How Your Thoughts Sabotage Your Relationships?
137. How Your Thoughts Sabotage Your Relationships?
You realize that you ruminate a lot in your relationships and you know this causes you a lot of suffering.
You tend to project quickly, or on the contrary to anticipate the worst (to learn more on this topic, see episode 50, the Disney syndrome), and you’d like to change that.
You’ve tried to change your mindset, to do positive affirmations, and you feel like it doesn’t work.
In this episode I’ll explain what really creates your thoughts, how they reinforce your emotional state, and what you can do to keep them from sabotaging your relationships. This explanation has relieved many people among the 600 people I’ve coached, because there’s often a feeling of guilt attached to it.
Spoiler alert: it’s connected to your nervous system
Watch my webinar on how to finally be happy in Love!
Where Do Your Thoughts Come From?
You talk to yourself and think all the time:
About yourself
About what you’re experiencing
About others
About your future
A human being has roughly 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day and is only conscious of 5% of them, meaning 95% are unconscious.
What causes you to nurture certain thoughts rather than others is the repetition of your experiences, which in a way creates a map of what you believe to be true — your beliefs.
Most of this map was formed in childhood, based on your past experiences and the emotional states you lived through. This is where your nervous system comes in.
A thought is a way your brain makes sense of what your body felt.
In short, your thought is induced by the state of your nervous system.
So depending on the dominant state of your nervous system, you’ll tend to have certain recurring types of thoughts more often:
| Nervous System State | Associated Thoughts |
|---|---|
| Ventral Vagal | “I trust others.” / “I am connected to others.” / “I can handle this situation.” / “Everything will go well.” |
| Sympathetic Fight | “There is danger.” / “This is a threat.” / “I cannot trust this person.” / “I am angry.” |
| Sympathetic Flight | “I must leave here.” / “I cannot face this situation.” / “It is better to flee.” / “I must hide.” |
| Sympathetic Freeze | “I must please others to be safe.” / “I must be accepted and loved.” / “I must avoid conflict.” / “I will do everything they want to avoid rejection.” |
| Dorsal Vagal | “I am alone.” / “There is no way out.” / “I am disconnected from the world.” / “Nothing matters to me anymore.” |
For you
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Your Thoughts Also Reinforce Your State
The thoughts you nurture will in turn reinforce the state of your nervous system and how you feel emotionally. This is the well-known spiral of negative thoughts that sets in and increases the intensity of what you feel.
Becoming aware of what you tell yourself about yourself, the situation, or what will happen will help you avoid escalating your emotion or your rumination.
The idea isn’t to practice positive thinking and invalidate what you feel (and further disconnect you from your feelings), but to find a more helpful interpretation that both acknowledges what you feel AND helps you move toward the response you want to give.
Let’s take an example:
If you panic because your partner isn’t texting you back and the thought “He’s going to leave me” comes up.
This thought “He’s going to leave me” points to your state in relation to this situation, namely a sympathetic fight state (“I can’t trust”).
To help yourself, first go through the body, for example by doing the wall-push exercise to regulate your agitation.
Then find the more helpful thought that acknowledges what you’re experiencing and helps you de-escalate: “I have an insecurity that’s been reactivated by the situation, this doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, he could be busy, I’ll give him the day to answer me.”
You’ll see whether these actions worked by whether your thoughts calmed down (with one caveat: as long as you haven’t deprogrammed your love patterns, their frequency, intensity and reactivation can still return often).
That’s why in Opening up to love you learn both the tools to regulate your nervous system and your emotions, understand the state you’re in, and also learn to have an inner dialogue that respects your state, understands your state, and supports your nervous system’s state so you can act in a more appropriate way.
Going further
If you want to explore the topic further and identify your own love patterns, you have my book S’ouvrir à l’amour, available in all bookstores.
And if you want to do the work on your love patterns through the body and transform your love life, you have the program Opening up to love. You can take the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporeal work to deprogram nervous system automatisms and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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