Break The Cycle Now!

How to move from what you saw at home, to how you want your home to be…

If you don’t want to make the same mistakes your parents made, then this book was made just for you!

Mirel Goldstein LPC, Relationship Expert 7/1/2014

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Break the Cycle Now

“How to stop family relationship patterns from childhood from taking over adult life”

By Relationship Expert, Mirel Goldstein LPC

www.goldsteintherapy.com

Read on to find out why it’s so hard to change relationship patterns- and some doable, concrete steps you can take to be

successful at doing just that.

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What do I mean when I say “Break the Cycle”?

So what I want to talk with you about today, is why it’s so difficult to “break the cycle” of dysfunctional childhood relationship patterns. We all want to do it, but it’s harder

than it looks! Most of us have heard the term “break the cycle”, but what do we really mean by this?

Well, most of you probably know that relationship patterns we experienced in childhood

often repeat themselves, even when we don’t want them to. Whether it’s abandonment issues from a father or mother who simply wouldn’t pay attention to us, or growing up in a home with parents who were constantly fighting, or even just something as simple

as not having enough money…most of us harbor some kind of hopeful belief or wish that one day we will be free from it all.

Whether it’s promising yourself that you’ll never marry someone like your father (or

your mother); that your kids will get all the attention they need; that the right amount of ambition and planning will protect you from the financial woes you saw in your

parents’ home…we all have fantasies of one kind or another, but things don’t always work out in quite the way we hope they will.

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“Breaking the Cycle” is Harder Than It Looks

And that’s why I get so many phone calls from people who were hoping to make things be different in adulthood, only to find themselves either confused about how to do that (as in, “how will I know what a healthy marriage looks like if I never saw one at home?”,

or “how do I know that I won’t be the same as my parents- when I have kids of my own- if I never saw anything different?”), or feeling like history is repeating itself despite the

best of intentions (as in, “I always promised that I wouldn’t yell and scream at my kids like my mother did, but now I find myself losing my temper and I can’t seem to control it”).

Take Sarah, for example, a woman in her 40’s who keeps finding herself in relationships with men who don’t take her needs seriously and blame her for all problems in the relationship, no matter what. Sarah knows that fears of abandonment from her

childhood (and a father who was mostly absent) are making it hard for her to leave men who don’t meet her needs, since she doesn’t really trust that there might be men out there who would be different from her emotionally unavailable father (who never took

responsibility either). Sarah desperately wants a healthy relationship, but doesn’t know how to let go of the old in order to let in something new.

Rachel is another example of someone who wants so badly to break to the cycle, but

just can’t seem to do it. She came in with her husband, Steven, and said, “I always wanted to have a good marriage, and to be on the same page as my husband, because it

was so painful to me when my parents would constantly argue and undermine each other. If my mother said yes, my father said no. If my father said yes, my mother said no. So I always go along with Steven even if I don’t agree with him, because I don’t want

the kids to get mixed messages. But now I think it’s going too far, and I feel like he never gives in the way I do, for the sake of the kids. So now I feel so angry from giving in all the time that I find myself disagreeing with him over every little thing. And the kids

are definitely picking up on it.”

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Now, the important thing to understand is that it’s always possible to break the cycle to some degree. What this means is that even if you have been living for years with financial problems and debts through the roof, you can always start to do things

differently and clean up the mess. It will be hard work and the bigger mess you have, the harder it will be and longer it will take to clean it up. But it can be done to some degree. Still, there might be some limits to what you can do.

So, for example, changing careers when you’re in your 20’s or 30’s is very different from trying to change careers in your 60’s or 70’s. But there are still changes you can make.

It’s the same thing with family dynamics. Trying to give your kids a happy childhood when you’ve been living with an abusive spouse for the past 10 years is not going to be so easy. Nor will it be easy to stop yelling at your children when you’ve raised a family

under those conditions and everyone feels the effects, as well as the habit, of living in a home where people yell to be heard. But there are always improvements that can be

made, even it’s just something as small as not making a bad situation even worse.

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Prevention is Best

But wouldn’t it be nice if you could learn the tools for breaking the cycle- doing things

differently- pretty early on? For example, learning what it would take to marry someone different from your narcissistic father before you actually get into a committed

relationship? Getting financial direction before you find yourself feeling like there’s no way out? Or even just figuring out the key to being the kind of parent you want to be, rather than the kind of parent you saw at home?

And that’s why one of my favorite parts of doing therapy is helping people get the tools they need to prevent a whole new generation of problems. Helping people recognize the

signs that they are stepping right into the exact scenarios they are hoping to avoid, is so rewarding to me because the positive ripple effect of doing things differently impacts so

many future situations and generations. In a nutshell, it prevents so many layers of problems. Instead of having to clean up a big mess down the road, it stops the mess from being made in the first place.

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The Trouble with Automatic Responses

But it’s not really as easy as it sounds to change those relationship patterns and family dynamics that we grew up with. Many people think it’s easy…until they actually find

themselves repeating history as certain kinds of pressures start to bombard them.

It’s easy not to yell and scream at our kids when all the conditions are just right for

this: we are calm, the kids are behaving, our partner is supportive, and we feel clear about how and what we want to communicate as a parent. But when we’re tired, stressed out, feeling unsupported, frustrated, confused or helpless…then things can go

very differently from how we want them to, because we start to react with automatic reactions.

Automatic reactions are those automatic responses that are so fast and rapid that they catch our “thinking brains” off-guard. These are the kinds of things we find ourselves

saying or doing without thinking about it first, sometimes much to our regret afterwards. And relationship patterns that are familiar to us often repeat themselves in

exactly those moments of reactivity. It’s not that we don’t know that we want to react differently; it’s that the reaction happens so fast that it bypasses what we know we want to do in favor of what we have seen others actually do in stressful relationship

moments.

And the other thing that makes this so complicated, is that we often don’t even know

just how much we’ve picked up from other people when it comes to the way we act in relationships, until we find ourselves acting in an uncannily similar way when it comes

to similar situations…or marrying the kind of person we thought we never would, for example.

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Many of us also block out thinking about parts of ourselves that don’t fit in with how we want to see ourselves, and this works okay for a while…until we experience enough

stress that these automatic reactions come out anyway, and we’re so surprised that we don’t have the awareness to be able to stop them in their tracks.

Sometimes we also get into tricky situations when other people give us nonverbal or unconscious signals or hints about themselves…ones that don’t quite match up with

what they say or do on the surface, or in non-stressful relationship situations. So, you might marry someone who acts surprisingly calm, kind, and in-control while you’re dating, only to find that a hostile or controlling side comes out when certain buttons get

pushed…or in passive-aggressive comments that hide just how angry the person is beneath the very calm surface (perhaps even he/she is unaware of the anger

underneath).

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Simple Tools that Can Make All the Difference

So by now you may be wondering, well what should I do if I want a different relationship or life than the one I saw at home? How can I have a healthy relationship

when I experienced abandonment in my past? How do I recognize the subtle signs of trouble in a potential partner?

Questions like these don’t have easy answers, but there are some steps you can take to

move in the right direction.

Professional Help

I usually recommend the help of a professional therapist as the number one step you

can take to work through your past (and create a different future!), because therapists have special training for helping you remember, talk about, and explore your past- including knowing how to ask questions that get you to think about things you didn’t

even think mattered. Therapists can also help you see how automatic reactions are happening in different situations in your life, and can help you learn to recognize them even as you’re engaging in them…being able to think in the middle of a reaction is

extremely helpful. And, of course, therapists can also model and teach you healthy communication techniques, like how to set boundaries gracefully, express yourself

clearly, and avoid mixed messages.

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Seeking out Healthy Role Models

But going to a professional therapist is not the only thing that can help you change

your relationship patterns; there are other ways that you can help yourself as well. One of them is to surround yourself with people who are different from your own family and past relationships. Finding healthy role models and seeing how they communicate and

interact, especially in stressful situations (so being around to see how a hectic dinner hour with a number of young kids gets handled, for example) is a great way of learning

new behaviors, and the more you get to watch this, the better. Seeing in action how healthy people deal with conflict, stress, recovering after an outburst, compromising, etc. is a much more helpful learning experience than anything you might read in a

book!

Getting Feedback from Others

Another important tool is to get an outside perspective when it comes to things like

dating. There might be subtle hints that a prospective partner is not very healthy, and sometimes other people besides yourself can pick up on this more easily…especially

people who come from a healthier background and find unhealthy dynamics to be unfamiliar and “off”. So it’s important to talk to people that you trust and to really pay attention to any feedback they give you, no matter how strong your emotions are about

the situation. Don’t underestimate the power of your blind spots. Other people can often see things clearly when they are very hidden to us!

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Spending Some Time Reflecting

And, finally, it helps to really think about ways in which you might be similar to your

parents (for example, worrying about your “image”, just like your show-off mother who cared too much about what people think; withdrawing into silence when you get angry

just like your passive-aggressive father), and also to try to understand what makes you different. Being able to acknowledge the impact that your childhood has had on you, as well as differentiate yourself from your childhood at the same time, is a very important

piece of insight that will allow you to be objective about how you show up in different situations- rather than defensively blocking out your similarities to your parents, or alternatively, over-identifying with your parents or past relationships, and feeling

helpless to be your own person. Some thoughtful reflection and healthy (even if painful) curiosity can go a long way to breaking patterns that are destructive or unhelpful.

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Good Luck on Your Journey!

I hope this will be your very first step on your journey towards change, and that you’ll open yourself up to the tools that can help you have the kind of future you want. You can do it and you deserve it!!

Mirel Goldstein LPC is in private practice in Clifton, NJ and her blog “Relationship Food for Thought” is

available on her website www.goldsteintherapy.com