The Unknown Factor Ruining Your Love Life

We’re getting a little bit more serious today and talking about family dynamics growing up that can impact your ideas about love.

I’ll go into my story a little bit, and then we’ll make sure you have the tools and strategies that you need to make great decisions.

So my parents were never married. They were always on-again, off-again throughout my childhood, until probably about fifth grade when they called it off for good. My father struggled with substance abuse, and really that was super hard. Anyone who has growing up in a home with alcoholism knows just how damaging it can be.

I remember really loud fights. I remember as a kid, I would pretend that the lamp on my bedside table was a radio, and that the knob on it was a volume dial, and I would get a pillow for the other side of my head, and I would pretend to turn the volume down, and so the light would flick on and off, and as I would “turn it down”, I would press harder on the pillow to my ear so I couldn’t hear it.

And so it just wasn't a great situation.

I remember a door getting kicked down. I remember holidays being super chaotic. I remember I used to get stomach aches a lot. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but now I know it was anxiety. I used to get anxiety before going to a fair, or an amusement park, because my dad would take us on his own, and I’d be worried about my brothers getting lost in a crowd and I felt responsible. It was a lot.

I remember I loved Disneyland because it was the only place that didn’t serve alcohol, and so I didn’t really have to worry there, because I didn’t have to be the parent. I could just not worry about the chaos for one day.

I remember such fun outings. I remember roller coasters, and bike rides, and camping, and all of these things. He was such a big personality. I remember everyone just wanting to be around him. He taught me how to be fearless, and jump off the highest rock, and put my hands up on the upside down part of the ride, and just dance my way through life. The thing about life with an alcoholic, whether they’re a parent, or a friend, or a family member, or a romantic partner, is that the highs are incredibly high. When you’re around them and experiencing life with them, everything is just so fun. It’s like you’re the addict, but the lows are incredibly dark.

Growing up I saw love as being really unpredictable. I saw loud arguments with sweet makeups, flowers and nice dinners after a big blowup. I saw it as being chaotic, never knowing what the day was going to bring. I saw it as being conditional and flexible, maybe when sometimes it shouldn’t have been.

I come from a family who for generations has struggled with alcoholism. It’s pretty common for people who have parents who have struggled with alcoholism, to have grandparents who have struggled with alcoholism, and so on. I was super lucky to have a grandmother who was very open about alcoholism with me from a young age. She told me about the family history, and the meetings, and the fact that I was much more likely to become an alcoholic because of my family history with it.

I remember before even knowing all of the information when I was probably about six years old, I was laying in bed and I remember hearing a loud argument, and I remember promising myself, and my teddy bear so you know it’s real, that I would never drink. Personally, I’ve tried alcohol, like different people’s drinks to try the taste, I don’t even like it, but I’ve never taken a shot or had the experience of being drunk.

So here's the thing about any type of trauma or family dynamics: It's going to impact you.

It is going to impact how you choose a partner, and how you feel with someone. So if you come from a family dynamic that you don’t love, you need to be so, so, so aware when you are choosing a partner, because these patterns will just keep showing up if you’re not actively choosing someone to be with who will not bring that chaos back into your life.

We have to actively choose to learn from the mistakes of others, rather than learning their behaviors and adopting them.

When I started dating my fiance in college, I was already very aware that I was not going to be with someone who’s a big drinker. I never really dated anybody who drank a lot. Less so because I knew that I wanted to marry someone who didn’t drink a lot, and more so because when you’re always sober and have had to grow up in this environment where you’re always having to take care of other people, taking care of someone who is a grown man, is just not in the cards. Seeing someone who is drunk out of their mind just isn’t cute when you’ve seen long-term how this behavior can be so destructive.

Ben was never a drinker. He definitely got that out of his system before he met me. But there was one night when we were dating, and he went out with his friends, and had a great time, and he called me to pick him up and he was pretty drunk. Nothing super obnoxious, but probably past the point that he should have been, which was just normal to everybody in college. So in the college world, it was probably pretty normal, but in my world it wasn’t really what I was looking for.

The next day when I was driving him home, he asked me to pull over because he thought he was going to be sick, and I told him on the spot if he ever got that drunk again, we would not continue. And this was pretty early in dating. And he never has again! It’s never been a problem.

Sure, he’ll have a drink, or two, or three, when he’s with his friends, and that’s fine! But it’s always under control. That solidified for me that this was someone that I wanted to be with.

I knew that by being with this man I could break a pattern that, unfortunately, continually showed up in my family.

If you come from a stable home environment, look for those areas that you can try and emulate. You have the luxury of being able to ask your parents for their advice, and how they’ve made their relationship work the way that they do. And if you don’t, then you need to be very aware of the choices that you are making in relationships.

We are automatically drawn to what we know. When we subconsciously learn from our parents what love is, we repeat that again, and again, and we are drawn to those things that are familiar. So if you don’t like those things, you need to actively make choices against them.

I know this might sound a little counterintuitive coming from a dating, life, love, whatever coach that you want to call me, but you cannot make decisions based on love alone. The feeling of “love” can be your attachment style being activated, it can be all these things we’ve talked about before, but you cannot rely on that feeling alone to make decisions for the rest of your life. I’m sorry, but relying on that feeling alone is maybe one of the worst things that you can do, because if I had relied on my “feeling of love”, and that was it, then I would probably be with someone who was an alcoholic, or an addict, or who struggled with some form of addiction, and there would just always be chaos in our home.

So what can you do? Look, there is hope, I promise- it’s been proved again, and again, and I can tell you from personal experience that there is a way to shift everything that you’ve ever known.

First, identify the type of relationship and family dynamic that you actually want. Then I want you to identify the type of relationship and family dynamic that you do not want. Then I want you to be so strict and intentional on the type of people that you are dating. If your father was never around because he was always on business, and that really does not feel good to you,

and you’re dating someone who never prioritizes you, and always just blames it on work, and who you never see, is always away on business, doesn’t call you, says all these things, then that’s probably not the type of relationship that you should be in.

Don't make excuses to yourself about how this person will change later on. You are wasting your time and your breath.

If you have vocalized your concerns and have not seen a change, then you are actively choosing to stay in a situation that is no longer serving you. My wish for all of you is that if you choose to be in a relationship, you choose to be in one that is healthy and that inspires you to grow every single day. I want to be inspired by the family dynamics you had growing up if that was positive, or I want it to shatter all of the patterns and create new ones if your experience was less than ideal.

Feel free to message me if you have any questions, or if you want to talk through anything a little bit more, and I hope that all of you go out today and make decisions that are so positive in your life.

XOXO,