In couple relationships, it is essential to lay the material foundations so that this life together can develop: choosing a good apartment, balancing work schedules, dividing responsibilities well, etc.
However, it is no less true that for the relationship to come to fruition it is necessary, in addition to surrounding oneself with objects and habits that allow mutual support, develop good harmony on a psychological level Or what is the same, discard all toxic ideas and beliefs related to how life together should be lived, the role of each member of the couple and the intentions of the other person that move them to be with us.
Below I indicate some of these toxic beliefs so that through self-reflection they can be recognized and questioned by those people who may have them even without realizing it at first.
1. Love is property
The belief that leads to jealousy problems. Understanding that your partner is part of yourself only serves to attack your individuality. Example: “It’s ten at night and he hasn’t called me yet.”
2. It’s your fault
A relationship is something bidirectional, but there are people who, when certain typical problems of life together appear, they automatically blame the partner This happens because it is usually easier to blame something on an element external to us than to look for aspects in our behavior that could have triggered conflict, or to reflect on whether everything is based on a simple misunderstanding. In this sense, be careful with personalities that tend toward victimhood.
Sometimes, a relationship can be confused with absolute knowledge of what the other person thinks. When we understand that our partner’s behavior is basically very predictable, we will tend to attribute intentions in an increasingly strange way, until we reach the point of approaching paranoid thinking and constantly suspecting what he wants. Example: “he wants to take the dog for a walk so he can spend less time with me.”
4. Reverse Mind Reading
Like the previous one, but based on what the other person should know about us Practice already shows not knowing. The belief that love confers a kind of telepathic power seems absurd, but it is not rare to find and from time to time offers stereotypical scenes full of reproaches such as: “I don’t know, you will know” or “do what you want, “You know my opinion.”
5. The other person is better than us
Simply assuming that the other person is more valuable than yourself introduces an asymmetry into the relationship. An asymmetry that at first is fictitious and exists only in our imagination, but that It can soon become a real decompensation, a self-fulfilling prophecy For example, it is common to get used to making deliberate and very costly sacrifices for the good of the other person, something that can make the other person get used to having special treatment and leading the relationship in all areas.
6. I have to prove things
This belief is closely related to the previous one. In short, it is aboutThe idea that the relationship has to be kept alive through fully planned actions in which we offer the best side of ourselves. This is something similar to an indefinite extension of the stage of trying to make a good first impression, and it can last even years after being married. This toxic belief directly attacks any sign of spontaneity in the life of a couple.
This can be summarized in believing that life as a couple is something similar to the culmination of a person’s life, a stage in which one loses one’s own individuality and becomes part of a larger entity, just as a caterpillar becomes. would transform into a butterfly. The problem with this is that, on the one hand, promotes isolation and distancing from family and friends and on the other hand, this union with the other person is still fictitious, so this idea does not correspond to reality.
8. My partner defines me
This belief can be toxic if taken literally, since it has the power to be self-fulfilling at the cost of our own identity. People who adopt an extreme version of this belief change their hobbies, personality, and even the way they speak depending on who they are dating. The negative consequences of this have to do with the loss of our ability to claim ourselves as people with our own criteria, but it also generates problems that are located above all on the social level, since people who know us can see in this a kind of fraud.
9. The need for drama
As it is sometimes understood that the relationship with our partner has to be more intense than our relationships with other people, this can also be extrapolated to the field of daily conflicts. Real minutiae may be overstated like the fact that the gift the couple has given us does not completely match our tastes.
10. No matter what he does, he is my partner
This belief is based on the idea that the relationship is, in essence, a kind of license or indefinite contract As long as the relationship has the label of “couple relationship”, the two involved (although usually only us) are entitled to do whatever they want, without having to take into consideration the agreed pacts and responsibilities.
Of course, the way in which I have presented these beliefs here is cartoonish, to clearly show the destructive implications of the lines of thought and hasty conclusions to which they can give rise.
In real life these ideas They appear much more disguised, and almost always their existence has not even been noticed because they are so basic and simple The task of discovering and facing them can also be one of those challenges that can be undertaken together and that make life together more intense.
