Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
We've spent our lives supporting people through the ups and downs, and we want to share these insights with you. Together, we'll unravel the layers of personal and building healthy relationships. Each week, we'll bring you engaging conversations, expert insights, and practical strategies to help you heal from the past, foster healthy communication, and develop enduring love.
This podcast is your guide to transforming adversity into triumph, healing wounds and past trauma, gaining wisdom and insight, and creating meaningful, fulfilling connections. So if you're here to heal, to better understand yourself or your relationships, you're in the right place. So sit back, get comfortable, bring your trauma and your drama, and let's start healing. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Music.
Hey everyone, welcome back to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us today. In the last couple of episodes, we've been talking about trauma and how in this new year, if we can really uproot and heal some of the trauma that you've been carrying with so much of your life that this year can look so different for you. And right now we're doing kind of a mini series where we're talking about different
scenarios. We're going to give you a different scenario in each episode and just kind of talk through it. So in the last episode, we talked about Sarah and overcoming childhood trauma. And in today's episode, we're going to give you a different scenario and this will be more focused on healing codependent patterns in relationships and really how trauma can show up in these relationships.
So let's jump into today's episode. So today we're going to talk about Marco, and he grew up in a chaotic family environment. He learned that he had to earn love by continually sacrificing his own needs to keep the peace. Marco, as a result of this, unfortunately developed textbook codependency. As an adult, Marco noticed he can't stand up for himself. He's always seeking approval, and whenever conflict arises, he always caves in and allows the other person to get their way.
In therapy, Marco realizes he's acting out of a childhood script. If I don't fix everyone's problems, they'll leave me and they won't love me. Marco unfortunately believes that he is unlovable. And so he doesn't think that anything inherently about him would cause people to love him. They will only love him for what he can provide to other people.
During an EMDR session, Marco might process the fear that he felt as a child and recognize how that fear has continued to guide his adult relationships. By reprocessing those key memories, he can adopt a new internal narrative, I am lovable. And when Marco's able to adopt that new narrative, that's when you're really going to start to see some major changes in how he acts and how he behaves. So first, he and his EMDR therapist, they figure out a specific core memory to work on.
Maybe it was a time that he was yelled at for expressing a need. And as he reprocesses that memory, a lot of other memories come up of not just in his own family, but in different friendships, in relationships, at school, at work. All of these times where he tried to express a need and it didn't go well. Or different times that reinforce that belief of I am unlovable.
So let's take a second and let's talk a little bit about how the negative belief system of I'm unlovable, how it might present in your regular everyday life.
So one of the things is you would definitely have what's called an insecure attachment style, meaning that at any moment, anytime somebody presents any level of dissatisfaction or frustration, whether it's with you or just even their circumstance, you're going to become hyper fixated on that and worried about what are the implications of that. That might mean that they're going to leave or it can cause you to require constant reassurance that you're okay, even when things are very clearly okay.
Because again, if you're operating with that negative belief system of I'm unlovable, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, for somebody to prove that you are unlovable by just leaving you or not caring at all about what your needs are and only caring about what their own needs are. So think about in a relationship, how you said, Tim, that they are concerned that something's wrong, even though they've checked and nothing's wrong, right?
So if you think about in a relationship, you ask your spouse, hey, is everything okay? And they say yes. Or you ask, what's wrong? And they say nothing's wrong. But Marco doesn't believe that. So he continues to ask, are you sure? Are you sure you're not mad at me? Did I do something wrong? And that creates this self-fulfilling prophecy because then your spouse begins to get irritated and frustrated with you, probably for multiple reasons. You're not believing what they're saying.
They've already said that they're fine and you continue to push or it can seem like you're trying to cause a problem or create a fight. And so this insecurity begins to cause a problem. And in Marco's mind, then it just confirms like, okay, see, I knew there was something wrong. I knew that you were mad at me. When really, they weren't mad at you at all. But by continuing to ask and check in, it creates this issue and creates this fight.
And a lot of times, this belief of I'm unlovable or that codependency that you feel plays off as people pleasing, right? Because you are so concerned about it that you're going to do anything to make sure that they're okay and that we're okay and that they're not going to leave you and you're going to prove your worth. It may even align with the belief of I have to be perfect because you're so concerned that they're going to leave you if you don't offer that value like you said.
And I also think that people who are running around with this negative belief of I'm lovable and who are struggling with codependency, oftentimes they do end up in relationships with narcissists. I do think that these tend to be two peas in a pod. So this codependent person, Marco, here believes that he's unlovable. And so he's going to find somebody who's generally going to treat him in a poor manner.
And people who are narcissists oftentimes are gravitated towards people who struggle with codependency because those are the type of people who are willing to kind of suffer the mental and emotional abuse that comes with being with a narcissist. This helps to fulfill that prophecy, that self-fulfilling prophecy that Ruth was talking about. I am unlovable. And then you're with somebody who's never really going to be able to love you
in an appropriate or healthy way. And so it just helps feed into that negative belief system. And so now Marco goes in and he goes through EMDR and he starts working on and processing this negative belief system of I'm unlovable.
And it goes through all these different relationships from his relationship with his mother and father and how he never felt loved by them appropriately or how he felt like his friends never cared enough about him or how about in every single romantic relationship he was in, he was treated in a very poor way. He was always second billing to his partner's wants and needs. And an important thing to note here is it really is about what his experience was.
You may go back and talk to his parents or his sisters and they might say no he had tons of friends people loved Marco or their view of what his childhood may be different but maybe that one incident already began to instill this belief of I am unlovable so then all the different experiences along the way were muted or pushed aside and seen from a different light in Marco's perspective which you can see how that could apply to his adult life right?
Maybe somebody is giving him the love and attention, but for him, he's just repeating that negative belief of I'm unlovable. And so no matter how much somebody loves him and pours into him and gives to him, it may show up in different ways. He may feel so uncomfortable that he leaves that relationship and kind of self-sabotages it and gravitates to more of a toxic and unhealthy relationship where that belief could be validated and confirmed.
But just to jump into what you're saying, Tim, all those different experiences, it may not have been what other people experience. And that's the thing with trauma is that we could go through the exact same thing, but have different beliefs and different perspectives of it. Oh, for sure. And one of the things I would like to tell my clients is, whenever you have one of these negative beliefs lurking underneath the surface, it's like looking at the world through tinted lenses.
It causes you to see the world differently than everybody who's around you. But ultimately, at the end of the day, what matters for you is what's your experience and what's happening to you. And so just like you're saying, you could be going through these things and people could be looking, oh, this is a good thing. Oh, look, this is great for Marco over here. But then Marco's perception of it is, oh, this is bad. Oh, this is dreary. Oh, this is awful. Oh, see, this proves that I'm unlovable.
That's not actually what's happening. But for how he's going to experience it, though, it is going to be filtered and he is going to feel like, oh, see, I am unlovable. But then as you go through this healing journey of going through EMDR, you start correcting that negative belief system.
And as Marco starts to heal the power of those negative experiences that he goes through start to wane and start to drift away and start to feel less personalized and more distant and as you come around the corner from working at desensitizing the negative memory to now integrating in the new positive belief system of I am lovable then what's going to happen is all of a sudden Marco can feel this wonderful rush of just memories and feelings of I am loved I am lovable.
And then think about all these different places where he is. And all of a sudden, those relationships that he was gravitated towards, where he was treated in a toxic manner, will suddenly feel toxic to him. And he'll feel like, this unhealthy relationship that I've been in, I don't want to be in that anymore. And I deserve to be treated better. And I can find somebody who will love me better.
And that is something that a lot of times people with this negative belief system, why they stay in unhealthy relationships, because they don't believe they can find better. But once you address that trauma and that negative belief system and you replace it with that positive belief system, it feels like, of course, I could find something better than this. Why would I stay here and be treated this way when there's plenty of fish in
the sea and I can go get one that's not going to bite me? Right, so Marco begins to find himself more aware of these toxic relationships and these patterns that have been set up. And he's able to begin to set healthier boundaries. He's able to speak up for his own preferences and reduce the extreme people pleasing that was happening. And this can look like very small things in the beginning where maybe he never voiced where he wanted to eat.
And now he is voicing like, hey, I kind of want to go here. And even that small change, which may seem so silly, but for an extreme people pleaser. An extreme codependent person in a toxic relationship, they would have never said that before because it would have felt like an imposition or it would have felt like they're being a burden to other people. And so Marco begins to find himself able to set these healthier boundaries. And that shift can directly improve his marriage.
It can improve his friendships and even the workplace dynamic. And so you might start seeing a shift like, let's say, Marco was estranged from his family, where he felt like they never loved him or didn't care about him. But then all of a sudden, his belief systems about that get reworked. And he may realize that he was never letting them love him. And so they would have loved him. they would have done way more if he would have ever allowed it.
But now all of a sudden he can start re-exploring those relationships and maybe reconnect with people that he thought would be impossible to connect with in the past. Absolutely. So what's important here is that EMDR addresses a root cause, the old unresolved fear of abandonment or conflict, rather than just stopping a bandaid on it. But as we're able to uproot that belief of I'm unlovable and really install that belief of I am lovable, I am worthy, it can significantly change Marco's life.
And so as we continue to give you scenarios and talk about different ways that EMDR can help, if you are interested in getting started on the process of EMDR and working with Tim and I, there's a link down below that you can click on and you can do a 15-minute consultation to see if this is the right fit for you, or if you know that you just want to kind of jump in and start working through some of your experiences, then you can already schedule a session with us.
So we're going to end there for today, and we hope that this was helpful in being able to see just a scenario on how EMGR can really help you heal these negative beliefs that show up in these codependent patterns in relationships. So we hope you join us in the next episode. Have a great day. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful.
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