Rose Wong

By examining our actions and attitude, we can start to break the cycle, says psychology researcher Raquel Peel.

Before she met the love of her life, psychology researcher Raquel Peel says that she was a “romantic self-saboteur.” Her early experiences had affected her attitude and behavior towards love.

In her TEDxJCUCairns talk, she recalls, “I assumed that people in my relationships would eventually leave me; I also assumed that all my relationships would fail.” Driven by these feelings of impending doom, Peel — a graduate student at James Cook University in Australia — would invariably “pull the plug” on romances whenever things got the least bit difficult.

Sound familiar?

She knew many other people who acted in deliberately self-destructive ways in relationships, so she decided to learn more about this behavior. She did it in two ways: by interviewing Australian psychologists who specialize in relationship counseling “to understand what self-sabotage looks like in practice” and by surveying more than 600 self-confessed saboteurs worldwide to find out what they did and why they did it.

“My participants varied in age, cultural background, and sexual orientation,” Peel says, “Yet they answered in very similar ways.” They exhibited one or more of what US psychologist and researcher John Gottman (watch his TEDx talk) calls “the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” or what he has identified as the primary behaviors that can lead to the end of a relationship: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. And while the particular form that these take are as unique as the people surveyed, the people surveyed, according to Peel, “sabotage relationships for one main reason: to protect themselves.”

Of course, while self-protection is the reason given by most of her participants, the actual causes of sabotaging behaviors are complex, varied and deep-rooted. Still, Peel has this advice to share with any self-identified romantic saboteurs out there:

Stop entering relationships that you know are doomed.

One form of romantic self-sabotage is choosing partners that are just plain wrong for you. “We should not be pursuing every relationship that comes our way,” says Peel. “Pursue those relationships that have the potential to work.”

Get curious about how you act when you’re in a relationship.

Peel suggests: “Take a really good look at yourself and your behaviors in relationships and ask yourself, Are you someone who needs a lot of reassurance from your partner? Are you someone who gets nervous when things get too close?”

Think about those four horsemen — criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. How often do you exhibit any of them? Which are your go-tos? And what are the beliefs you hold about yourself or your partner when you act in these ways? Try to observe your actions — or think back to what you’ve done in the past — and strive to understand the reasons behind them.

View your relationship as a partnership.

“We need to figure out how to collaborate with our partners, and how, even, to be vulnerable together,” says Peel. “Are you and your partner on the same team? Do you talk to your partner about your relationship goals?”

Obviously, this isn’t appropriate in the early days when you’re getting to know each other. But when you’re in a committed relationship, writer Mandy Len Catron (watch her TED talk about the reality of love) says — borrowing from linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff — it helps to view it as a “work of art” that you two are co-creating together, in real time. Adopting this attitude can make you more excited about the future you’re both building, rather than seeing love, and therefore your relationship, as something that is happening to you beyond your control or input and likely to end in heartbreak.

Many romantic saboteurs mention the dispiriting sensation they have when they’re in a relationship knowing it’s just a matter of time before it will end. As Peel puts it, “it’s like staring into a crystal ball knowing exactly what’s going to happen.” However, the work-of-art mindset can help counter that pessimistic self-narrative. Instead, “you get to stop thinking about yourself and what you’re gaining or losing in your relationship, and you get to start thinking about what you have to offer,” says Catron.

Be kind to yourself.

Your reasons for developing self-sabotaging behaviors most likely spring from an understandable and human place. “It’s natural to want to protect yourself,” says Peel, “but the way out of it is to have insight into who you are in a relationship … and how best to collaborate with them. After all, if you know who you are in a relationship, your partner will also have a chance to get to know you, and together you can break the pattern to sabotage.” She adds, “Love will never be easy, but without self-sabotage, it is a lot more reachable.”

Watch her TEDxJCUCairns talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniella Balarezo is a Media Fellow at TEDx. She is also a writer and comedian based in NYC.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Rose Wong

Today, it’s not enough to have one birds-and-the-bees talk; it needs to be an open, ongoing conversation. Author and activist Christa Desir explains why and how.

The first few times I talked to high school students about sexual assault, when we got to the Q & A section, I was inundated with what I call the “Does that count?” question.

“What if we’re both drinking, does that count?”

“What if she said yes but then in the middle she changes her mind, does that count?”

“What if neither of us remember the next day?”

This happened with different high school groups, and eventually, I realized that something was wrong with my presentation. I said, “You know what? Let’s reframe this. Let’s put the legality of this aside, and let’s look at this from the perspective of our own values. Do you want to have sex with someone who doesn’t remember it the next day? Do you want to not remember it the next day? Do you want to be someone’s regret? Or, would you rather be someone’s enthusiastic ‘yes’?”

With these questions, the conversation changed. It got much more open, honest, authentic and vulnerable. It turned out their questions weren’t what was wrong; I was. I was too busy pointing out all the scary and dangerous places where sex can go that I forgot to talk about the wonderful, amazing, awkward and beautiful places. And I’m not the only one.

By only talking to our kids about the dangers of sexual violence, we’re leaving girls feeling afraid and boys feeling indicted. We need to give them the chance to explore their sexual curiosity, and we need to guide them through this very complicated, modern sexual world with transparency, honesty, non-judgment and vulnerability.

Unfortunately, we put sex in the same category of risky behaviors as vaping, texting while driving, and sniffing glue, instead of as something that many of us will do throughout the course of our lifespan. Furthermore, we’re failing to give our young people a language around consent. We are not helping them develop a voice to unapologetically own their “No”s and enthusiastically declare their “Yes”s.

How do we do this? Here’s a 4-step guide to help start these important conversations:

Step 1: Teach consent

Create an understanding in children around consent. This understanding needs to start young. They should learn about good touch and bad touch and the difference between them, that their bodies are their own to make decisions about, and that we are listening to them.

This might mean when you bring your child to a big family party, you don’t insist they hug and kiss every single person in the room. In schools, if it’s not a safety issue, perhaps we don’t require that they hold hands with the person next to them in a circle. What kind of message are we sending kids if we tell them, “Your bodies are your own to make decisions about, but you have to hold the next person’s hand because that’s the nice thing to do”? This is a mixed message, and it’s not good for kids. We also need to give kids the opportunity to say “Yes.” In my house, that means I’ll say to my son, “Hey, buddy, you look kind of sad. Could you use a hug?” and he’ll tell me if he does.

Step 2: Advocate for sex education in schools

We adults need to be advocates for comprehensive sexual education in our local schools. That includes positive representations of LGBTQI youth, information about birth control, instructions on how to use birth control, and information about STI’s. If you can’t make sex ed part of the school curriculum, then make sure it’s taught elsewhere in your communities or in your places of worship. And, of course, we must always keep having these conversations in our own homes.

Step 3: Make it an ongoing conversation

We need to accept that there is not just one sex talk we have with our kids. This should be an ongoing conversation, and you should continue it every opportunity that you have. So if you’re driving to school, listening to the radio, and your 11-year-old hears the morning DJ bring up porn — as morning DJs are wont to do — and your kid asks, “Hey mom, what’s porn?”, you might turn off the radio and then distract him by finding out what he wants for dessert. Or, you could answer the question. You don’t have to give him a full treatise on sex workers’ rights, but you could answer this one question and allow him to ask another one. That’s honesty.

The nice thing about sex being an ongoing conversation is if you muddle it the first time, you’ll always get the chance to do it again. In these discussions, we just need to be as open and non-judgmental as possible and admit that we’re not the captains of the ship who know everything. In fact, we are learning as much as our kids are.

Doing this makes you a person who is safe to talk to, and that’s who you want to be with your children. If they tell you, “Oh, hey, mom, I have this crush,” you could say, “Oh really. What are they like? What do you like about them?” instead of assuming that the person is a he or she.  Similarly, if they tell you that their best friend is a “non-binary aro/ace,” you could say, “Oh really! What’s that?” If you know what that is, you could say “What do you think that means? What does that mean to you?” That’s how you open the conversation and how it keeps going.

Step 4: Embrace the discomfort

Acknowledge that it can be uncomfortable at times to talk about sex. A few months ago, I had my 14-year-old son in the car with me. It was just the two of us, and this never happens. So I thought I would take opportunity to talk, and I turned to him. I said, “Hey, buddy, I just want you to know that if you have a wet dream, it’s totally normal. It’s very common. This happens to adolescent boys all the time. Just let me know because I can make sure we get the laundry done right away so it’s not a big sticky mess for two weeks.” He said, “Yeah, Mom, I know how to do my own laundry, but can you just pull over here on the side of the road? I’ll walk the rest of the way to school.”

As you can see, sometimes it goes wrong, but that’s all right as long as we keep showing up. With these conversations, we’re building the scaffolding — however rickety it might be — beneath our children so they can lead healthy sexual lives that are rooted in open communication and enthusiasm.

This piece was adapted from Christa Desir’s TEDxOakParkWomen talk. Watch it now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christa Desir writes contemporary fiction for young adults. She has volunteered as a rape victim activist for more than 10 years, including providing direct service as an advocate in hospital ERs. She is a founding member of the Voices and Faces Project, a nonprofit organization for rape survivors that conducts an international survivor-based writing workshop.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.