Relationships Survey - #2

The other day I told you about the number one response to my survey about relationships. Today I want to talk about the second most asked question that came up. Really it was two questions that I have combined into one. Those two questions were basically the flip sides of the same thing: What makes a relationship succeed or what makes it fail.


In the special Teleclass coming up in about a week I will be talking specifically about those things that are key to success in a relationship. For now, I would like to talk about the one thing that results in failure.

The number one question that came up was why people tend to change so much for the worse from the time we meet them and start dating until the relationship is well into the committed phase. I stated that there is a part of the brain called the limbic system that eventually hijacks the relationship. Well, this is the key to understanding why relationships fail. You see the limbic system is our emotional warehouse where we store our pain and our defenses against our pain.

All of us carry woundedness from our childhoods. That is the pain I am talking about. Later in life our relationships and marriages become the theater for that pain since the limbic system really does not know the difference between our current relationship and our family of origin. We come to the partnership with our pain and we expect our partner to heal it for us. But there is a SECRET. We want our pain to go away without ever knowing what it is! So what we do is act out our pain in the form of a defense.

Meanwhile, our mate is doing their version of the same thing. To us, their acting out and defensiveness looks like and attack. Simultaneously, our acting out of our pain looks like an attack to them. This complimentary behavior forms a cycle of acting out, defensiveness, and lack of fulfillment that results in the inevitable breakup.

It boils down to this. People with no personal insight are unconscious to the emotional forces inside of themselves. What doesn’t get worked out gets acted out! Relationship failure is the result. Until we confront the emotional forces in our own lives, we will never fully understand what goes on in another person.

So you see failure in a relationship is not about sex, money, communications or any number of surface factors. These are symptoms of the underlying problem that we brought with us into the relationship.

What makes a relationship succeed? Please join us for the Teleclass: How you can move from Frustration to Fulfillment. Learn the top three qualities of a successful relationship. If you can’t make the class you will be sent a link to download the recording.