Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Okay. Relationships are just they're so simple, aren't they? They're just so easy. They're so simple. No problem. Everybody gets along, like, especially, like, the people who matter most to you. When you start start depending on people, it gets easier to be loved by them and never feel any triggers, or no? Is that not
that's not quite the case, is it? I will say that the topic of relationship and how to have a 2 person nervous system situation is a whole other, category of complexity, because you think it's hard just to regulate your nervous system. Right? Imagine 2 people. Right? I'm sure I'm sure who here has had wild failure at 2 person nervous system systems? I will raise my hand on
that one. You said wildly failed. No matter how much you learn, no matter how much Instagram posts you look at, no matter how many books you read, no matter what you know or what you do, we just have relationships, don't we? We just I feel like we just come up all the time everywhere, like like like, at all times. And even with the people that are in our lives that are,
like, we have, like, secure attachment with. Right? So the thing is is that, like, this topic, I'm I'm bringing some jovialness to it because, like, in my opinion, trauma informed content, relationships is like going to family dinner or family thanks like a Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas or holidays or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever your celebration is, and and bringing up religion and politics at the dinner table. Relationships are that in the trauma
informed context. Right? Because there's just so much opportunity for triggers and what abouts and, like, relational history and stuff like that, and yet it's also what we need so very much. Right? It's it's we need relationships. And so what naturally happens as you learn about the nervous system and you learn about your nervous system, you understand, what's happening for you somatically, cognitively, emotionally, you understand what's happening for you, inside and in your environment.
Well, at some point, we gotta take a look outside and go, who are these people around me? Like, what's going on here? Right? Because, like, how should I put this? Like, no amount of self regulation will help you, improve a toxic relationship if the other person isn't willing to get on board, and we don't here's what we don't wanna be doing. We do not hear me now. We do not wanna be using self regulation tools to become stronger in a
toxic dynamic that doesn't change. And I think a lot of people do that. They're like, let me just regulate. Let me just kinda breathe it through. Let me understand my parts. And just like, I'm better at coping in this toxic dynamic. So that is not, not, not, not, not the goal. Okay? I cannot be more clear about this. Okay? We are not trying to help you be in a shittier relationship longer with better tools to be in a shitty relationship because now you can self regulate. I wanna be so
clear about that. Now that being said, there's a fine line between toxic relationships and differentiation tension, meaning how can I be myself with you but separately? Right? Because you're gonna disagree. So there is emotional pain in toxic relationships, and there is emotional pain in healthy relationships. I think, this is a whole, again, like, genre that we could dive into that could have its own year long or more training program just on the
concepts around dyads and how they work. But what's important to understand is if something happens in a relationship once or twice, might be circumstance. Okay? 3 or more times, it's a pattern. Okay? And, what we're gonna be doing today is talking about you and your patterns, which is not not not justifying other people's patterns. And we're not and and the other thing is, who here feels like, you do a lot of emotional labor in your life for your
friends and family or loved ones? Like, you're the one that's always kinda pushing it forward. Right? You see some people, they're rolling their eyes at that question. They're just so tired with it already. I I see it. Right? Yeah. I understand. Okay. So the other thing we're not doing is because we're gonna be talking about you taking responsibility. However, we are not gonna be talking about you taking
responsibility for anything other than you. Okay? Now, in the one of the sacred books that I read, it says you reap what you sow. I believe that to be true. The other idea is that there's this idea of karma, right, cause and effect. Now if you do emotional labor or if you're parentified as a child, meaning you had to take care of your parents or your family of origin or your household, okay, you didn't learn to reap what you sow. You
learned to reap what everybody was sowing. You learned to be the absorber of the consequences of everybody else's choices, and you probably learned how to save people from the consequences of their choices. True or not true? What do you think? Come on y'all. I told you bring it it's like bringing up politics at dinner. I got it. Okay? But, like, it's true. Okay? So what we're saying is your job is to reap what you sow. Your job is to experience the consequence of your
choices. And most of the time, it's not your job to save people from the consequences of their choices. Because ultimately, you can't. Now, in secure attached relationships where there's loyalty involved and there's healthy dynamics, that it gets nuance. It's not black and white. Okay? But in general, this is about you adulting and releasing the need to absorb other people's,
consequences of their choices. There may may be some grief associated with your needs not being met and the sobering fact that they may never be met by somebody, no matter how much you
believe it to be true or will it to be true. But what we are gonna help you understand is is that once you get to know yourself, once you get to know your parts, once you get to know how you do things, once you start to restructure your defenses, once you start to build positive emotional states, y'all, we got to have relationships that support that too. We got to. It's so important. So we cannot change the past, but what we can do is, impact how the future happens.
And so sometimes it might mean the end of certain relationships, but it'll probably mean the end of certain patterns. And I think sometimes you should break up with or divorce the pattern, not the person. We don't always wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater because guess what? I said this on Instagram, like, a month or 2 ago. I got so much shit for it because people think that toxic and abusive mean the same thing, but
they don't. Toxic just means unhealthy. Okay? If you've ever been in a relationship with a toxic person, that makes 2 of you. Okay? Meaning unhealthy. Okay? That's all that means. Right? So as you start to clean up your side of the street, here's what we're not gonna do. We're not taking the moral high ground that says, well, I know better now. I know better than you. Not doing that either. Okay? Because that's I would not call that healthy. What we're gonna do is we're gonna help you
understand, hey. I have a relational model of how I do things, and that's informed by what I've learned in my past. Right? So I have a model. Okay? And that model has probably repeated with new, current people in my life where it might not be exactly the same, but there are definitely familiar themes. Who follows? Does this make sense? Right? And so what we want to do is we want to start to update your model, your narrative
about yourself and about relationships in general. This comes with all kinds of fun things like setting boundaries, being assertive, speaking up, adulting. Stop wishing for the people to intuit your needs for you, to wait around for them to say something first. We're not going to be doing passive aggressive communication no more. Alright? We're we're adulting now. That's what this is all about. It's about adulting. Okay? When I I have I
have, I have so many different friends in different friend circles. Right? And there's this one group of friends, mostly women and mostly single women, that hover between, like, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, and they kinda do and and San Francisco. They kinda do just, like, this circuit. Right? Every once in a while, I'll be talking to them, and they're like, there's just so many un I'm sorry. Unavailable un emotionally unavailable men out in the world. Right? And my question
is, what does that say about you? If you're really noticing how unemotional these men are that you're looking for, what that say about you? Now they don't like to hear that because we can see ourselves sometimes as the good one. Right? But I see emotionally available people everywhere, and I also see emotionally unavailable people everywhere. Okay? But it's important to understand that your expectation of relationship is based on the
past, which makes total sense. However, okay, we can start to update it, and the first place we wanna update it is to say this, and this is this is not victim blaming, and this is not for you to take more responsibility for everybody else. Okay? But if you've been in toxic relationships, you have parts of you that hold toxicity as an expectation for relationships. That make sense? And so we want to clean up your side of the street in that
context. Who follows? Does this make sense? Okay? I'm not saying you're toxic. I'm also not saying that you're, like, the the good one and they were the bad one. Because in relationships, there are no angels and devils. Doesn't exist. Unless there's, like, pure abuse, okay, which is not good and unacceptable. Okay? So it's really easy to see how other people are doing something wrong in inappropriately, not what you want, in a toxic way that is impacting you in a certain way, very difficult
to be self aware enough to understand how you're doing it too. Right? The healthiest people in the world can say, I'm toxic sometimes. You know what? I have narcissistic parts sometimes. You know what? I have selfish parts sometimes. You know what? Like, I actually do. Maybe I'll gaslight, but I bend
reality to my way a lot. Right? Because that is when you can start to own your own internalized, we'll call them toxic traits, right, Then we can start to update your model to say, I have parts of me that hold this, and I don't wanna act this out in a relationship anymore. I want to find a better way about going about doing things. Who follows it? Make sense? Okay. Again, we're not
blaming. Right? We're not doing any of that stuff. But if you've been in toxic relationships primarily or you've had the same pattern repeat over and over and over and over and over again, that's not a coincidence. It's not Mercury retrograde. It's not your star sign. It's not your rising sign. It's not your moon. It's not in what's in your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 12th out. None of that shit. It's your nervous system repeating attachment patterns that you learned from the
past. Period. End of the story. Mercury does not give a f about your attachment system, and and your attachment system doesn't give f about Mercury. Right? What matters is you learned how to relate, and you have an internal working model of who you think you are, what you think you're worth, and you have an internal working model of how you expect other people to treat you. And what we wanna do is upgrade that inside you and then start
to reality test in a new way. Who follows? Does this make sense?