyze old patterns and rework the negative habits that keep dragging you back to negative partners and partnerships. Re-prioritize your relationships. True happiness doesn’t come from the love of someone else. Life brings us true love when we learn first and foremost to love ourselves.