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hey this is Leo for actualised org in this video what I want to talk about is bad relationships all right let's talk about bad relationships why do you keep getting into a bad relationship and how can you prevent that cycle from continuing so we want to dig deep into what causes bad relationships and why you seem to keep stumbling into them now what I'm talking about here is specifically bad intimate relationships right dysfunctional intimate relationships whether it's a marriage or long-term girlfriend boyfriend situation or even a short term girlfriend boyfriend situation so let's take a look at some of the distinctions that are necessary to really get your head around this and to prevent this from happening again the most important distinction and I believe this is coming from Stephen Covey I can't quite remember is the distinction between codependent independent and interdependent relationships see codependency is the problem here this is where you are at if you have problems with your relationship and you keep getting bad relationships is that you're probably in this codependency frame now let's go through and talk about each one of them and show you how they how they evolve one is the next so first what you've got is you've got codependency codependency means that you have two people that are coming together and they're leaning on each other for support and what they're doing here is they're using each other as emotional crutches now they'll justify it to themselves as love or as companionship or something good but in fact what's happening there is that each one has a void that they're trying to fill in each other's lives and so they're trying to prop each other up and that creates a dysfunctional dynamic the next level up from that and it's a pretty big level up is independent independent means that you have one confident grounded individual and then a second one who's also confident grounded and they come together and they have an independent relationship they don't really synergize it's simply just in and you know they're sharing some stuff together but it's not really the synergistic relationship and then you have the interdependent relationship this is the next level up and this is the highest level that you get to this is where to come together and then they perform almost like a choreographed ballet where they start moving in sync and a synergy effect happens and really something awesome flourishes that's greater than the sum of its parts so of course everyone wants this right we all want this but most of us in our relationships are here we're in the codependency frame and we don't like to admit it as well in fact right now I'm saying codependency and what I'm telling you that you might think Oh codependency that means like what I'm enabling my partner or my spouse or my girlfriend or my boyfriend to be involved with crime or drugs or something like that that's like a very extreme example of codependency codependency simply means like I said that you two are dependent on each other that's all it means you're dependent that means that you cannot stand and be happy by yourself and so is that is the case with the other person so you guys can't be independently happy but you can be happy together so what this does is creates a temporary stability and it seems like the stability is nice because you get into a relationship and it's like yes it's going pretty well because that person is providing you with something you're providing that person with something and you both seem to be sort of fulfilled but it's a deceptive stability and it never really lasts and also leads to a lot of toxic and bad stuff and I really see this with people is that they get themselves involved with these toxic relationships and then they can't get out of them it's like this giant pit this giant like sand pit that they get trapped in and they can't get out and they're stuck in quicksand and then this leads to just like horrible things I mean it leads to verbal abuse it can lead to physical abuse arguments leads to all sorts of a needy behavior just all sorts of dysfunction and when you are stuck in a relationship like that it's almost impossible to you to thrive in life it's impossible for you to become self actualized because that other person is holding you back and really you are holding yourself back because you are choosing to be in this relation now let's take a look at why this is going on the reason this is happening is because there are deep personality flaws within both individuals in this relationship and that these individuals are not willing to address these flaws so the solution here is ultimately as with most things in life is to look within not without the problem is in you now this is especially tricky with relationships because when you have a dysfunctional relationship our mind will trick us and it will point the finger at the other person and we will blame the other person we will say that we are being victimized and the other person is doing something wrong now it doesn't mean that the other person isn't doing something wrong all I'm saying to you is that you have to take responsibility for your own relationship in the fact that you're allowing this to continue and that you're in there in the first place right this is the only way that it can work you have to take full responsibility for your bad relationship otherwise you're going to get stuck you're going to get stuck and the pattern is going to keep repeating again why because there's this flaw in you your psyche has a gap in it a void and you need to fill that void with something and that other person is doing it for you that's why you're hooked you're addicted to that other person and so you keep coming back even though you know that this relationship is not healthy see most couples in a codependent relationship I mean they're not stupid they're not totally blind they they understand their higher self knows that this is a dysfunctional situation but they keep going and going and going just like a drug addict would with a drug addiction he also knows it's not healthy but he keeps doing it simply because he's stuck in a rut and now he has his chemical dependency right he needs something that that drug is giving him some sort of hit hit of stimulation it's hard to break free of that well that's literally what's going on with this codependency in your relationship now let's take a look at what are some of these gaps that you could have in your own psyche see once you get honest with yourself once you really get fed up with this procuring pattern of bad relationships then you're going to tell yourself okay what can I really do to take responsibility once you're at that point then you have to ask yourself okay what is the real void that I'm trying to fill why am I so needy and that usually comes down to one of these five things I would say it's this one is money two is six three is love four is companionship and five is support emotional support or other forms of support so one of these things generally is going to be the cause of your neediness and your codependency so you need something from the other person it might be love it might be sexy might be money it doesn't really matter what it is you might think that what you want and what you need is very noble you might say well love love is a very noble quality love is maybe the highest value of my life I really need love that's very important to me that's fine except what you're doing is you are desperate desperately seeking love and you're so desperate for love that you're literally willing to endure anything to get it and that's exactly what happens is that you endure anything and you endure a bad relationship and you endure a person abusing you in some way and you endure arguments and you endure all sorts of turmoil and you endure all sorts of things that you really shouldn't be enduring because you don't have a boundary set and you're not independent see you can still want love when you're independent it's just that when you're independent you don't really need love you want it but if you don't get it it's okay you're willing to like wait until a good opportunity arises when you're desperate you'll do anything for love including really stupid things and that can lead to a very disastrous situation in your own life so if you see that you have this kind of gap where you really need something then you have to start to address this because I can guarantee that this gap it's not going to go away just because you change relationships so even if you're thinking of getting out of this current relationship that you're in and you're saying yourself well this guy or this girl he's an she's a and this is never going to work out with them but you know what it's all their fault so I'm just going to go I'm going to find somebody nice I'm going to have this dream life with my dream partner we're going to get married or whatever our situations going to be and we can have a family everything's know beautifully well newsflash that's not going to happen to you because you are the cause of your own relationship problems not the other person so you have to also bite this bullet in a minute right it can get it can take it can take some real serious pain and a history of bad relationships to finally come to the point where saying to yourself okay fine it really must be me now it really must be me it can't be there's a person that that's a trick that my brain is playing on me so once you go through that and you come out and you say okay fine it's me then it's like okay what are the real sticking points that I have and it's one of these gaps so once you identify one of these gaps let's say that your gap is love if to look back and see where is this gap really coming from usually what you'll find is that this gap is coming from the past from childhood childhood or early adulthood and the reason that is is that when you were growing up probably what happened is that you weren't maybe getting enough love maybe your parents got divorced when you were young maybe some sort of traumatic situations happened or for some reason you have some sort of self-esteem issues or insecurities and you feel now that you're deficient in some way and you need something to come in there and fill in that void and what you've been doing your whole life especially in your dating life and your intimate relationships is that you've been looking for the man or the woman who's going to fill that void and really what you were looking for is an external solution to an internal problem and you never really want to turn around and take a look inside yourself to see okay what is the internal problem see the problem is that when you find an external solution to an internal problem then you're even more dependent on it because what happens when that person goes away what happens when that person leaves on a trip what happens that person decides to leave you what happens if that person stays late for work and can't join you for dinner see what you what's going to happen is you're going to get resentful you're gonna get mad you're going to feel like that person is taking away that thing that you're propping yourself up on right you're let you're leaning on that person the person might move away and now you need to chase so this is creating this this needy dynamic and it's really not good and the the point here is that you have to look back and kind of trace trace from the past where this came up the nice thing about doing that trace is that it gets you more awareness more consciousness so that you're not acting as unconsciously in the future in your in your relationship that'll get a little bit more distance so that you could do whatever needs to be done to start to correct this situation see the problem is that if you are this needy person you're codependent and you go and you think that you're going to go into some other relationship and things going to be better there then actually you're really kidding yourself and in fact here's the dynamic it's going to happen you have really three people that you could run into you can run into another codependent person so let's say you're codependent and you run into another codependent person well that's going to be the same type of relationship that you already got right a codepen a person can only really stay in a relationship with another codependent person here's why you might think like well what if I go find myself a nice independent guy or nice and dependent girl wouldn't that solve my problem no because here it's going to happen the independent person is going to be here you're going to come in as the dependent needy person and you're going to want something from that person from the independent one and what's going to happen is you're going to like start leaning and leaning and leaning and you're going to be putting this independent person into a codependent frame but this independent person really will only have two choices either he or she can choose to fall into codependency which is a lower state of consciousness and most independent people will never want to do this so what happens is if you do that he'll just leave you or she will leave you or something will happen there'd be a lot of tension there or the other thing that might happen is that that person actually does you end up successfully converting him in to a codependent frame and now that person is in a codependent frame with you and basically you're back to where you started from and there's a lot of tension and turmoil going on there so in either of those cases it's a it's a lose-lose it's not going to work a codependent person is never going to be able to stay in a relationship with an independent person there's going to be too much clashing going on so that's the case there and you might be asking what about the interdependent well interdependence is really just independence of two people and then then deciding to do a really nice choreography together there's no way in hell there's gonna be any kind of choreography going on with you because you're codependent you're too needy to think about that you just need your needs desperately met and the independent person he doesn't wanna be with you so this is going to happen is that there's not going to be a choreography there's may be a lot of tension and then it's going to break up so no interdependence will happen as well so I hope you can like understand the severity of this problem now this is not meant to depress you this is meant to be real right this is meant to be a sobering truth because once you realize this it's actually empowering now you can say okay I am pretty low I'm kind of at Ground Zero but now I do see that there's a way to work my way up it'll take some time it'll take some work inner work outer work maybe breaking up a relationship but then you can see that there is a path forward you can move out of codependency into in dependency once you're independent then you would start to have nice relationships okay so how do you know now if your relationship is actually codependent or not and how do you know if it's time to break it off or not because ultimately my solution to you is if you're in a codependent relationship then you've got to break it off I know you don't want to that's not what you want to hear because you love that other person you're addicted to that other person you don't want to really admit that and it can be hard to actually follow through on that you might even admit it to yourself logically but then you won't actually have the courage to break it off with another person or maybe you break it off but then you get back together well you need to make a clean cut when you see that codependency is there if you don't then you're just going to be slowing yourself down in life and the toxicity is gonna be building up more and more and more and there's nothing that's going to come in there and magically fix it for you so the solution there is to break it off how do you know when this is right to do well here's a little guideline I'm going to give you actually a researcher dr. John Gottman he has a very amazing book called the seven principles that make marriage work and there he talks about some of the research that he's done on couples and what he did is he's one of the foremost researchers on couples and successful relationships and what he does is he gets people couples to come into his lab and he literally observes them through a two-way mirror and as he's doing this he'll look and he'll see he'll take notes and he'll try to find patterns and he'll ask himself you know what are the successful relationships and what are the dysfunctional relationships and what are the different factors that are involved there and he actually distilled everything down to a very simple little guideline that you can use to evaluate a relationship and what he found is the following is that a happy successful relationship that has a chance of actually continuing on the long run that is a relationship that has a ratio of five to one of positive to negative interactions five to one ratio that means for every five good things that happen in a relationship one bad thing happens now with dysfunctional relationships relationships that will never stay together there the ratio is lower than five to one it's either four to one or three to one or two to one or even one to one so imagine this one that one good thing happens and then one bad thing happens for every one good thing one bad thing if your relationship like that it's severely severely dysfunctional in fact this little this little metric works so well this rule of thumb that John Gottman will use it in his lab and he says that he has a 95% accuracy rate of predicting whether a couple will stay together not successfully just by observing them for five or ten minutes because he can already see in the way they're interacting the looks they're giving each other the smiles or frowns the things they say to each other he can already detect from within that where are the positives and where are the negatives so it's very easy when a couple is standing there talking to each other for 10 minutes you'll see how many negative looks do they give each other how many positive looks how many like loving looks how much how much positive conversation is hat is going on versus negative how many fights are there relative to all the good stuff that's supposed to be happening in a relationship well you calculate that you tally it up and then you can clearly see so you use this on yourself now ask yourself really how many positive to negative interactions that are in your relationship and if it's lower than five to one then you need to really consider cutting it off and if it's something really low like I would say a three or a two or a one to one then you definitely need to cut that off that's going to be the solution for you now you don't really want to hear that of course but you know what sometimes you gotta endure a little bit of pain to grow yourself and to move on to the next stage so when you break it off you have to break it off cold make sure you don't come back to that person and then you have to be by yourself now this period we're going to be by yourself it might seem that you're going to be lonely going to be depressed you're going to be sad actually it's going to happen is that you're going to you're going to get over that person and you're going to grow to a new level and when you exert that sort of decisiveness and we have the courage to leave somebody like that who you know is not right for you then that actually builds a lot of strength within you then when you're gonna be off on your own you're gonna have time to reflect to ruminate to really introspect to do this tracing back activity to find out what are the real codependency problems within you that's causing this that's causing this pattern this is probably not the first time that this happened right so you're gonna you're going to find those out you're going to really work on those maybe through therapy through coaching or through your own journaling or whatever process you want to use you're going to work that out and then once you work that out then you can get into a new relationship and there you have a chance now because when you become independent then you can find other independent person and together you have a chance to do something either independent together or either even interdependent together and really make a nice beautiful relationships the way it's supposed to be right loving happy that's the way a relationship should be there should not be toxicity and negativity and fighting and certainly no any no form of abuse so if you've got any of that stuff then those are clear signs that you need to start to change stuff up alright so this is Leo this is how to deal with bad relationships alright post me your comments down below like this video as well if you like this please click the like button right now so other people can see it and also share it to throw it on Facebook or wherever you like to share stuff so your friends can see it and we can get more people into good relationships and finally what I'm going to do is I'm going to direct you to actualize org and specifically signing up to my newsletter my lose letter I'm releasing it every single week with new updates new articles exclusive content just for my subscribers a lot of new stuff that I'm creating all the time I'm actively doing research and what I'm researching is how to get you the mind sets strategies and the techniques that you need to build an extraordinary life I know that you imagine a powerful life for yourself a life where you have everything that you want your relationships are handled your money and finances are handled you've got an amazing career you've got passion you've got energy how do you actually do that see I've spent the last five years of my life working on this personally because I've had all these struggles that I had to iron out and what I learned is that you have to really work on your mindsets just like we're working on mindsets here with this codependency so if you want to know more about that you want to stay on track then that's what I'm here for is to keep you on track keep you accountable for your own goals so that you're achieving those dreams that you want this is so easy to fall off track right alright so go and sign up and then you will be all set you