Are You Unhappy in Your Relationship? The Hidden Emotional Reasons Why You May be Unhappy In Your Relationship
It can be a fuzzy question, am I really happy in this relationship? Or perhaps you know you’re extremely unhappy but you don’t wanna admit it because then you’d have to face the consequences of possibly breaking up and you can’t even fathom that.
A lot of the time when we are on a self-discovery or self-healing journey and we find ourselves in a relationship that perhaps on the surface seems fine but then why do we feel unhappy?
And it’s not as complicated as it seems to be and relationships don’t have to be a source of pain but perhaps that’s all you know. Perhaps there were challenges with you and a parent or that stress is a part of your norm. Perhaps feeling depressed and unhappy in general and in relationships it’s just something that you’ve learned to live with. But this time it’s a little bit different because at this moment you feel enough suffering to come and read our words. We feel you, we see you and we hear you.
We’re here to acknowledge how you feel, and why you feel that way and what you can do about it so that you can feel a little bit better and improve your circumstances.
We went through our fair share of unhappy relationships and wondered why and stayed stuck. You have to ask yourself is there a dependency perhaps a strong dependency, Addiction, or fear of being alone?
However, there is a glue to holding this kind of dependency and addiction to this person you are in an unhappy relationship with. This glue is called emotional abuse. Now, emotional abuse can seem harmless and easily slip into everyday normal conversations that we don’t even see as wrong or alarming because it’s all we know. And overtime our self-esteem has been broken apart where we’ve learned to now accept that this is what we deserve deep down.
These 3 hidden signs of emotional abuse can accumulate and continue to erode your sense of self, well-being, and personal happiness. We are here to help you identify what the hidden signs are:
- Signs of Dismissive Behaviour
- When you’ve shared your feelings and they were not acknowledged, brushed over, ignored and
- Signs of Gaslighting
- Signs of Emotional Suppression Now that we have identified what these three hidden signs of emotional abuse are, you can begin to become aware of the signs in your relationship. With this awareness, you can begin to take the steps to stop this in your relationship and reclaim your emotional health and personal happiness.
How to Stop Deep Emotional Abuse
Obviously, we know what we’re going through is not emotionally healthy because it does not feel good. In fact, it feels painful. It feels like a slew of anxiety, depression, addiction, feeling high, feeling low, feeling empty and craving for something more or different.
We’re in a cycle of emotional abuse and we continue to live it day in and day out because we don’t know how to be without it. Cycling through emotional abuse is our normal way of life because it makes us feel alive. We crave on a nervous system level the ups and downs of emotional abuse or that high and low feeling because it’s like an adrenaline rush for the nerves.
When we are emotionally wired in our nervous systems to continue experiencing this, it can be almost impossible to stop the emotional abuse cycle.
Once we can get honest that we actually crave the highs and lows that come from the emotional abuse, then we can begin to face it head-on and heal it.
The 5 Steps to Stop the Emotional Abuse Cycle:
- Recognize the signs of emotional abuse, especially what the hidden forms look like in relationships
- Identify how deep you are in the cycle by cultivating an awareness of how often you live the patterns of emotional abuse. E.g. How much do you need emotional abuse to function or to feel alive?
- Begin to wean off the emotional abuse slowly by creating emotional space for yourself and the person/people emotionally abusing you
- In the emotional space, begin to feel, heal and integrate the painful, angry, low and empty feelings that may arise
- Have a self-compassion practice with the emotions that come up
For more depth knowledge and guidelines on healing the trauma and roots of deeper emotional abuse, check out our book “Awake AF to Relationship Sh!t”