“But Wouldn’t Most People Act The Same With All Partners?”
Listen to a podcast episode about this here!
The headline of this post is a question that I am asked frequently in counseling, whether directly or indirectly. Here are the two main reasons it is asked:
- A person feels stuck in their marriage and convinces themselves to stay in a bad situation because they would “just get into the same bad pattern with the next person I picked.”
- A person feels that their own behavior has nothing to do with why their partner is unhappy, and that their partner would be unhappy with anyone.
People who were raised in negative homes tend to feel paralyzed in their lives, as I discuss here. They have a negativistic way of viewing the world, and if they are also depressed, their brains actively tell them how bad life is and will continue to be. These people look at their relationships as just one more hopeless, lonely, frustration area of their lives, and assume that not much they could do would change this “fact.” (Spoiler: this is not a fact.)
In the first case, this person convinces themselves that, as Patti Stanger says, they have a “bad picker” and would likely pick the same sort of self-involved/depressive/angry/difficult partner no matter what. To this I say:
