103. Why do you keep pushing people away?
Podcast Summary and Shownotes
We all want to feel loved and be in a loving relationship. But for some of us, no matter how hard we try, we keep pushing people away. And all our efforts to be in a relationship seem to just fall apart. In this episode, I'll explain why you may be pushing people away. And I'll help you find ways to let the people you love into your life.
My name is Jacob Brown, and I'm a Couples Therapist in San Francisco. To learn more, visit:
Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi, my name is Jacob Brown and I'm a couple's therapist in San Francisco. I wanna welcome you to sex love and couple's therapy. We all want to feel loved. That's a universal desire, but sometimes instead of feeling loving our relationships, feel confusing, frustrating, and a little crazy making The purpose of this podcast is to help you clear up some of that confusion so that you and your partner can find ways to make your relationship feel closer, more connect, to do more loving. So stay tuned. We've got a lot of great stuff to talk about, and now let's go talk about my three favorite topics. Sex love in couple's therapy.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Why do I keep pushing people away? That's a question that therapists get asked over and over and over again. Clients come in either individually or they come in as a couple and one, or both of them says, why do I keep pushing my partner away? What's wrong with me? Why does this keep happening? When I hear that phrase, there's a certain sadness to it because clearly they don't want to keep doing this, but there's also, you can hear a certain hopelessness to it because they've tried so hard time. And again, and yet each time they forge a new relationship, they find themselves back in that same trap. Why, why do I keep pushing people away? So that's the topic for today. And that's what we're gonna talk about, why this happens and what we can do about, about it and prevent it from happening and spoiling yet.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Another one of our relationships, as I said, this is a really common issue that brings people to therapy either individually or as a couple, the client knows that they're somehow playing a role in this process. This process of feeling distant from their partner or from people in general in their lives, but they can't quite understand what's going on. They can't quite understand what they're doing it doing in this it's as if they are somehow blinded to their own behavior. And they can only see the other person, but they can't see their role. And they plead, I mean, plead with the therapist to help them understand with questions. Like why do I keep pushing people away? Or it was going so well. And then I pushed him or her away, when am I stop? Or I find someone I like, but as soon as we start getting close, I pull away or create a reason to break up.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Why do I keep doing that? It's a question that is brought into therapy time. And again, many of us carry the feeling that we want to get closer to the people in our lives, but that somehow or something keeps blocking us. This pattern of starting a relationship, getting closer and then friction coming up and then breaking up can repeat itself time. And again, and it can go on for decades. As a cycle is repeated many people experience, a deep feeling of frustration and sadness and loneliness, emptiness, and even despair. And they ask themselves, what am I doing wrong? They look at all the couples around them and it feels like they're the only one who can't be part of a close and loving relationship. And it makes them want to cry in my work. I've noticed a few common themes among clients who experience these repeated relationship problems.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
The first a history of trauma, I have to tell you so many people have suffered significant trauma in their lives. I, this is so common. You know, we, we have this fiction about happy childhoods and, and growing up in a happy environment. But the reality is that so many of us never had that. And to make it worse, often the trauma that we've experienced has come at the hands of the people who were supposed to love and care for us abuse. Use of parents, abusive schools, abusive partners, to name just a few. The pain of these experiences has taught people that there is no safety in love that the safety of feeling of safety and love just can't be trusted. That even those who say they, them will in the end, hurt and betray them and the greater their trauma, the more they come to expect that betrayal.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
And in this way, the feelings of love that they so desperately crave become instead a source of their pain. Now this is not the reality of love, but this is the reality of their experience of love and feeling close. Often the triggering of old trauma wounds ignites a sense of being overwhelmed. People become flooded with feelings of anxiety and may experience panic attacks. The only way they can calm this distress is to push the other person away and create some. And while they hate themselves for pushing their partner away, that is preferable to the overwhelming anxiety that comes with feeling intimacy and to further confuse the situation. They begin to see the partner as a source of the problem, rather than the trauma as being the source of the problem. And all they do then is push the partner further away. And then they become sad and despair.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Because once again, they're gonna find themselves alone. The second common theme is a fear of being discovered, and you can look at this as also kind of a question of self-esteem or low self-esteem. And unfortunately, some of us grow up with a deeply damaged self sense of self-esteem. Some of us may go through life with a sense that we are a fraud that they, a current thought that if he or she only knew the real me they'd leave me. And as time goes on, rather than growing to believe that their partner truly knows them and loves them, their feeling of being a fraud, only intensifies, and soon they are so uncomfortable with their own perceived duplicity. The idea that they're hiding something from the person, they love that they have to escape the relationship to, to let off that pressure. In some cases, they may even see ending the relationship as an act of bravery. They justify leaving by thinking that they are sparing their loved one from the disappointment of finding out the true with about who they really are. And in this way, they can see themselves as leaving for their partners. Benefit
Speaker 1 (07:09):
A third theme for people who push their loved ones away is the belief that all relationships are doomed. We see this often in individuals who have grown up in chaotic households, households in which the relationships are really unstable, filled with anger and infidelity, that experience can seriously damage an individual's ability to believe in a lasting love.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Some people, especially those who parents divorced when they were young, come to believe that all relationships are essentially unstable and doomed. They believe that it's only a matter of time before things begin unravel, given their belief that the relationship won't last, they hold themselves back and never commit. They never really lean in or give themselves to the relationship or to the other person. And in fact, this is one of the drivers for the relationships faltering and failure that they're so convinced it's gonna end. They hold themselves back. And that holding back actually destroys the relationship itself.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
The fourth theme is a rigid personality and some of us just have that, that some somehow the way we were born or how we adapted to life, some of us are a little more rigid than others. And while some of us can adapt easily to changes and can live in the kind of the gray areas of life, others have a more black and white version of the world. And for these people, there's a strong sense that there's a right way and a wrong way. And this includes everything from how to make a peanut butter sandwich, to how to express and receive love.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
The more rigid our thinking. The more often we'll come into conflict with our partner, because we think, oh, they're doing it wrong, but it's not the disagree agreements that cause the problem it's that we see these disagreements as being alarming or even toxic rather than seeing the conflict as two different points of view. These people whose personalities a little more rigid, have an overwhelming sense that there is something wrong with their partner. There's causes tremendous anxiety and suddenly they see their partner as damaged or crazy or untrustworthy or, or somehow other and different from themselves. And that sense of otherness drives them to escape. And the fifth and last theme is the theme of shame, plays a powerful role in pushing people away.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Those who carry shame feel either I'm not enough or I'm too much to handle. Or in some case they feel both in either case, they feel as if there's something so deeply wrong with them, that the relationship is doomed from the beginning and they need to get out of there. That the only way they can save their lives, that they can find comfort is to end the relationship. So how do we deal with some of these barriers to intimacy these themes, which keep coming up over and over again in our lives and keep us separate from the people that we love and feel close to? Well, the truth is there is no easy way to over overcome these barriers to intimacy, regardless of their origin. In many cases, these barriers reflect fundamental for personality traits about who we are, or the result of deep traumatic wounds or these experiences that we've had growing up and what we've been taught and what we've been shown.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And in any case, these are not easy to overcome, but I strongly believe that there is a path to recovery. I believe that healing comes by steadfastly working to keep the search light on ourselves rather than on our partner. It's common that in these situations to only focus on our partner's faults, that's the flashing red light that gets all of our attention. It's so much easier to blame them, to look inward and recognize that carry within us, the wound or the pain that needs to be addressed as a therapist. My role is to turn the question around and help my clients to search out their role in the relationship problems. It's impossible to change ourselves. If we're caught in the cycle of blaming others, change starts from accepting yourself as you are both the strengths and the weaknesses, the good and the bad, and showing yourself some self, some compassion for the difficulties that you've had in your life and how they are showing up in your relationships. It's only once that we're willing to see our parts in the relationship that we can really begin to change. I hope this has been useful and interesting for you. If you have any questions or thoughts, please make sure to leave me a comment.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Well, that's our episode for today. I hope you found it interesting and useful, but most of all, I'd like to thank you for listening. If you have a minute, please hit the subscribe button and give us a rating. And I hope to see you again soon on another episode of sex, love and couples therapy.