How to stop sabotaging your romantic relationships (with Raquel Peel)
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I'm Chris Duffy, and this is How to Be a Better Human. Today on the show, let's talk about love. Specifically, about how sometimes it seems like people keep finding themselves in love with the wrong people over and over and over again. Maybe you identify with that for yourself. Or maybe you immediately thought of a friend or a family member who seems to fit that pattern.

Before she met the love of her life, psychology researcher Raquel Peel, she self-identified as a romantic self-saboteur. And her early experiences, they had affected her attitude and behavior towards love. Here's how she described it in her TEDx talk. Hello, my name is Raquel. I am a recovering romantic self-saboteur.

I assume that people in a relationship with me will eventually leave me. I also assume that all my relationships will fail without much evidence. Consequently, I am often thinking how best to protect myself. And I count on the four horsemen of the apocalypse to do the job, with criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. Just ask my husband.

But let me tell you, it doesn't work. So a lot of people come to me and ask, "How did things change for you? What happened?" I have been conducting research into what works to maintain long-term relationships. But before I tell you, let me just say we should not be pursuing every relationship that comes our way. I would like to tell you to pursue those relationships that have the potential to work. They are good. And what's standing in your way is your self-sabotage tendencies.

Change is really hard, but not impossible.

So if you are someone who needs to break the pattern of self-sabotage, please be kind on yourselves. It's natural to want to protect yourself, but the way out of it is to have insight into who you are in a relationship, your expectations of your romantic partners and how best to collaborate with them. Because after all, if you know who you are in a relationship, your partner will also have a chance to get to know you. And together, you can break the pattern of sabotage.

So what do you think? Does that sound like you? Or does that sound like someone that you know?

For me, I think that anyone who's interested in having a relationship should be thinking about these questions that Raquel is asking. Who are you? What are your expectations? What are you looking for? So many of us end up undermining our relationships in ways big or small without even knowing it. And today on the show, we're going to hear from Raquel all about how to break that cycle of romantic self-sabotage and how she was able to transform her own relationships. But first, a quick break.

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I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Okay, we are back talking about love with Raquel Peel.

Hi, I am Dr. Raquel Pio. I am a researcher in the field of relationship sabotage. So you study romantic sabotage. What is that? Well, let's get straight into it, I suppose. Relationship sabotage is a terminology that hadn't been defined empirically. So you made this up? Well, I had to define it in the literature. Interesting. Yeah, so I bet that if you open any popular magazine or watch shows or...

sitcoms, whatever it is, you will come across the term. But empirically in the literature, the only terminology that came close to relationship sabotage was self-handicapping.

But the problem was that self-handicapping was only studied in the context of education and sports. So when I started looking into it, I realized that that wouldn't apply for relationships because a lot of the items that I use to measure self-handicapping are to do with physical barriers that we might put into ourselves so we can't perform.

So, for example, an athlete might not perform as well because they had a lot to drink the day before. Well, that's not what would happen in relationships. So my work became how do we define it empirically as a measure operationally?

So my first study was actually interviewing psychologists who specialize in relationship therapy and asking them, what is relationship sabotage? How do you see it in your practice? How do you see your clients day in, day out? Discuss what they do as a pattern. So relationship sabotage is a pattern, right?

And it is defined by me as a pattern of attitudes or behaviors that are destructive and used to either impede success, withdraw effort, or most importantly, justify failure in relationships. So when you were interviewing psychologists and they were talking about their clients, even though this term hadn't been in the literature before,

When you said, I'm looking to talk about self-sabotage when it comes to love, was that something that everyone was like, oh, I see this all the time?

Absolutely. So and that's why I say that everyone understands the term. You can see it everywhere in movies, in magazines. Psychologists knew what I was talking about. But then it became about bringing that back to the empirical literature and defining as a construct. So self-sabotage, while everyone understands it.

I think we understand it in the sense that we know what you mean, but I think it's actually very confusing as to why we would do this, right? Like, why do you hurt yourself when it comes to wanting to be in a relationship? You are absolutely right. It is confusing because it takes insight. So usually people would be self-sabotaging non-intentionally. So it's not something that we think about and decide to do.

The reason why we do it is because we want to protect ourselves against hurt that we think is coming. And the reason why it's so confusing is because what we are actually chasing in wanting to protect ourselves is a win-win outcome. And what I mean by that is if I sabotage my relationship, but nothing happens, I keep that relationship, everything keeps going well, then I can say, oh, all right, well, despite all my efforts, this person still loves me or this person is still with me.

But if the relationship fails, then you can say, ah, I knew it. I knew this wasn't going to work out. I knew that person wasn't right to me. In the end, you're right no matter what. And we as humans, we love being right. So that's really rewarding. I feel like so much of your...

research and so much of the studies that you've done, they are both very relatable and they're so sad to me because I think we can all relate to this, the ways in which we push people away or do things that we think are helping us but ultimately are actually making us sad or lonely or pushing away love.

Maybe that's not everyone. Maybe that's just me, but I certainly can really relate to that idea. No, I, look, I know what you mean by sad. My early studies did make me feel quite sad because the most prominent theme I would encounter in people's speech about, so after talking to psychologists, then I needed to talk to people in relationships, right? And what I would hear from them is, I am afraid. I'm afraid.

I am afraid that I'm not going to be accepted. I am afraid that I'm going to be rejected. I'm afraid that that person will think I'm weird. I'm afraid that they will think they will never love me. There was a lot of, I am afraid and I am scared. And this is why I'm not engaging or this is why I'm protecting myself. And you're absolutely right. That fear is exactly what is, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are afraid of getting hurt.

Thus, they get hurt. So how can someone recognize if they are a self-saboteur when it comes to love? Look, it is actually a very confronting thing to talk about. I often get a lot of pushback. The way to recognize that you are a self-saboteur will be to look at yourself in the mirror and have a reflection and really good think about what are the types of behaviors that you see yourself carry from one relationship to the next. So I'm not talking about something that you've done only once.

and there was conflict over it. I'm talking about the types of things that you see yourself feeling and doing again and again and again, and leading to that stage where you don't feel good about yourself or your relationships. And it will be hard because we don't like to think that we are at fault.

But that step is needed. That insight is needed. So what are some of the common ways that people sabotage relationships? If we're looking inside of ourselves and trying to see if we do this, what are the common things that we might be looking for? Yeah, well, my scale. So when I started to develop my scale, after talking to psychologists, I had an array of attitudes and behaviors that would contribute to someone getting to that stage where they are doing the same things again and again. Defensiveness, so feeling victimized.

feeling misunderstood, feeling like there is an attack coming, whether it's real or not, perceiving that you are about to be attacked.

Also, trust difficulty. So carrying that heavy luggage from one relationship to the next, thinking that you're going to be betrayed at any time. So not being able to trust your romantic partners, checking up on their social media, feeling really agitated and uncomfortable and apprehensive if they're not with you, and controlling to a certain level because of that.

To me, the most interesting factor was lack of relationship skills. And I like talking about that because as humans, we don't get taught how to love. We don't. It's not something that we sit and think about. It's not part of education. I would like to argue that we need to be taught how to love.

And you might be lucky that you have a partner who is quite insightful and that person teaches you how to do it. But some people are not. Some people are stumbling on relationships and not knowing what to do, not knowing how to navigate. And that's okay. And I think that's then having that insight that perhaps I need to learn how to do this. I need to be kind to myself. I need to be able to communicate to my partner that I'm

This is new to me. I don't know what I'm doing. Can we learn together? Can we do this together? It's interesting because I feel like that sense that you just said, even of that it's okay to learn and it's okay to not be perfect. It feels like so many of us come into this thinking like, if I'm not perfect, that is my fundamental core, right? I'm not worthy of love if I'm not already perfect at love. I don't think a lot of us, at least I don't, I certainly did not think about it as a skill, although it is one that you develop.

And it might start with communicating. It might start with actually being able to say, wait a minute, I don't know exactly what I'm doing here. I'm feeling afraid. I'm feeling afraid of being hurt by you. I'm feeling afraid that those feelings are taking over. This is going too fast.

It's okay to actually express those feelings. And you'll find that in that vulnerability of being able to express your feelings, you are already learning how to love. It is so scary to imagine saying the sentence, I'm afraid of being hurt by you, right? Like that is already putting yourself so out there. And yet when you say it like that,

Of course, that is trusting your partner to be able to respond to that and to hold that emotion with kindness and with love. But wow, even just hearing it, I'm like, whew, that's a scary thing to say. Very scary, very scary. And I don't know that we can truly be ourselves and truly be in love without taking some sort of a scary step towards being truthful to our feelings.

So I have a history of making bad choices when it comes to romantic partners. I was hurt countless times. I was a very open person in my youth,

And I can relate to what you're saying, Chris, that I was hurt because I was myself. I was hurt because I would share my feelings in my story. And it got to a point where I would do the hurting before the other person because I couldn't put myself through it again. But then I found myself quite lonely. And in that cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy where I was destroying relationships before they even started, but I actually had to take...

take risks in order to accept that maybe in one relationship this won't happen. And what I do is I challenge myself with what is the evidence for this thought?

what has happened to tell you that this is exactly true. And a lot of the times you'd be surprised to learn that, oh, actually, I'm just assuming. I'm assuming that the other person is thinking that way. I'm assuming that the other person is feeling that way. And I have heard from a lot of participants, little things like, I get apprehensive when my partner doesn't text me every day. It could simply be that they're busy, not that they don't love you. And maybe we have to ask them that. Maybe we have to ask, look, I,

I am just wondering, you know, why is it that you don't text every day? Is that something that we could organize? You might find that the other person is quite happy with that. Oh, OK, I could do a check in text before I go into work. I think sometimes one of the most destructive things in relationships is us having the idea that we shouldn't have to ask or we shouldn't have to explain that the other person should just know.

It seems like, at least in my experience, you're never going to meet someone who just knows all the time. That's not a possible person. No. And again, in my research, I can't tell you how many times I would hear the conversation around, I wish my partner would know what I'm feeling. I wish my partner would know what I'm thinking. I wish my partner would just know what to do. Well, they can't.

They cannot unless you tell them. They cannot, unfortunately. And it's a saying that we hear a lot, isn't it? One of the things that you would do in relationship therapy would be learning how to express your feelings using I statement. So it's about saying for me or I feel something.

And then continue with what it is the issue. So it's learning to talk about what it is for you rather than what you expect of the other person. So no, you don't expect the other person should be able to read your mind. I just feel I would feel more comfortable if I knew what you were thinking. Yeah. I mean, it's so much easier to say you are rude and you never listen to me rather than to say I feel like I'm not being heard in this conversation. Yeah.

But it's a lot easier to just say, you are a rude person. That's who you are. And you always do this. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I mean by relationship skills. That could be one skill that we might need to learn in communicating with our partners is that we need to talk about what it is for us rather than what we expect of the other person. Because when we do that, when we say you, you, you, we put the other person at a defensive posture. They are now thinking, I'm being attacked.

I'm going to self-protect. I'm going to withdraw from this conversation. I'm going to go away. I'm not going to engage. And then you get into that cycle of you push, they pull away. You are looking for those micro-expressions.

With, you know, tooth comb thinking, all right, what are the reasons here where I can justify? So again, if I go back to my definition of relationship sabotage, I was looking for justifications so I could tell myself that I'm right. No one's going to want to be with me for the rest of my life. So let me find the reasons now before it gets too late. It's interesting. It's almost the way that I'm thinking about it in my head now talking to you is it's like, are you on the prosecution or are you on the defense?

Right. If you're on the prosecution and you're looking for reasons to convict this person of their bad, they don't care about me. This isn't going to work. You're going to find the case. But if you're on the defense and you're like, this is why maybe I should try and care for them, that can be a much healthier. You maybe should switch teams, right? Join the public defender's office instead of the DAs in your relationship here. I really like that. I like the way you think, Chris, and I agree. OK, we've got to take a quick break, but we will be right back with Raquel in just a moment.

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in past relationships, but you've also been married for 10 years now. So I think you'd probably be considered a success story here. So how did you break your own patterns? What worked for you? I'm going to be honest with you, Chris. It's something I have to work on every day. When you have one of those days where you start doubting everything and it's easy to just fall back into your same patterns of wanting to protect myself or not wanting to talk about your...

concerns and fears, I have to call myself out on it. And it's almost every day. Some days I'm like, what are you doing? I know you're tired. I know you might have had a bad day. Maybe there was a conflict.

you need to manage this. And it's, I don't believe this is something that we can just fix and that's it. It's something that you are going to have to work on for the rest of your life because it is what, that's what relationship is. It's constant management. It's constant caring. Don't you feel though, like many people have in their head that if a relationship feels like work, that it's not good. I feel like I hear that a lot.

I disagree. I think the things that we care the most in our lives and we take the most pride in are work. Kids are work, relationships are work.

it involves passion and involves dedication. I completely agree. To be clear, I think that like a good relationship is something that you're just going to have to take work and it's not always going to be easy. But I think there is this idea in, you know, romantic comedies and movies, like it's just easy and it feels natural. And you're like, yeah, it should feel like that some days, but there's definitely going to be days where you're like,

This is a lot of work and it would be easier if I wasn't doing this work. But luckily, I guess I'll just do it because I hope tomorrow doesn't feel like this, too. I would I would challenge that thought. I don't know if it would be easier. And I would also say, yes, it is a lot of work, but it's work that you do collaboratively. So it's shared work. You are doing that with the other person. It shouldn't all be on you.

So no, it shouldn't feel like a huge burden. It should feel like dedication. Yeah, I find that that idea of collaborative work really resonates. And especially because

I think that when I feel the best about my relationship, and this is also true for many friendships too, is when I think about it less as a thing that I have or that I'm giving to them and more of a thing that we're building together of like, oh, we're putting in the work to build this thing. And that thing is almost the third entity, right? It's not like me and you, it's me, you, and the relationship.

That feels like what is actually happening here. I couldn't agree more. And this is one of the things I talk about when I talk about how do we combat sabotage? Well, get insight into who you are. And you're absolutely right. Working together towards building something beautiful and something that will last forever.

So if someone's listening to this and they're hearing what you're saying and they sense that their partner is maybe a romantic saboteur, their partner is without even knowing it, sabotaging the relationship. How can we convince someone that we won't hurt them and that it's safe to be vulnerable? I get that question a lot, but I'm going to ask them to, first of all, look at themselves in the mirror. Because sometimes we are quick to say that our partners are the self-saboteurs, but at

Or are you contributing to that? So maybe let's get that out of the road first. Look at yourself, have a think about what are the types of things that you are doing before pointing the finger. But yes, if it is the case and you have been great, you have been trying to do your best and your partner is that person who is pushing you away, you will take a lot of reassurance and patience, a lot of patience with that person. So what can people who are recovering self-saboteurs or currently in this experience

If they're noticing, I kind of do this, I'm doing this in my relationship right now, what can they do? You said that there are three tips. What are they? Well, the first thing I would ask them to do is to identify the root cause reason for that.

Because it is okay to want to protect yourself and defend yourself if you've been hurt before, but we need to identify that and deal with that. So tip number one would be get a little bit of an insight as to why you are doing those behaviors. What is the root cause? Have a conversation with your partner around those. Have a check of your expectations for how you think the other person should react. Maybe they will be surprised. Maybe

maybe it will take them a little bit to understand what is it that you're talking to them about. They also have their own, they might have their own fears, their own traumas. So you would have to navigate that together.

And that's where collaboration comes in. But then you do need to move to a stage where you manage your expectations. No, they are not going to be able to read your mind. You are going to actually have to express your feelings out loud. And that's really scary. And then thirdly, if you are in a relationship, you're going to have to work together because if you work by yourself, you are going to be bumping heads. They might be working on something else.

One thing that I have asked people before as well is, especially for those who are single, what is your motivation for looking for relationships? Are you afraid of being alone? And if so, why are you afraid to be alone? Is that a matter of giving yourself time to get to know yourself, to get to know what you need when you are in relationships? And that will be scary, but that can't be the reason why you want to be in a relationship.

So what is the motivation behind giving love, searching for relationships, wanting to be patented with someone? That actually feels like a really important piece here, which is there's definitely a big difference between sabotaging love and...

And being happy with not being in a relationship. That is completely fine. Like it's okay to be single, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. So if someone said to me, look, I'm happy to be single. I'm getting to know myself. I'm focusing on my work. I'm traveling. That is completely fine. But then the question here is, are you single because you're afraid of getting hurt and you actually want to be with someone?

And if they say, yes, I do want to be with someone, I am looking for love. Well, then we need to continue this conversation. Yeah, it kind of all comes down to doing some of the self-insight to recognize what it is that you want and what it is that you fear. And if the conclusion you come to is you're happy on your own, then that's great. In fact, that's a huge success. But if the answer is I'm unhappy because I'm afraid, then there's a solution. You don't have to feel like that.

Absolutely. And look, I actually think that's the hardest part. That is the hardest step. It's the first step and it's the hardest step. And I know it sounds simple. Get to know yourself, get some insights into your fears and what you have been doing from relationship to relationship. And if you haven't had that many romantic relationships, look at your relationships with your parents, with your peers, with your colleagues. Start to identify who you are and how you behave when you are scared.

that is the hardest part. And that might take quite a while for you to do. Some people have asked me, well, how exactly do I do it?

It might be that you are someone who likes to write. So that was for me, writing was the way that I got to know myself. So journaling might be how you do it. It might be that you need to talk to a therapist. You might need someone in the room with you brainstorming those ideas. But that is a step that sounds easy, but it's not. It might take time. So be kind, take your time, live through it. You can't jump steps. Okay, so...

Looking for patterns is easier when you've been in relationships before. But what if you're someone who has, you're a little bit older and a lot of your peers, it feels like, are in relationships and they've made it work and you haven't had a long lasting relationship and you're not quite sure exactly why and you can't draw on all these past experiences. How can you do the work or figure out what's going on there? Well, it sounds to me from what you're describing that that person's pattern is avoidance.

And it could be a pattern, not wanting to engage, not wanting to be intimate. So the literature talks a lot about fear of intimacy and avoidance as the result of that. So for some people, you're quite right. They don't have those past relationships to go back to because they have been on an autopilot of avoiding it from the beginning. So you're going to have to take that risk and learn with your partner. Or you could learn with friends.

It's about communicating. It's about being open and maybe start with friends and say, look, I've actually never really been in a romantic relationship because I don't know how to communicate with partners. I don't know how to. One of the skills that I talk a lot about is being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes to be able to understand where they are coming from. So you're not defensive anymore.

So it might be that you start with friends, bouncing those ideas. And sometimes it's just saying out loud. In therapy, you might get asked to imagine a word exactly how you want and describe it to them and describe interactions that you would have with your romantic partner in that word. And then it would be about breaking it down to how is it that you would achieve that now?

So you've described what it is that you think would be the perfect scenario. And then how do you achieve that? So really setting short-term goals towards achieving

getting to know that person and embarking on a relationship. Unfortunately, we're coming right to the end of our time. So we always have two questions that we end on. The show is called How to Be a Better Human. So the first question is, what is one idea or book or movie or piece of music or what is the thing that has made you a better human? I, oh, that's a really hard question. How am I a better human? I had to face myself in the mirror.

So I don't know if there is a book about that, but it's about, for me, it has been about confronting myself, facing myself, not blaming anyone else for how I feel and for what I do. So I guess for me is if I am wanting to be a better human, it will take courage to look at myself and face myself head on.

That is beautiful. And I, you know, it's funny because normally the next question is what's one way in which you are personally trying to be a better human, but you already answered it. You're such a good human. You can, you combined our two questions into one. It's perfect. I have one song by Sam Smith that I talked about in my TED talk, Two Good Goodbyes. And that song has been my inspiration for really for this research because

So maybe listen to that song and see how you connect with it. Because I think he describes it beautifully. He wants to be in love, but he's pushing everyone away. He's too good at goodbyes. And I think some of us are guilty of being too good at goodbyes. That's so great. That's beautiful. I am so grateful for you taking the time to talk to us, Dr. Raquel Peele. It has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you. No, Chris, thank you so much for having me.

That is it for today's episode. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and this has been How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Raquel Peel. On the TED side, this show is brought to you by the emotionally available Abhimanyu Das, the self-reflective Daniela Balarezo, the relationally aware Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, the caring Ann Powers, and the always engaging Cara Newman.

From PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Jocelyn Gonzalez, who knows herself and her needs. Pedro Rafael Rosado, who is improving himself every day. And Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, who is setting clear and healthy boundaries as we speak. Thank you for listening. And please, don't forget to tell someone you love all about our show. Have a great week.