251. The Danger of Autopilot in Relationships

What if the reason you keep ending up in draining relationships has nothing to do with what's wrong with you — and everything to do with how your brain operates?

In this episode, I break down discernment — the skill that transforms every relationship in your life, from your marriage to your friendships to how you co-parent with your ex. Here's the truth: your brain runs on autopilot. It creates shortcuts for everything — including the people closest to you. And when those shortcuts go unchecked, you stop seeing people for who they are. You start operating from a script that was written for you long before you were born.

It goes deeper than biology. From childhood, women get trained to override their own reality. "He's pulling your hair because he likes you." Sound familiar? That messaging doesn't stop in grade school. It follows you into your marriage, your dating life, and your friendships. It teaches you to reframe harm as love and to silence your own experience.

I share my own story of trying to wake up from autopilot during my first marriage — and the painful responses I received when I started asking real questions. Breaking free from the script is messy. But staying plugged in has a cost too.

Discernment means slowing down, removing the filters, and backing yourself up on your own experience. No shame. No self-blame. Just clarity.

If something in your life feels off — if what you're giving never matches what you're getting back — this episode is your invitation to start asking real questions.

Ready to get off autopilot in your relationships? Schedule a coaching consultation with me at sadecurry.com/schedule-appointment.

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast. I'm your host, Sade Curry. It is good to be back with you today.

Today, I want to talk about a general principle that I use in my coaching with all of my clients, whether I'm working with them on their divorce, with dating, in a difficult relationship, in parenting, or in their friendships—whether they are reviewing their friendships or building new ones. This works with everything. It is one of the four major areas that we use in relationship assessment and then in the radical design of what my clients want their relationships to look like going forward.

That principle is discernment, and it works even with long-term relationships—relationships with siblings, relationships with parents, extended family members, friends from high school. It works and is so critical, especially for long-term relationships, for marriages that people have been in for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. Discernment is so key.

One of the places it comes up a lot is when people tell me, "Well, this person is family," or "It's my husband," or "Things should be this way," or "Just tell me what to say." A lot of times we're looking for a formula to apply to our relationships. We're looking for a general principle that applies in every area so that we can go through it, except the general principle that applies in every relationship is that every relationship is different. Every single relationship is different.

I tell my dating clients that you can be on a date with a particular guy, and the energy you create between each other is going to be completely different from the energy that same guy is going to create when he's on a date with another person. Every human being is completely different from every other human being. Now, there are general things that apply, there are general things that are the same, but when you meet a new person, you have to discern who that person is in order to make decisions about your relationship with that person.

Now, this sounds great. All I have to do is discern who the person is, right? All I have to do is meet a person, look at my spouse or my ex that I'm co-parenting with—even attorneys. This comes up with my clients when they are working with or choosing attorneys. All I have to do is meet that person, discern who they are, and then make a decision, right? Yes, it is that simple, except if you've been socialized as a woman and you have a human brain, you have been trained out of discernment. Literally, your whole life has been an exercise in training you to not have discernment. In order for our systems to run the way they've run, in order for you to have been willing to have the partners that you've had and keep the human race going, you've had to be skilled in the art of not having discernment.

And this is the problem.

So let's just go back to our biology. We have a brain that is operating in this world where there's so much information coming at us. Let's not even count this age of social media and technology and AI and movies and entertainment, having 3,000 friends on Facebook and another 5,000 on Instagram to deal with—that's very recent. That's all in the last twenty years. Just being on this planet, you have more information coming at your brain than you can process.

Our brains are so powerful. They take all the information in, and in order for you to not go crazy with the amount of information that comes in, your brain filters out information that it thinks doesn't matter. Then it takes the information it thinks matters and creates these well-worn neural pathways so that when you are in a particular situation, you can take a shortcut to decide what happens.

Your brain is constantly creating shortcuts. So if you see a man—shortcut, this is what a man means, make the decision. If you see a bear—shortcut, this is what it means. If you see a snake—shortcut, it means danger, be afraid, run. If you see a spider—shortcut, be afraid, run. If you see a cute little puppy—shortcut, it's cute and needs care, pick it up and hug it. Your brain is creating shortcuts for everything. If it sees a slice of cake, it's like, shortcut, pleasure, go for it.

Over time, your biology is creating shortcuts all the time, and the more you use those shortcuts, the faster and faster your brain makes those decisions based on them.

I'll try to put this in very basic terms. Just think about anything you see when you are driving to work. If you've worked at a place for a reasonable amount of time, your brain has created a shortcut for how you get to work. Sometimes you get in your car, you start driving, and your brain says, "Okay, we don't need to think about the fact that we are driving home. We can use this time to think about other things." It takes you completely offline on your driving and puts that on autopilot. You can create a whole new book or scenario in your mind. Then you get home and you're like, "Oh my goodness, how did I get here?" That's how powerful your brain shortcuts are. You can go on autopilot in important areas because your brain is driving this machine.

Now that we understand the principle of autopilot, understand that your brain is doing that not just when you're driving home. It is doing that in your relationships. It is doing that in your longest-term relationships. Your brain is saying, "This is our husband. Autopilot. Shortcut, shortcut, shortcut. This is how we deal with it. Boom, done." Even when things change.

And that is the problem. That's where the problem starts. Even when things change—even when there's infidelity, or abuse starts, or your partner is harming your kids, or there's financial abuse, or there's a problem—your brain is like, "Yeah, they did that, but this is our shortcut. We don't want—" Your brain would rather conserve energy and keep things the same than actually do the thing that would cause you to be happy. And it's not your brain's fault. It's just biology. It's just chemicals moving around in your body that are putting you on autopilot.

The act of being discerning in relationships requires a lot of energy. One of the reasons I'm bringing this out as a particular topic that I'm going to break down—all five parts of discernment—is that I'm seeing that when I'm coaching clients, it's one of the hardest things for them to do: to move into the driver's seat once their brain is on autopilot.

This is the reason why you go on dates and you get heartbroken every time, because you go into the date on autopilot. You're not expecting that this person might not be right for you. You're on autopilot of hoping, wishing, wanting, already falling in love because the person said one or two things or you have a few things in common. Your brain is on autopilot: "If they check these boxes, we should be able to make a family." That autopilot creates expectations, and then when those expectations are not met, there's heartbreak. Versus, "I don't know who this person is. I'm not going to be on autopilot with anyone that I meet, because I don't know who they are."

Or when you are in a relationship where you're in a rut, or you're in a rut in your marriage. This applies with teenage children or young adult children too. You think they're still your cuddly little kid, but they are growing. They're growing so much, exponentially, in those teenage years and young adult years. They are seeing the world, making new decisions, becoming their own people. If you as a parent are working on autopilot, you are not taking in the changes. You're not seeing your children for who they really are and for the people that they're becoming. You still want to relate to them the way you did ten years prior.

Same thing with siblings, same thing with friends. You assume that, "Oh, we were really close in high school, so now we should be close." No. These are other human beings. They are a universe unto themselves. You should always be in exploration mode when you are talking to another human being.

What I really want you to start thinking about is: How can I become more conscious in my relationships? How can I stop being on autopilot in my expectations and in the way I relate to people, in the way I talk to them, in what I want them to do, what I want us to do together? How can I take the rose-colored glasses off and start to see these people for who they are?

So I talked about biology and how our biology is motivated to create shortcuts in relationships, to put us on autopilot. There's a second layer that creates even deeper autopilot for women, and that is the active training that begins when you are a child being socialized as a woman—to deny your own reality, to do things in a way that fits the mold of what a girl, woman, or lady is supposed to be, to actively deny what you are thinking and feeling and experiencing and wanting in order to keep the societal narrative going.

Women have certain things that society expects of them. You're expected to like men. You're expected to give men a pass. And you see this right from when children are young. A boy is teasing—I'm holding up quotes for those of you listening by audio—"teasing," slash lightweight bullying a girl, pulling her hair in class, calling her names, whatever the thing is. And what do adults say? "Oh, he's doing that because he likes you."

Think about this. The reason that conversation is happening in the first place is because this girl does not like what is happening. If she liked it, she'd be like, "Oh, it was so delightful to have my hair pulled in class." It wouldn't be an "Oh my God, this happened, and I'm upset about it" situation. The child is upset. And what do we adults do? Because we want our girls to follow the narrative of, "Oh, a boy likes you, it's really great. You've got to be careful around boys, you've got to be nice to them because then you need one of them to choose you later on." And also sometimes it's because, "Well, we don't want them to hurt you, so you've got to be nice to them."

Instead of coming off of the autopilot of the societal conversation and the societal narrative to call out something that might be harmful, at least to take a second look at something that might be harmful to a girl child, we reinforce the narrative. We actually gaslight the child. "He's pulling your hair because he likes you. He's harming you because he likes you." And that is where that second layer of autopilot comes in.

In all of these situations over time—you see it in movies. We show our kids Beauty and the Beast. "Oh, he's ugly and terrible and mean, but underneath all of that is this wonderful prince, this wonderful man who is eventually going to love you and eventually going to treat you well, if only you hold on long enough and endure long enough." So there is the thing that is happening, there is the reality of the situation, and then there is the story that we tell about it. There is the narrative that we put on it so that the system can keep functioning the way it functions. And girls are getting these messages from when they're really young. I got those messages from when I was really young, and so did a lot of the women that I talk to.

If you think about it, you have interaction after interaction and input after input and correction after correction over decades, and your brain absorbs all of that into the autopilot. The autopilot becomes: if a man harms us, then we instantly reframe it into "he actually likes us," or we frame it into something that we're doing that's making him do that, or reframe it into something that we need to put up with in order to continue.

All of that training—now you have your biology that tends towards autopilot, but it has been trained by society to use that in a way that creates relationships that can be harmful to you. That answers so much of what you see or you may be experiencing in your life. It will answer so much when your results seem confusing, when your input into your relationships does not match the output that you're getting out of it. When you have friends who are constantly throwing shade in weird ways. When your friendships don't feel like they have any growth or they're nourishing. When you look around and you're pouring into people but you don't seem to have community that pours back into you. When you're in a difficult marriage and it just feels like you are being drained all of the time, giving, giving, giving, and no one's giving back. If you are experiencing abuse or what might be abuse and you're like, "How am I getting here?" but it's so hard to put your finger on it—it's because your own brain has been trained to participate in it.

This is not a conscious choice that you are making. This participation is not a conscious choice. It is line-by-line training. You have been trained to operate on this script that was written for you long before you were born, long before your parents were born. It's a script that humanity has been playing out for a really long time.

So if you are making relationship decisions, if you are actively trying to build extraordinary relationships, the first thing you have to do is see clearly. You can't see clearly if you are running on autopilot. Your conditioning is going to make it almost impossible. You're going to keep running into roadblocks and wondering what you're doing wrong.

Discernment is the practice of removing those filters—removing the biological filter, which means slowing down. Really slowing things down so that when your brain is trying to skip things and shortcut things, you can say, "Okay, I'm going to slow this down so that I can use my conscious mind to examine whatever is happening."

You want to remove those filters that are clouding your perception of people in your life and clouding your own experience. That's another thing that happens—we lose touch with our experience because we are trained to hold on to the narrative, and so our experience doesn't matter. You're experiencing something, but your brain keeps shortcutting to changing the story.

You want to get off autopilot. You want to get out of the script. You want to get out of the narrative that you've been handed. And the first step is to recognize where you're on autopilot. You have to be willing to ask that question without shaming yourself, without feeling like you're doing something wrong because you've been on autopilot for twenty years. That wasn't your fault. That's just your biology. That's just society.

Any woman you talk to about this will tell you, "Oh yeah, this is what happened. I missed red flags." People use the phrase "missing red flags" as some kind of shameful thing that women do. Of course we miss red flags. We were literally sent to boot camp for the first twenty years of our lives on how to ignore red flags. That's all it was—how to ignore red flags. If you are missing red flags, it means you were good. You did a good job of taking the training that you were being given.

So the first step is to start to examine where you are on autopilot. Where am I just responding automatically all the time? A good way to start this is to start journaling your experiences versus what you think about them. Start writing down things that feel uncomfortable but you haven't done anything about them for years. The areas you want to make changes but you haven't been able to, or you haven't been able to find time for. Conversations you want to have that you haven't been able to have. All of those are patterns. They're just patterns that are running unconsciously, and you just keep seeing them over and over again, but you're also trained to ignore them over and over again.

So discernment is important. I feel like there are five parts to discernment. Once you're aware of where you are on autopilot, you're going to want to start seeing people for who they really are, which is a different layer. When you realize, "Oh, I'm not seeing the person for who they are, I'm acting on autopilot," then you have to build the skill of actually seeing people for who they really are—not just the role that they're playing, but who they really are. That's a whole other skill.

Seeing the society and the culture around you and how that's playing a role—when people dismiss your experience, or they encourage you along a different line, or society disapproves of more conscious decisions that you're making—that comes into play as well.

Frames of reference that are put in place. Like someone says, "Oh yes, we are spouses," but one person's definition of a spouse is different from the other person's definition of what they get or give to a spouse. So frames of reference come into play.

And really being in touch with your own experience—that is the most important part. When you experience something, can you back yourself up on that reality? "This is what I experienced." You can interpret the experience many different ways, but the experience itself, the fact of the experience itself, is something you have to back yourself up on without jumping on autopilot to explain it away or to interpret it a particular way that may or may not be in your best interest. And that autopilot, and society's autopilot, and your friends' discomfort with what you're experiencing, and their desire to jump right to fixing it for you or changing it for you—all of that comes into play.

I'm going to wrap up with a story about autopilot—when I was breaking out of autopilot. I think I've told this story on the podcast before. Towards the end of my first marriage, I was really starting to say, "The way I'm thinking and the way my life is going, they're not matching the things that I want or the things that I think are normal." And I remember going to an older lady at church and saying, "Hey, this is happening in my marriage. These are things—" And I kind of took a list, because I was struggling with my own autopilot. I was struggling to become more conscious of what was happening and the way I was responding automatically in ways that were harmful. I wanted someone to say, "Well, if these things are happening, maybe you should think about this or think about that"—at least a person who would have a conversation with me about this.

I really should have just gone to a therapist. However, to be fair, I did try two therapists, and neither one was helpful. It was just the world and the bubble that I was in at the time.

So anyway, I go to this woman, and I'm like, "Hey, I made this list of things that have been happening, and I think this is a problem." And my situation, I think, triggered her own autopilot. She literally said, "Oh my God, you're just so negative. You're so negative about your relationship. You're so negative about your marriage." She packed up her stuff and left my house and never spoke to me again.

At that point in time, I couldn't laugh about it. I can laugh about it now because I understand what was happening with her. Do I forgive it? I don't know. I'm not really a "forgive" kind of person. The concept is, to me, weird and misapplied in many ways. But I can understand it, because she was on autopilot. She was socialized that marriage is sacred, even if people inside of it are being harmed. That women were meant for marriage, and that anything that touched that transaction was bad. So even if these things were happening, the fact that it threatened the institution of marriage—I was cut out.

I hit her in a very sore spot of her own autopilot beliefs, where it's like you don't touch that, you don't get into that, you don't talk about that. You don't look at it. Later, I found out that she has children who are estranged from her. And I was like, okay, well, that makes a lot of sense, because if she can't talk about things and hold space for her own children, it makes sense that she couldn't hold space for me. She was on her own autopilot, her own triggers, her own challenges, her own inability to wake up to the reality of the real world and the messy things that happen in the real world.

I had to go through that path. It was very painful and messy because I really did not have support to get off autopilot myself. It was very painful because it just kept feeling like I was crazy, like I was doing the wrong thing. Everyone around me, all the messaging that came at me, was that I was doing the wrong thing and I was harming people by coming out of autopilot, by challenging and questioning things that were held sacred—because they were harming me. And yes, I loved all those things. I loved marriage. I loved the institution of marriage. I wanted the fairy tale. But the fairy tale was harmful. And because I questioned it, I became the person who was wrong.

I swear, I get it. But that's where the choice is. The choice is really to say: Is it worth it to come out of autopilot? Is it worth it to unplug from the matrix of the way I am looking at my relationships and ask real questions? Or do I prefer to stay plugged in?

I don't think there's anything wrong with either one. I think my role as a coach and a teacher in these areas is to give people the option—to say, "Hey, you have options. You don't have to do either one. You can question it, ask questions, and then make decisions that you think are best for you. Or you can actually choose to not have questions and be like, 'You know what? I'm good. I'm actually good.'" And some people really are good, and I think they should enjoy what they have.

But if you feel any kind of questioning coming up, any kind of wondering and confusion, any kind of discomfort where what is happening in your life is not congruent with what you feel is in integrity or in alignment with the life you want to live, or what you think is healthy, then you might want to look into developing some of this discernment.

Okay, that's our episode for today. Later this week or next week, I will talk a little bit more about frames of reference and how the language of our relationships gets used to bind us into agreements that we may or may not be consciously signing off on. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for your time and attention, and I'll see you next time.