Everyone has at least one core issue when it comes to relationships. The core issue may be invisible to you, but deeply affects how you connect to your partner and potential partners.
Once you can see and work with your core issue your relationship results will permanently shift for the better. You will gain the capacity to get more of what you want in relationships.
You can start working on this right now, by reading this article.
First, let’s understand the nature of a core issue, and then let’s see if I can help you discover yours.
Your core issue is the thing that comes up over and over in relationships that hurts deeply. It is exactly THE thing that you dread other people will either do to you or deny you. It is also the thing you dread others will think about you or the way they will perceive you. It is your secret fear and what you most want to avoid.
Your core issue does not feel like it comes from you. Instead it feels like something that keeps happening to you. When it happens to you, it sends you reeling. It cuts you to your very core and leaves you angry, resentful, or devastated.
It is difficult to try to understand that the thing you feel other people are doing to you is actually your own issue. It is much easier to believe that what’s happening to you is somehow out of your control and the responsibility of others.
But here’s what is actually happening:
While you are experiencing your relationship partner, or any person do THAT thing to you or say THAT thing to you that hurts the most, you are unaware that you are actually pushing them to do so. You are influencing the people you interact with to act just THE way to activate your deepest pain. In other words, you are making sure that the thing that hurts you the most happens in every relationship, and perhaps even in every interaction, you have.
You do it unconsciously and automatically. We all do it. It is the nature of human beings to try to control danger and pain. Your core issue, THAT thing others could do to you feels dangerous because it can be so devastating. You bring it about intentionally to make sure you are in control of when and how you feel that pain.
Here are some of the ways you will push others to treat you in a way that activates your core issue:
- Misreading what someone says or does.
- Perceiving someone is trying to hurt you when they are not.
- Thinking people are rejecting you when they are not.
- Assuming people won’t connect with you or won’t be there for you, even when this is not true.
- Overreacting to people and pushing them away without realizing it.
- Withdrawing and walling yourself up, so you are unavailable to connect with others.
- Being awkward and uncomfortable around others.
- Trying too hard to please or take care of others.
- Not allowing others to help you, which makes them feel useless or unimportant.
There are many more ways in which you may sabotage relationships without realizing it.
But aren’t you just being yourself when you do any of these things? In a word: no.
Typically people act out the behaviors above because they are trying to protect themselves from people doing THAT thing to them, from hurting them in THAT way that activates old childhood wounds.
In trying to protect yourself from experiencing your core issue, you actually act in ways that create it.
Here’s an example:
If your core issue is the feeling of not being good enough, you will enter social situations feeling awkward and not exactly as good as other people. You will try too hard, or have trouble connecting with others. In doing so, you will feel disconnected from others. You will interpret this as evidence that you are in fact not good enough. In reality, though, not connecting with others has nothing to do with your value or rank among others. You were just awkward and maybe bristly or shut down and because of that people could not connect with you.
Do you see how this works? You think it’s others doing something to you or seeing you in a particular way, but it is actually you creating your own results.
The same thing applies in a relationship, where the person with a particular core issue sets up his or her partner to activate that issue.
Let’s look at where your core issue comes from, and what it might be, so that you can start to get a handle on it:
Your core issue comes from childhood. At some point you experienced a deep wounding, either by what was done to you or because what you needed was not given to you. It is what you decided was wrong with you to explain the pain you experienced.
This explaining away of pain by a child defining themselves as damaged happens unconsciously and automatically. When painful things happen to kids they take it personally and decide that they must be somehow defective. Then they name how they are defective and create a personal problem that can’t be solved.
The thing about the core issue is that it was never the truth about you. It was something you made up in reaction to wounding by adults. Adults do not hurt children because there’s something wrong with the child, but because they themselves are in pain.
There’s in fact nothing wrong with you. Even if you are certain that you are somehow not okay and that is THE reason relationships hurt, it is not.
But as long as you believe that something about you is not ok, as long as you believe your core issue is true, you will continue to set up others to treat you as if it is in fact true and you will keep experiencing it.
What is the core issue for you in relationships?
Do you believe you’re:
- Unlovable
- Unattractive
- Not good enough
- Misunderstood
- Not worthy of attention
- Not interesting enough
- Always doing something wrong
- Never wanted
- Too intense
- Too complicated
- Too much
- Can’t be loved
Feel free to add your issue to this list, as there are endless variations of how children justify why painful things happen to them in childhood.
Now the question is, will you walk away from this article and keep pretending that there’s really still something wrong with you, or will you start to watch what you think and how you act to make people treat you as if there’s something wrong with you?
If you want relationships stop being a source of frustration and pain, but rather become a source of love and connection, here’s what you need to do:
- Understand your core issue, so that you can clearly see that it is not the reason for your relationship woes.
- Heal, so that it no longer has a hold on you.
- Start loving and appreciating all of who you are.
- Learn to observe yourself and how you create the relationship results you don’t want.
- Learn to intentionally create the relationship experiences you do want.
[stextbox id=”red_box”]I do all this with my clients in coaching.
To experience coaching set up a 30-minute Get Clarity Session.
In the Get Clarity Session I will help you discover your core issue and give you ideas of how to work with it, so that you can start to create the relationship experience you want![/stextbox]
