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Hello, guys!
Summer is almost over, how was your summer?
Let's meet up on Saturday and talk about how 1)[The skills of self-confidence]
2) Why 30 is not new 20 and 3)[The difference between unhealthy love and healthy love] Please follow the link and watch the video first!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HYZv6HzAs&t=2s
As the Athletic Director and head coach of the Varsity Soccer team at Ryerson University, Dr. Joseph is often
asked what skills he is searching for as a recruiter: is it speed? Strength? Agility? In Dr. Joseph's TEDx Talk, he
explores self confidence and how it is not just the most important skill in athletics, but in our lives.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together
to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep
discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x =
independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but
individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Answering Some Common Questions About Self Confidence
Self-confidence is a sticky subject for a lot of guys.
For one thing, it’s a broad topic that encompasses everything from how we think and feel to how we look and interact
with other human beings.
For another, it’s not a topic we really like to talk about all that often. If you don’t have much confidence, you probably
don’t want anyone to know that; and if you do, you might feel like talking about it will make you seem conceited, or
even crass.
As a result, many men are left with all sorts of questions about their own self-confidence (or lack thereof) and no one
who they feel like they can talk to about it.
So it’s no wonder that I see a lot of the same questions about self-confidence popping up in forums like reddit’s
r/Confidence, not to mention in my inbox and my Twitter feed
To help guys who are struggling with a lot of the same issues I had (and continue to have), I’ve collected answers to
some of the most popular questions about self-confidence below.
And if you’re looking for an even more comprehensive roadmap for confidence, check out my Amazon #1 best-selling
book Ready to Roar: How Shy, Quiet, Self-Doubting Guys Become Strong, Charming Self-Confident Men
Both implicitly and explicitly, the media tells us we should strive for a ripped physique, dapper style and smooth social
oves.But it doesn’t tell you what to do if you’re too scared to set foot in the gym
This is often one of the first hurdles the contemplative man identifies in his quest for confidence: the person we want to
be seems so far away from the person we are now that trying to become him feels futile – and, if we’re being honest,
terrifying.
The best strategy I’ve found for overcoming this sense of overwhelm comes from the
book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Branden developed a therapy method known as sentence completion that’s designed to help you think more deeply
about your aspirations and identify steps you can take to achieve them.
Here’s how it works:
The genius of the exercise is that it not only gets you thinking about small, easy-to-achieve steps you can take to
achieve your goals – it reveals that you already know what those steps are.
Achieving your goal, then, becomes a simple matter of executing the steps you’ve laid out for yourself.
Let’s use improving your style as an example. If you have
a closet full of raggedy old t-shirts, you’re probably not going to rush out and replace them with crisp-fitting suits
overnight.
After all, buying your first suit
Instead, try writing down the sentence stem, “If I brought just 5% more awareness to improving my appearance today…” then jot down your answers as quickly as possible.
They might look something like:
“…I would replace my ratty old sneakers with some crisp white kicks”
“…I would ditch the hoodie in favor of a well fitting Rugby sweater”
“…I would have my shirts tailored”
“…I would get a more stylish haircut”
“…I would replace my t-shirts with polos”
Before you know it, you’ll quickly amass a list of small, easy-to-execute tweaks, all of which would give your look an
By making a series of small, incremental changes, you’ll not only start to look better, you’ll start to feel more
comfortable – and more confident – with the idea of looking good.
Before long, you’ll adjust to your new, five-percent-better look and ask yourself how you can increase your look by
another five percent, and then another, and so on and so forth.
So if you’re having trouble getting started on a self-improvement endeavor of any kind, try asking yourself what you
would do if you brought just 5% more awareness to the problem.
In almost all cases, the right starting point will reveal itself.
First and foremost, understand that if you constantly catch yourself comparing yourself to others, you’re not alone.
“Some psychologists, most notably Leon Festinger, believe that our desire to compare ourselves to others is a drive—
one almost as powerful as thirst or hunger,” writes Rutgers University sociologist Deborah Carr
So rest assured that comparing yourself to others is a perfectly normal and natural part of the human experience.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly pleasant one. When we compare ourselves to others we tend to focus
primarily, if not entirely, on what we perceive to be others’ strengths while ignoring their weaknesses – making
ourselves feel inferior in the process.
Plus, as Carr points out, constantly comparing ourselves to others can turn friends into rivals.
“If we use others as a benchmark to evaluate ourselves, that creeping twinge of jealousy may undermine our ability
to truly cherish the good things that come to others,” she writes.
So, how do we circumvent this most human of tendencies?
Since it’s pretty much impossible to resist our urge to make comparisons, Carr recommends comparing yourself not
to others, but to yourself – more specifically, to past and future versions of yourself.
“This process, called temporal comparison, is less well-known than Festinger’s social comparison theory, but there are
good reasons why we should rely on temporal rather than social comparisons when taking stock of our lives,” she says.
More specifically, Carr says temporal comparison allows you to structure your goals in a manner that’s both realistic
and practical:
“Having a clear idea of what we need to do, what we have been doing, and what’s got to change can help us to take
realistic steps to reach our goals.”
In addition, temporal comparison allows you to better identify and understand any issues in your life that may be
keeping you from reaching your goals.
For instance, maybe your goal is to build muscle. You start a workout plan
By comparing your diligence this week to the past two weeks, you can identify where and why you went off track,
allowing you to course correct and get back at it for week four.
This is a much healthier and more productive way to approach the problem then if you had simply sat at home during
week three and lamented the fact that “everybody else” works so much harder than you.
As Carr puts it: “By focusing on self-improvement rather than one-upmanship, we’ll have a more realistic and insightfu
l strategy for reaching our goals, and ideally, our friends and loved ones will be there to support us along the way
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What’s the fastest way for me to build self-confidence?
Before I can answer this question, I have to point out the problem with its premise: building real, authentic and lasting
self-confidence takes time (unfortunately).
Whether you’re trying to feel more confident about your body, your people skills, your style or any other aspect of your
life, the only real way to effect change is by taking small, incremental steps toward improvement, day in and day out.
As Navy SEAL, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, author, podcaster and all around bad-ass Jocko Willink puts it:
Getting better isn’t a hack or a trick or a one change that you need to make. Getting better is a campaign. It’s a
campaign. It’s a daily, a weekly, it’s an hourly fight. An incessant fight that doesn’t stop against weakness and against
temptation and laziness.
It’s a campaign of discipline. It’s a campaign of hard work, of dedication.
It’s waking up early and going to bed late and grinding it out every second in between. Every, single, day.
So, you want to get better, you want to self improve? Stop looking for a short cut and go find your alarm clock and find
your discipline.
But with all of that said, it’s also true that some actions yield more immediate results than others. While consistency
is the key to confidence, there are a few quick wins you can rack up to help yourself feel better in the moment.
They include:
Yes, it sounds like something your sister does at yoga class. But don’t let the name fool you – it also works.
Research by Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy
Carve out two minutes each day to strike a powerful pose and you’ll immediately feel the difference.
There’s no denying that when you look good, you feel good. Read this post
Starting a workout plan is an obvious way to both look and feel better, but it might be awhile before you see results –
especially if you don’t update your diet accordingly.
Use the tips in this post
I learned the hard way – by wasting a lot of time –
that before I could improve my mind, body people skills and style, I first had to understand what I was doing wrong.
For me that education came from myriad books covering everything from the psychology of self-esteem to what to
say at parties.
Make a list of the areas you’d most like to improve or the skills you’d most like to develop, then seek out books on
those topics. I found that even before I had put the advice I learned from books into action, I felt more confident just
by virtue of knowing that I was (finally) on the right track.
To help you get started, I’ve put together a list of the best (non-bullshit) self-help books for guys
In my experience, the best way to get over your fear of
failure is to reframe and depersonalize what failure really means.
Too often we make the mistake of assuming that if we fail to achieve a certain result, it will betray a personal flaw on
our parts. We avoid trying new things because we fear that, if we fail, we’ll have to admit that we are failures.
But the truth is that failure is inevitable. Literally everybody fails. Going through life trying to avoid failure is kind of like
going through life trying to avoid hearing a Justin Bieber song: it’s futile, so you may as well embrace it.
Once you accept the inevitability of failure, you’ll quickly start to think of it not as a reflection of your personal worth,
but as a normal, necessary and even valuable part of life.
Some of the most successful people view failure in this way. There are essentially two types of people: those who
spend their lives trying to avoid failure at all costs, and those who embrace it – and in so doing, learn from it and grow.
It’s only the latter group who achieve great things, as illustrated by one of Michael Jordan’s most famous quotes:
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to
take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
By acknowledging – and better still, embracing – the fact that everybody fails, you’ll learn how to harness failure’s\
lessons and join an elite class of high-achievers.
Mind Tools | Overcoming Fear of Failure
Psychology Today | 10 Signs You Might Have Fear of Failure and 2 Ways to Succeed
Forbes | How to Conquer the Fear of Failure
OK, so you’ve accepted that failure is a normal part of life – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting.
Even when you acknowledge that failure is commonplace, you’ll need a strategy for overcoming the feeling on
inadequacy that all too often accompanies it.
While you can find no shortage of listicles and multi-part strategies for bouncing back from a setback, my favorite
is the simple, two-step process outlined by Jim Rohn.
Rohn acknowledges that everybody fails at one point or another and suggests two simple steps for rebounding from
these missteps:
It’s tempting (and oh-so-easy) to blame others for our failures. But it’s only by taking responsibility for them that we
give ourselves a chance to learn and improve, Rohn argues.
“Be prepared for the letdowns that happen every so often,” he writes. “Know that this lost opportunity just set you up
to take advantage of the next one. Realize that you can make the necessary alterations next time.”
Think back to when you were in school and you got a bad grade on a math test. Sure, you may have felt bad about it,
but you probably didn’t blame your teacher for being inept, or the curriculum for being inappropriate for a 10-year-old,
or the text book for being poorly written.
Chances are you simply accepted what happened, learned from it, and did better next time.
(For the purposes of this argument, I’m assuming that you did, eventually, pass fourth grade math.)
You can apply the same attitude to literally any setback, and grow as a result.
“Don’t get down on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s the next opportunity that matters, not the previous one,”
writes Rohn.
“The previous one matters only in that you must learn from your mistakes. But the next one gives you the opportunity
to show that you have learned from your mistakes.” (emphasis mine)
By taking responsibility for your failures and mistakes, you become what Stephen Covey, author of
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
And in responding, you give yourself an opportunity to improve and grow.
Success | How to Bounce Back From Failure (by Jim Rohn)
Huffington Post | How To Bounce Back From Failure — Over And Over Again
Psych Central | 6 Steps Toward Resilience & Greater Happiness
Psychology Today | 4 Proven Ways to Bounce Back From Failure
Annoyingly, confidence isn’t one-size-fits-all. Oftentimes
we feel great about our abilities or performance in one aspect of life, and downright embarrassed about others.
You might think you’re a math genius, but break out in a flop sweat when talking to girls. Or you could know you’re
a good speaker, but you hate how scrawny your arms are. Or maybe you’re comfortable with your athleticism, but
can’t wear a suit to save your life.
While you can’t exactly transfer your confidence from one facet of life to another, you can determine how and why
you became confident in certain fields, and then repeat that method elsewhere.
Say for example that you grew up with a reputation for being the smartest kid in class. In academic and professional
settings you’ve always excelled, and you feel confident in your intellectual prowess.
But in social settings, things were different. You started to notice that other guys somehow had a seemingly natural
ability to talk to girls (seemingly being the operative word), while you clammed up, over-thought everything and
could barely string a sentence together.
Instead of getting hung up on the fact that you’re not as smooth as you’d like, ask yourself why you’re great at taking
tests, but not at talking to women.
Chances are, it’s not because you’re preternaturally gifted at tests, it’s because you’re more practiced. You studied,
you read, you spent time on intellectual pursuits that helped develop your critical thinking skills, all of which make
tests and other academic pursuits easier for you.
And while you were doing all that, how much time did you spend engaging people in conversations? Probably
not a lot.
So the reason you’re much better at tests than at parties isn’t because you’re preternaturally gifted, but because
you’re more practiced. Test-taking and socializing are both skills, and you’ve just practiced one a lot more often than
the other.
When you start to evaluate the reasons why you’re confident in one area and not others, you realize that your
lack of confidence stems not from your self-worth, but merely from a lack of practice.
Shift your focus to the areas you want to improve, and self-confidence will follow.
Unfortunately, we’re not all blessed with prototypically
perfect father figures like Sandy Cohen
Some of us have family, friends or other close relations who display traits we would have rather not learned, from
negativity and pessimism to more serious concerns like aggression and even violence.
The good news is that your development is not your destiny. Even if you grew up around less-than-ideal influences,
you have the ability to choose both who you want to be, and who you want to model.
And you don’t have to look far to find admirable men doing excellent work. Your own community is no doubt full of
teachers, organizers, charity workers and other stand up citizens whose examples you can learn from.
But you don’t need a personal connection to great leaders in order to learn from them. Thanks to podcasts,
biographies and autobiographies, we have the ability to learn and internalize lessons from great men not just
throughout the world, but throughout history.
Book stores (by which I of course mean Amazon, because who goes to book stores anymore?) are packed with
biographies of men whose life stories will both inspire you and provide you with a model to adapt to your own life.
1. Do you think that it's a possible to gain confidence, or is this part of your personality?
2. Can you be confident in one area of your life, and not another? If so, what areas in your life
are you confident in? What areas aren't you confident in? What would you like to change?
And what are you doing about it?
3. Where does confidence come from?
4. How do I build self-confidence if I’m too intimidated to even get started?
5. Why can’t I stop comparing myself to others?
6. What’s the fastest way for me to build self-confidence?
7.How do I get over my fear of failure?
8. How do I bounce back from rejection or failure?
9. How do I bring confidence from one part of my life to another?
10.How can I develop confidence if I never had good role models in my life?
11. What is the difference between self confident person and not self confidence person?
12. Do you think you are self-confidence? explain why or why not
13. Who is the most self-confidence person that you know?
https://www.ted.com/talks/meg_jay_why_30_is_not_the_new_20/transcript
And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle. But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. "Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.
But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy." And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one."
That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.
So, I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.
This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.
So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.
And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time." Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine."
But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college." And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30."
Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.
The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.
Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends."
Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call ..." She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?"
Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will." But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by.
First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By "get identity capital," I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count.
Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that unposted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads.
Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now.
Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.
So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough."
Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.
So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now.
1. Have you ever felt you need better life? when was it and what has changed?
2. Do you think 20's the best time to step up and change your life?
3. What was the greatest achievement in your 20's?
4. Are you a procrastinator? if you are, how are you going to change that?
5. What do you think of " You can't choose family but you can pick friends"
5. Are you willing to take risk to change your life?
6. What's your future plan to have better life?
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_hood_the_difference_between_healthy_and_unhealthy_love
So when you think about a child, a close friend, or a romantic partner, the word "love" probably comes to mind, and instantly other emotions rush in: joy and hope, excitement, trust and security, and yes, sometimes sadness and disappointment. There might not be a word in the dictionary that more of us are connected to than love.
Yet, given its central importance in our lives, isn't it interesting that we're never explicitly taught how to love? We build friendships, navigate early romantic relationships, get married and bring babies home from the hospital with the expectation that we'll figure it out. But the truth is, we often harm and disrespect the ones we love. It can be subtle things like guilting a friend into spending time with you or sneaking a peak at your partner's texts or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school. 100 percent of us will be on the receiving end of unhealthy relationship behaviors and 100 percent of us will do unhealthy things. It's part of being human. In its worst form, the harm we inflict on loved ones shows up as abuse and violence, and relationship abuse is something that one in three women and one in four men will experience in their lifetime. Now, if you're like most people, when you hear those stats, you'll go, "Oh, no, no, no, that would never happen to me." It's instinctual to move away from the words "abuse" and "violence," to think that they happen to someone else somewhere else. But the truth is, unhealthy relationships and abuse are all around us. We just call them different things and ignore the connection. Abuse sneaks up on us disguised in unhealthy love.
I work for an organization called One Love started by a family whose daughter Yeardley was killed by her ex-boyfriend. This was a tragedy no one saw coming, but when they looked back, they realized the warning signs were there just no one understood what they were seeing. Called crazy or drama or too much drinking, his actions weren't understood to be what they really were, which was clear signs of danger. Her family realized that if anyone had been educated about these signs, her death could have been prevented. So today we're on a mission to make sure that others have the information that Yeardley and her friends didn't. We have three main goals: give all of us a language for talking about a subject that's quite awkward and uncomfortable to discuss; empower a whole front line, namely friends, to help; and, in the process, improve all of our ability to love better.
To do this, it's always important to start by illuminating the unhealthy signs that we frequently miss, and our work really focuses on creating content to start conversations with young people. As you'd expect, most of our content is pretty serious, given the subject at hand, but today I'm going to use one of our more light-hearted yet still thought-provoking pieces, "The Couplets," to illuminate five markers of unhealthy love.
Katie Hood: Anybody recognize that? I don't know. I do. Abusive relationships don't start out abusive. They start out exciting and exhilarating. There's an intensity of affection and emotion, a rush. It feels really good. You feel so lucky, like you've hit the jackpot. But in unhealthy love, these feelings shift over time from exciting to overwhelming and maybe a little bit suffocating. You feel it in your gut. Maybe it's when your new boyfriend or girlfriend says "I love you" faster than you were ready for or starts showing up everywhere, texting and calling a lot. Maybe they're impatient when you're slow to respond, even though they know you had other things going on that day. It's important to remember that it's not how a relationship starts that matters, it's how it evolves. It's important in the early days of a new relationship to pay attention to how you're feeling. Are you comfortable with the pace of intimacy? Do you feel like you have space and room to breathe? It's also really important to start practicing using your voice to talk about your own needs. Are your requests respected?
KH: If you ask me, isolation is one of the most frequently missed and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love. Why? Because every new relationship starts out with this intense desire to spend time together, it's easy to miss when something shifts. Isolation creeps in when your new boyfriend or girlfriend starts pulling you away from your friends and family, your support system, and tethering you more tightly to them. They might say things like, "Why do you hang out with them? They're such losers" about your best friends, or, "They want us to break up. They're totally against us" about your family. Isolation is about sowing seeds of doubt about everyone from your prerelationship life. Healthy love includes independence, two people who love spending time together but who stay connected to the people and activities they cared about before. While at first you might spend every waking minute together, over time maintaining independence is key. You do this by making plans with friends and sticking to them and encouraging your partner to do the same.
KH: As the honeymoon period begins to fade, extreme jealousy can creep in. Your partner might become more demanding, needing to know where you are and who you're with all the time, or they might start following you everywhere, online and off. Extreme jealousy also brings with it possessiveness and mistrust, frequent accusations of flirting with other people or cheating, and refusal to listen to you when you tell them they have nothing to worry about and that you only love them. Jealousy is a part of any human relationship, but extreme jealousy is different. There's a threatening, desperate and angry edge to it. Love shouldn't feel like this.
KH: Yeah, hmm. In unhealthy love, words are used as weapons. Conversations that used to be fun and lighthearted turn mean and embarrassing. Maybe your partner makes fun of you in a way that hurts, or maybe they tell stories and jokes for laughs at your expense. When you try to explain that your feelings have been hurt, they shut you down and accuse you of overreacting. "Why are you so sensitive? What's your problem. Give me a break." You are silenced by these words. It seems pretty obvious, but your partner should have your back. Their words should build you up, not break you down. They should keep your secrets and be loyal. They should make you feel more confident, not less.
KH: Frequent breakups and makeups, high highs and low lows: as tension rises, so does volatility. Tearful, frustrated fights followed by emotional makeups, hateful and hurtful comments like, "You're worthless, I'm not even sure why I'm with you!" followed quickly by apologies and promises it will never happen again. By this point, you've been so conditioned to this relationship roller coaster that you may not realize how unhealthy and maybe even dangerous your relationship has become.
It can be really hard to see when unhealthy love turns towards abuse, but it's fair to say that the more of these markers your relationship might have, the more unhealthy and maybe dangerous your relationship could be. And if your instinct is to break up and leave, which is advice so many of us give our friends when they're in unhealthy relationships, that's not always the best advice. Time of breakup can be a real trigger for violence. If you fear you might be headed towards abuse or in abuse, you need to consult with experts to get the advice on how to leave safely.
But it's not just about romantic relationships and it's not just about violence. Understanding the signs of unhealthy love can help you audit and understand nearly every relationship in your life. For the first time, you might understand why you're disappointed in a friendship or why every interaction with a certain family member leaves you discouraged and anxious. You might even begin to see how your own intensity and jealousy is causing problems with colleagues at work. Understanding is the first step to improving, and while you can't make every unhealthy relationship healthy -- some you're going to have to leave behind -- you can do your part every day to do relationships better. And here's the exciting news: it's actually not rocket science. Open communication, mutual respect, kindness, patience -- we can practice these things every day.
And while practice will definitely make you better, I have to promise you it's also not going to make you perfect. I do this for a living and every day I think and talk about healthy relationships, and still I do unhealthy things. Just the other day as I was trying to shuttle my four kids out the door amidst quarreling, squabbling and complaints about breakfast, I completely lost it. With an intentionally angry edge, I screamed, "Everybody just shut up and do what I say! You are the worst! I am going to take away screen time and dessert and anything else you could possibly ever enjoy in life!"
For a minute, I really wanted to kill him for calling me out. Trust me. But then I gathered myself and I thought, you know what, I'm actually proud. I'm proud that he has a language to make me pause. I want all of my kids to understand what the bar should be for how they're treated and to have a language and a voice to use when that bar is not met versus just accepting it. For too long, we've treated relationships as a soft topic, when relationship skills are one of the most important and hard to build things in life. Not only can understanding unhealthy signs help you avoid the rabbit hole that leads to unhealthy love, but understanding and practicing the art of being healthy can improve nearly every aspect of your life. I'm completely convinced that while love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time.
Five types of unhelathy love
1) Intensity 2)Isolation 3)Jealousy 4)Belittling 5)Violence
1. Define your own healthy relationship.
2. Have you experienced or seen any relationship abuse?
3. Have you ever experienced intensity when you were in relationship?
4. Have you ever felt isolated from friends and parents when you were in relationship?
5. Are you an independent person when you are in a relationship?
6. Are you jealous when you are in a relationship? do you try to know where your partner
is what he or she is doing?
7. Have you ever felt breakup can be a real trigger for violence?
8. Tell us about your worst relationship if you ever experienced one of them.
9.Define your own healthy relationship
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