My coaching practice centres mainly around helping women solve their relationship problems. How many of us have a shared goal with our partners to be happy, only to be arguing with them about the best way to achieve this? How often do we find ourselves wanting to be right and by doing so delaying the process of achieving the goal often to end up walking away and blaming the other person? 

I’ve been inspired by a podcast I heard by my business coach this week on the concept of Horizontal Hostility that exists when one group overtly or subtly undermines another group in order to create belief in their audience that their methods are the best. This shows up in our personal and most intimate relationships too and we’re going to explore it in this blog.

I'm going to teach you how taking responsibility for the way you show up in your relationship can help you achieve your shared goals faster.

American Psychologist Adam Grant defines horizontal hostility as when groups that are similar in mission take actions that drive one another apart, and create animosity thereby lowering the overall value of the effectiveness of the mission. 

Stone and Susan B. Anthony had a shared mission for women's voting rights. In 1866 Anthony partnered with a known racist, George Francis Train, who supported women’s suffrage because he believed women could help to curtail the political influence of African Americans. 

Stone was outraged to see them campaigning with Train, and the rift grew wider when Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment proposal to grant African-American men the right to vote. For Anthony if women weren’t given the right to vote then other minority groups shouldn’t be given it either.

Passionate people decide that there’s a wrong way and a right way to achieve their aims. They argue instead of joining towards achieving a mutual goal. This isn’t exclusive to groups and movements like women’s suffrage and voting rights of African-Americans. It shows up in our personal relationships too.

Defining relationships

A relationship can be defined as our thoughts about the other person. The thoughts we have about someone determine the quality of the relationship we have with them. My relationship with my partner is created from thoughts like ‘he’s a great person, I have a lot of time for him, he’s interesting, we have fun...’ These thoughts create good feelings for me and from this good feeling place I act in ways that contribute towards the well-being of our relationship. 

Conversely, a previous relationship was typified by thoughts like ‘they’re being abusive, he’s unkind, they shouldn’t speak to me like that, he’s doing it wrong, he’s causing me harm...’ Thoughts like this made me feel terrible and caused me to blame, judge and criticise the other person, resulting in me being the victim and not taking any responsibility for my own happiness. 

The human brain likes to focus on the problem, what we don't like, what might harm us and others. Our brains are addicted to self-righteousness and get a big dopamine hit from making others wrong. 

“…the drive to be right is antithetical to relationship and emotional connection, as it elevates oneself at the expense of the other.”  Robert Solley

This is what happens. We find ourselves in a relationship that isn’t working out for whatever reason. We’re arguing a lot, we aren’t getting our way, we feel confused, and tell ourselves we’re being manipulated, controlled and exasperated. As we reinforce this story within ourselves we make ourselves right and the other person wrong. We don't set boundaries (the best way to practice self-care) and literally drive a wedge between ourselves and our partners. 

Our primitive brains get a dopamine hit, the hormone that is responsible for pleasure and reward, from the activity of policing others; it gives us a sense of authority and control. We tell others who to be, how to behave and what to do and we become self righteous in the process. 

This is kind of lazy. The brain doesn’t have to think hard about our own behaviour when we can spend our time thinking about what somebody should do or how they should be. We couch our relationship in negativity, in terms of all that is wrong with it and everything that isn’t working.

 
Why does taking responsibility for you own happiness matter?

The problem isn’t what your partner who is doing wrong is doing. Our brains don’t have to think hard about explaining clearly what we do when we can just spend all our time complaining about what someone else is doing and all the reasons they shouldn’t be doing it, and all the reasons our lives are terribly unhappy and ruined because of what the other person is doing. “If only they would…’ we cry. And all the time we complain, we abdicate responsibility for our own behaviours and delegate all of our power to the person we are so adamant is wrong. You can watch a free training where I talk about this in more depth

One of the many reasons for having a relationship with someone is for growth and mutual empowerment and yet complaining about your partner does not create either for us, or for them. It creates the total opposite. When we complain about our partner we disempower ourselves and keep ourselves stuck. When we focus on what our partner is doing wrong the partner is presented as the villain, and we are presented as the victim. 

My ex-partner was a functioning and chronic alcoholic. The narrative was always that he treated me so badly, that he was always drunk, that he was abusive, that he spent all his money on alcohol, and so the list went on. Notice how the story always began ‘that he…’ The story rarely started ‘the problem was that I stayed around, that I enabled, that I waited for him to change, that I tolerated…’ I told the story in a way that always portrayed me as the victim and him as the villian. Not nice. Not empowering and not the whole picture. 

Now I’m not saying that there isn’t abuse within relationships, there totally is. I was in an abusive relationship for a long time and I just thought it was normal. But I was so convinced that it was all his fault that I never stopped to consider my part in it and I also never stopped to consider that by telling the same story about him over and over again I was reinforcing this image of him and not creating or imagining any other possibility for him. I was condemning him to a life as an ‘abuser’.

Why we end up in the same relationship but with a different person

Once I began to do some research into the dynamics of abusive and codependent relationships I discovered groups of women (mostly) who were identifying as broken, damaged, vulnerable and weak. Heck, I only had to look back at my own maternal line to read this story. It felt icky and I wanted no part of that, but it wasn’t until I encountered coaching that I began to learn a new approach to solving this problem of feeling like I’d had something terribly bad done to me. 

I began to understand that the way for me to heal was to take responsibility for my thoughts, feelings and actions and to stop blaming the other person. I’m not going to lie, that was, and continues to be difficult and painful. Looking at ways I behaved in relationships with my coach, and through my own self-coaching work is frequently excruciating. In order to be free from patterns of the past I am required to get very honest with myself about ways in which I have shown up to relationships. This does not mean that I excuse the other person from their behaviour, it does not mean I justify or condone their actions. It means that I do not look at their behaviour and actions at all, but only my own behaviour and actions. 

By taking full responsibility for my actions, I take responsibility for my feelings and I become an emotional adult.  There was a time when I didn't have the benefits of working with a coach to help me uncover my thinking and I indulged deeply in negative thinking and emotions. I didn’t know that I could decide on my own about relationships and so I believed what other people told me (men are bad and irresponsible, relationships are doomed to failure, men aren’t up to the job) and what other people permitted me to rant about. So many women have been in relationships that have not served them or their partner and they’ve ended up delegating all the responsibility to the other person for their own pain. 

Let’s consider how we talk about relationships. Are we always calling them ‘abusive relationships’? How about we had a relationship where neither person showed up with love and integrity. I’m not saying abuse doesn't happen, it does, but if we keep labelling our past relationships abusive we have no alternative for healing, no alternative for new stories. We miss the lessons the relationship had to teach us. This is how we continue to have the same relationship over and over again, but with different people. And when we keep telling that story we don't create new possibilities for the other person, we don't honour them in any way as a fellow human being with their own shit and a human brain, doing their best in this messy fucked up complicated human world. 

I always want my clients to know that they can be successful in relationships no matter what the other person does. I encourage us to talk about relationships in this way. By always bemoaning bad relationships we aggrandise bad relationship PTSD and wear it as a badge of honour. Is this the message we want to be sending our daughters? I could trash my ex but it would be at the cost and value of all my future relationships and the effect of a generation of women and their overall experience of relationships. I want to be part of creating a generation of women who take responsibility for their outcomes, and they won't do this by blaming the partners they had for not getting the relationship they wanted.

Where do we go from here?

Try letting go of hostility, policing your partner and complaining about all the things they’re doing wrong. Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone could have reached their goal of women having the vote so much sooner had they decided to stop making one another wrong about how to reach that goal. How much faster could you reach your shared goal with your partner if you let go of making their methods wrong? Remember why you entered into a relationship with the other person in the first place and be sure that you are not the one delaying the achievement of your shared wishes, dreams and desires for a happy life together.

And if you find you’ve cleaned up your side of things and the relationship still doesn’t give you what you want then it’s time for a different conversation. But until then, as Elvis said clean up your own backyard. 

If you want this too book a free 60minute consultation with me. This is an hour that could change your life, one hour for you to begin the work of becoming the person who is responsible for all of her own happiness. I can’t wait to meet you there.