3 Toxic Relationship Architypes You Should Know

https://calendly.com/relationshipsuccesslab-info/discovery-call

 On the outside, success looks effortless—but behind closed doors, many high achievers secretly battle fears of rejection, failure, and never being “enough.” In this episode, Dr. Sarah uncovers the hidden link between ambition, trauma, and relationships—and how survival mode quietly runs the show. 

Dealing with issues:

trauma and ambition

hidden relationship struggles

why high achievers feel unfulfilled

breaking free from survival mode

trauma bonding

trauma cycles

emotional regulation

nervous system healing

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Relationship Success Lab, the place for relationship empowerment and actionable tools so you can heal from trauma bonding and create secure loving relationships. I'm Dr. Sarah Award-winning expert clinical psychologists and co consultants, helping high achievers to have happy and healthy relationships. today we are talking about the toxic blueprint of relationships. Unfortunately, many of us enter unhealthy relationship after unhealthy relationship, and it is a repeated pattern. And at first, when we end an unhealthy relationship, we think, okay, I need time to process this. I'm gonna learn some lessons. I'm going to move on. And you move on, you meet someone else and things might be really good to begin with, and you think, oh, the, this person is really different to the last person. They are not controlling. They are free spirited, they are more spiritual. We have more things aligned. They're funny, we. And you give it a few months, and then you realize that actually you are in another toxic cycle. And guess what? The faces may change, their names may change, their shoe sizes may change, but it's the same story. It's a different individual, but it's the same pattern. And you are the common denominator. So unfortunately, many people that I come across spend such a long time blaming the other person and hoping the other person would change for them. And they spend so much time finger pointing that they struggle to look at themselves. And by the way, I'm not condoning harmful behaviors. I'm not saying that. You know, other people shouldn't change or other people, if they're hurtful towards you, that that's okay. That's not all I'm saying. But what I am saying is that your power lies with you and you can only look at yourself in order to change yourself. That is the only thing that you have control over, and it's the same with everybody else. We only ever have control over ourselves. We do not have control over anyone else, so that is really where the change lies. Now I'm going to delve in talking about three common archetypes of harmful relationship patterns, what you would see in a partner, and also how it is that we start to break these patterns. Because like I said, you are the common denominator if you are the person who enters these dynamics time and time again. And by the way, this can happen not just. Across different relationships, but it can even happen within the same relationship that we are in. So for example, if you are having a harmful pattern and moment of tension where things are just exhausting, you are constantly anxious, you are nervous, you dunno what to do and that is going on, but then you realize, hey, you know what? We got over that last argument, and here we are again. We're in a different argument, but it feels the same. That is also a toxic blueprint in your relationship, and you are probably going to be tapping into one, if not more, of these three common archetypes. So what are these archetypes? There are so many different relationships out there and so many different. Types of people out there, so many different personality types. But ultimately, if we are entering harmful relationships time and time again, we are really living with three main common archetypes. The first one is the narcissist. Now with the narcissist, these are individuals that we end up being in a relationship with. Where there is a sense of grandiosity, they feel, believe. Express that they are better than other people, which then means that there is a lot of contempt towards you. And so we, as time goes on, they may see you as being lesser than them, less intelligent, less successful, less enough. And these issues come up in arguments. And when we have that hierarchy, if they believe that they're better than you, or they're expressing themselves in such a way, then. That just breaks you, your self-worth becomes shattered. It's on the floor, and you are just tolerating a lot of harm so that you could potentially get to the good you are forgiving, you are overcompensating, just so that you can potentially be acceptable to this individual. And that can be a really painful dynamic to be in. And when it comes to the narcissist, there are multiple different types of g narcissism and ways in which this can be expressed. But ultimately, their way of being in a relationship is through. Dominance. And so there will always be a hierarchy that exists because that is the only thing that they know in their blueprint that is the way that they cope with life. And so that can be really challenging. Okay. Second archetype to know about, uh, people who are emotionally unstable. So people who are emotionally unstable, they are really struggling with. Emotional identification, so they feel emotions, but actually they really struggle to identify and label emotions just at a very basic level. They just know emotions are bad, or, hmm, this feeling of discomfort is. Something I don't like. Uh, so, so they go through that process of recognizing something that's not comfortable, but actually sitting there and really identifying and feeling and leaning into the emotion is something that is not in their repertoire. It's something that they've not been skilled at, something that they don't do. So they stroll to identify emotions. But also they struggle to identify emotions in other people, and so empathy can be very, very challenging. So if you're in a relationship with somebody who is emotionally unavailable. They may see that you're upset. They may see that something is going on, so they logically understand that there's a problem, but emotionally, they're not there emotionally. They can't quite get to that point and empathize and appreciate from an emotional perspective what is going on for you. They just block it out. They push it aside, and they go immediately into either avoiding that topic completely. Silencing you so they could be stonewalling you or they just abandon the whole thing. So it becomes very, very challenging. And so you just don't know where you stand with these people. So like I said, they struggle with emotional ident uh, identifying emotions. They struggle with. Emotional empathy. And they also struggle with emotional processing. So emotions are very much seen as zero or a hundred, and there are no shades of gray. So if we don't feel anything, that's great. Good place to be in. Um, and actually I'm going to avoid you quite heavily. I'm gonna avoid anything that is sensitive, that is touchy, that is vulnerable. I'm, I'm going to avoid that entire realm and. If I can't avoid it, then it's tragedy, then it's too extreme, it's overwhelming. And so if I ever get to that stage, then I'm gonna try and avoid that as well. So these emotionally unavailable individuals are also likely to have an avoidant attachment style. They will keep you at arm's length from an emotional perspective. And it becomes very challenging for you to love somebody who is keeping you at arm's length. It's very challenging to sustain a relationship where there is such a huge gap, especially when it comes to emotional connection. And then the third archetype is the fixer upper. And the fixer upper is the individual that you see as being vulnerable, as having their own personal struggles. And somehow somewhere inside of you, you feel that you can support them. You feel that you can. Save them potentially that you can show them a better life, that you can lift them up and wouldn't that be a beautiful story in that you are able to save this person? They would see you, they would see that you've saved them, and oh my goodness, how much would they appreciate you? Then you are their savior. How much would they love you then? But actually, what's really problematic in that dynamic is that ultimately you'd be attracting somebody. Who lives in victimhood, you be attracting somebody who is really digging their heels into being the vulnerable person, the victim of any situation. And by the way, the issue really with that is that you identify as somebody who is a rescuer. You identify as somebody who always. Puts yourself second in order to prioritize other people. So you end up prioritizing your partner and you just end up being further down on the list. And maybe you see that as a good thing in that you are so supportive, and that's what supportive partner does. That's what a living partner does. But ultimately, you are sacrificing yourself and you're abandoning yourself in that process. So when we're dealing with these three different archetypes. Sometimes they can be blended. We can be in a relationship where there is more than just the one pattern showing up. Or sometimes we could be in a relationship with just one of those patterns showing up. The patterns, I'm gonna go through them is the narcissism, the emotional unavailability, and the fixer upper. So if you are experiencing one of these three patterns. You are going to enter a toxic relationship dynamic. There is no other way of existing other than it being harmful and exhausting where you are constantly pouring yourself and getting very little if nothing in return. So how do we break this up? What? What do we do? Well, as I often mention, it really does stem from the nervous system because you see every single. Experience that we would've had, that would've been in some way anxiety provoking, some way traumatic. Some way stressful, is imprinted in our nervous system, especially if it was connected with love. So just to break it down, if for example, you experienced. A very stressful argument or a very stressful phase, or a point in time when you were questioned in a relationship and you weren't sure how much you were loved, how much you were accepted, but at the same time, there was also love in the background. What happens is that your nervous system and your brain wiring literally starts to associate the two, and that stress and anxiety and tension is associated. It goes hand in hand with love. And so it assumes that anything that is stressful is also love somehow. And guess what? If there's is no stress. Then it begs the question, is this really love? And so we end up operating from this space of stress in order to find love. So even if we end a relationship and we realize, oh my goodness, that was so terrible, that dynamic. It was toxic. It was harmful, it was all the rest of it. And we enter another one. Well, we've got one of two options. We like to start dating somebody who elicits that level of stress and we consider, oh. Ooh, this. This must be love, right? Because this is what our brain and what our nervous system is geared to. Stress equals love, and so we go for it. Or alternatively, we end up dating somebody where they don't evoke stress. But then we question actually, is this really love? Could it be love? And so we end up dismissing it. We almost feel like it's boring, it's mundane, it's not for me. They're really nice. Can't say a bad word about them, but you know, just don't feel that spark, just not that interested, just. No, we're just not aligned and you can't even put your finger on it. But they just don't elicit that excitement. And unfortunately, what's actually happening there is that our nervous system and our brain and our neurology is geared to believing that that excitement is love, whereas actually that excitement is stress and it is your nervous system trying to find some kind of resolution of historical traumas. So how we really start resolving these issues is that we need to start to interrupting these patterns. And the way that we start interrupting these patterns is, first of all, we need to bring awareness and we need to bring awareness not only to the mental process of what is happening, but also to our nervous system. So how is it that I feel in my body right now? What part of my body is speaking right now? What would I be saying? If it was unfiltered, what parts of my past does this feeling represent that I've already experienced before? Where does this come from and. At what point in my life have I experienced a tragedy or a trauma or a challenge where I notice this physical sensation coming up? And is it possible for me to resolve it in that moment? And by the way, I would heavily recommend that you work with a qualified clinician, a practitioner, somebody who is experts in this field, because you don't want to be doing this on your own. Because there is a risk of retraumatizing yourself, by the way, if you are not held in a, in a special and expert container. But, but ultimately what we're trying to do is we're trying to interrupt that pattern, that association between stress and love that lives inside of your nervous system and inside of your neurology. And when we're able to interrupt that, we can then start healing it by activating the parasympathetic nerve system by really starting to create. Uh, new neural pathways for the soothing system. And that's really when we start to replace these old patterns where we associate love and stress with a new association. The new association being love and peace, love and calm. And it's really gearing our body and our nervous system to really recognize that those are the things that should be in existence. And if any of this. Resonates with you, please get in touch. My link is in the show notes below, and if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend because I bet you that one of them will find it useful too. Until next time, take a.