There are three things I used to do in relationships that I now recognize as genuinely destructive.
And what makes them so insidious is that none of them felt wrong at the time.
They felt completely normal because they were what I grew up watching.
And if I'm being honest,
They're what a lot of us grew up watching.
These three behaviors are incredibly common.
I see them constantly in my work with clients and they are doing real damage to real relationships every single day,
Often without people even realizing it.
The first one is name calling,
Cussing someone out,
Just completely losing during conflict.
Let me tell you a story.
My ex-husband and I had only been together about a year when we had our first real fight after moving in together.
I unleashed I called him every name I could think of.
And I still remember the look on his face,
This complete shock.
And he just said,
Stop.
We don't talk to family like that.
I felt several things all at once.
Surprised at his reaction.
Shame at my own behavior.
And honestly,
A strange kind of curiosity.
Because something clicked in that moment.
I saw that there was a different way to handle conflict.
I just had never seen it modeled.
And that is the thing about these patterns.
We don't choose them.
We inherit them.
We don't know what we don't know.
But once we see it,
We can't unsee it,
Right?
I hear from clients regularly whose partners are calling them names.
Cussing them out,
Completely unraveling during disagreements.
And what breaks my heart is how often the person on the receiving end has started to normalize it the same way I once normalized doing it myself.
The second thing I used to do was give the silent treatment.
Now I want to make a distinction here because stonewalling and the silent treatment are not the same thing,
And that difference actually matters.
What I am talking about here is the silent treatment specifically,
And it is one of the most common and most damaging patterns I see.
Both in my own history and in the clients I work with.
It feels like control.
It feels like self-protection.
But what it actually does is leave the other person in a kind of emotional freefall.
And that is not an accident.
That is the point of it,
Even when we don't consciously realize it.
The moment I really understood what I was doing was on a vacation with an ex.
He said something that hurt my feelings.
Instead of telling him that,
I just shut down for the entire evening,
Ignored him intentionally,
Watched him try to reach me and fail.
We talked briefly before bed and fell asleep.
The next morning over coffee,
It hit me like a freight train.
The shame of what I had done and the awareness of how much I had hurt him just broke me open.
I started crying almost immediately,
And I apologized to him right there.
We processed the whole thing together over that cup of coffee,
And in that moment,
Something shifted in me that I have never gone back on.
I made a promise to myself that I would never do that to him or to anyone else again,
And I never have.
The third damaging behavior I used to have in relationships was not apologizing when it actually mattered.
Now,
As someone who spent years of people-pleasing,
I was not short on apologies.
I apologized for everything,
For taking up space,
For having needs,
For existing,
But when there was real conflict and genuine repair was needed,
I had learned to sweep it under the rug,
Pretend it never happened,
Move on without ever closing the loop.
And I see this all the time with clients too.
The fight happens.
Nobody repairs it and both people just walk around carrying the weight of it until the next one.
So the cycle looks like this.
Name calling.
Silent treatment.
No apology.
Act like everything is fine.
Repeat.
And then we wonder why relationships feel so hard.
We wonder why we keep ending up in the same place with different people.
These patterns are not character flaws.
They are learned behaviors.
They got passed down to us,
And somewhere along the way,
They became the only tools we had.
