When Depression is in your bed

When Past Behavior Doesn't Define Your Future: A Conscious Partnership Story

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Season 1 • Episode 28

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What we believe about our relationships can become self-fulfilling prophecies. The notion that "past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior" might seem logical, but it ignores our capacity for growth and conscious choice.

Through a candid glimpse into my own marriage, I share how a flooded basement became an unexpected opportunity to break old patterns. When my husband discovered our underwater basement, I felt the familiar pull toward our dance of dysregulation—him upset, me trying to calm him down, both of us spiraling into disconnection. But this time, something different happened. One conscious breath created space for a new possibility.

The magic wasn't in pretending the flood wasn't stressful or in perfectly managing our emotions. It was in understanding how our nervous systems interact and choosing not to amplify each other's dysregulation. By allowing my husband his natural reaction without attempting to "fix" him, he regulated himself. We faced the challenge together rather than turning against each other.

This experience reveals the mechanics of relationship patterns: they repeat not because they're inevitable, but because they're calling for our attention. Every conflict contains within it the blueprint for growth—pointing to unmet needs and inviting deeper understanding. With consciousness and self-regulation, we can transform these patterns into pathways toward connection.

Whether you're struggling with recurring conflicts or simply want to enhance your relationship, remember that new possibilities emerge when we pause, breathe, and choose differently than we have before. Subscribe to join me on this journey of conscious partnership, where even flooding basements become opportunities for connection.

- If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat!

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the One Depression is in your Bed podcast. This episode is part of my Conscious, connected Partners in Real Life series, in which I will share real current moments from my actual life as examples of what conscious partnership can look like. Today, I will talk about how past experiences may actually not be the best predictor of future experiences. If you'd like to hear more, stay tuned. I'm Trish Sanders and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. So you may have heard that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and I'm here to tell you. While that can be true in certain instances, it is absolutely not a guarantee, especially if you do the work to be in a conscious, regulated partnership. This means that if you gain knowledge about yourself, be in a conscious, regulated partnership. This means that if you gain knowledge about yourself, your partner, how to regulate yourself, how to effectively communicate, or if you increase your awareness in any number of ways about any number of different things, this doesn't have to be set in stone, and growth or new behavior is totally possible. As I said, it is possible for past behavior to be a predictor for future behavior, and I'm not going to talk about all the reasons why that may be. In some ways, it's quite understandable, because old patterns tend to repeat themselves. What I am going to talk about today is how these seemingly repetitive, inevitable types of patterns that can occur in romantic partnership may really be the outcome of both partners unconsciously and unintentionally working against each other. And I'll share an example of how. I almost got caught up in this dance of dysregulation just last week, but I was able to take a breath and allow something new to happen.

Speaker 1:

So in an intimate partnership, it's really easy for one person to expect their partner to act in a certain way. So some sort of conflict happens and one person thinks oh, I know how my partner is going to react. Or their partner reacts in a certain way and they tell themselves oh, I know what this means. It's the same as always, and that creates dysregulation in them. So their partner may in fact be dysregulated, which means that they're going into a protective place. But if you react to your partner and you think to yourself well, I know where this is going, that may be dysregulating to you. And when you become dysregulated, you then encourage your partner to become even more dysregulated. Then they can impact your nervous system and you become more dysregulated, then things just can get really out of control really quickly and both partners can be super dysregulated and the whole situation can escalate very quickly even from seemingly small triggers, and it's very easy to tell yourself. These are the kinds of things that always happen. These are the same fights that we get into my partner always does this, or your partner might say that you always do that, and it feels like there's nowhere to go from there. But understanding this unconscious process and being able to make it conscious and seeing how each partner's nervous system can affect the other and maintaining your own regulation can create a whole new pattern of behaviors.

Speaker 1:

And luckily I had that experience last week and I'm here to share it with you. So last week we woke up on Monday morning to find that our hot water heater had broken and our entire basement was underwater by a few inches. My husband had gone downstairs first and he called me when he noticed what was going on and I ran downstairs and he understandably was not happy. No one's really happy when they find out that their entire basement is flooded. But in that moment his understandable dysregulation landed in my nervous system as an old experience, because I've seen Ben get dysregulated before, and sometimes it's in a situation that I thought he was, quote unquote, overreacting, or sometimes his reaction whether it was an overreaction or not, from my perspective sometimes it landed as scary in my nervous system or any other number of dynamics where my nervous system received his behavior as a cue of danger that I needed to protect myself. And so in that moment, very briefly, I felt myself kind of tense up and pull back and I wanted to protect myself by telling him to relax or calm down or we'll figure it out, or what can you do? It's already happened, whatever any number of things that I could have said in that moment because I wanted him to regulate. However, if I would have told him to relax or don't make such a big deal of the basement being flooded, that would not have landed very well in his nervous system.

Speaker 1:

Telling someone who's feeling nervous or anxious or upset or frustrated to relax is generally an unhelpful way to respond, and certainly when your basement's flooded, that would have been a very unhelpful response. But instead I was able to pause and take a breath that wonderful tool of our breath and I was able to stay regulated instead of launching off into my own dysregulation and, for whatever reason, I obviously was not happy about the basement, but I wasn't immediately triggered from the basement itself. I really was in a state of like, ok, this just kind of sucks and we'll just have to figure it out. I certainly had moments of dysregulation over the next several days as we were ripping out the basement and cleaning everything out and all that but more about that on another episode perhaps. But in that moment I really was able to use that breath to ground myself and when I was grounded I was able to see much more clearly and I was able to easily see.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, of course Ben's frustrated. Right now he's having a moment that he's well entitled to have and I don't really need to make that worse. Right, I can allow him that space and he had his little moment and he wasn't doing anything outlandish or having this giant reaction. It was just a totally understandable, valid reaction to finding out that your basement was underwater. Right. Once he had that moment that he needed, he actually was able to self-regulate pretty quickly.

Speaker 1:

I didn't have to jump into that role that I know pretty well that I don't always like being in, although I've been in it often, certainly in our earlier relationship, but I didn't have to help him. I didn't have to save him or fix him or regulate him or make him feel better or take care of things or be the responsible one or anything. I just had to take a moment so that he could take care of himself and I could take care of myself, and then we were able to work together in partnership to figure out what needed to be done, and he was able to call the plumber and get the ball rolling, and then everything else that happened. Afterwards, the company came to rip everything out and we had to deal with all that situation, but we were able to deal with it together, which made a huge difference. So, yes, it was absolutely a difficult situation.

Speaker 1:

However, we didn't make it worse by creating a rupture and a divide between us, and that is something that, in the past, we absolutely would have done. We, in some ways, are experts in making hard situations even worse, and at a certain point, we both were like, hey, you know, we don't really want to do that anymore. Let's try to work together instead of against each other, and that was a huge shift, as we have done the work to become conscious partners. So for me. It was really quite exciting to see in real time how this new pattern was emerging, that I was able to regulate myself. Ben was able to regulate himself. We both were able to have our own reactions, which were, in this case, different and they often are different but we were able to get through it in such a way where we were able to stay connected and that felt really, really good, and I was really proud of both of us for being able to do that Because, again, historically we have not been good at it and that's because we didn't understand what was happening. Our nervous systems were just doing what nervous systems do and reacting to one another, and then we make stories about each other.

Speaker 1:

He probably would have thought that I was minimizing how he felt and didn't let him have feelings, and he probably would have experienced me as unsupportive, which would have made sense. But it's not actually true that I don't want him to have space to have his feelings or that I'm unsupportive, and I probably would have thought that he just has these giant reactions and I likely would have told myself an old story that he can't handle anything in life and that he just loses it whenever there's any little bit of stress that's happening and that would have been really quite an inaccurate story, because it's perfectly reasonable to have a reaction to your house flooding and it's not accurate that he can't handle anything. But if we had told ourselves those stories, we each would have believed them very wholeheartedly and we would have continued being dysregulated and, acting out of that frustration and anger towards each other, thinking that we didn't feel supported and we weren't working together and that things never changed. All of those old patterns would have very easily taken hold and again we would have felt really justified in continuing to be frustrated with each other and to continue not working together, and we both would have felt really alone during that process. However, since we have in fact done that dance so many times before and I am very familiar with those old steps, I was able to catch it in this particular instance before it even started and we were able to engage in a brand new dance, a brand new behavior that I wouldn't say is the first time it's ever happened, but for me and maybe it's because I'm very consciously looking for moments to actually talk about on the podcast that could be that it's helping me to notice the positive things that are happening, but also, I think maybe over the last two or three years there have been so many situations. It's a regular occurrence that something happens and I'm like, wow, that's new. You know that's not what used to happen, or I know how this would have gone in the past and this was way better. And so I definitely have developed some ability to notice when new growth is happening.

Speaker 1:

And growth, as I see it, is when we choose our behavior, because we understand our underlying needs and we have some information about our partner's underlying needs and we choose to move forward in such a way or to act or to do something in a way that hopefully gets us closer to what we really want Our needs being met, our partner's needs being met, the relationship feeling better. And that's really what growth is a new behavior that is more likely to get us what we want than a dysregulated or reactive behavior, which is more likely to create disconnect and rupture. And so we were able to really do that together and we both had a part. And maybe on the next Conscious Connected Partners in Real Life series episode, I will talk about the next part of what was really hard for me about the flood experience, because, like I said, that initial moment I didn't experience as super dysregulating, but the dysregulation and the challenge definitely came over the next few days and perhaps I'll talk about that more, but for today I'll leave you with that question, wondering are past behaviors absolutely the best predictors of future behaviors? Because, while the answer is sometimes and unconscious, patterns do have a tendency to be repetitive and they repeat and repeat, and repeat, but it's not because they can't change.

Speaker 1:

The reason the conflict continues to happen is because it's calling for someone to be able to recognize it and pay attention to it and come to it in a new way and to really understand it. There's an unmet need underneath there and there's also what we call a lost part, but there's opportunities for growth. It's actually the blueprint for relational growth in the conflicts that couples have. And when you can come to it in that conscious way and regulate yourself, as Ben and I were both able to do in the flood, then you can maintain connection and you can really understand what you need and move forward together. And I am grateful that Ben and I have continued to figure out ways to move forward together and it's really exciting for me to be able to share our learnings, our missteps and our moments of celebration with you. So I look forward to talking with you next week when I share more about the experience of being in a conscious, connected partnership.

Speaker 1:

As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments, because I want to thank you for showing up today and I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be. The path may seem long or unclear or unknown, and I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride, and that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one, any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action, or towards rest, or connection, or self-care, or whatever step makes sense to you. I invite you to take a step today, because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed.

Speaker 1:

If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trishsanderslcsw. View and reach out to me on social media at trishsanderslcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.