What Role Does Fear Play in Unhealthy Toxic Relationships? [Ep. 813]

0:01 You're in a good place now you are listening to Perspectives with Ashley Burgess. Welcome back to the Ashley Burgess Podcast. And to day we're talking about unhealthy relationships. Unhealthy relationships have one common denominator, and that is fear. Whether it's a fast and furious love affair, a marriage without getting to know someone, not really putting in the time to see who that person is and to understand that person, or other people who are wanting to have a family at all costs and not realizing the kind of person that they're having this family, this child with. And it's interesting because fear is really all encompassing, the fear of being alone, the fear of dying alone, the fear of not getting.

0:52 Married, the fear of not having. Somebody, the fear of not being able to take care of someone or not having someone take care of you, the fear of being by yourself. All these fears push people into relationships that they really have no business being in. And it's interesting because those relationships, even though in the beginning it's solving this void, solving this fear factor, but these relationships turn into absolute nightmares. And today's podcast, we're going to explore these fears, understand these types of fears that get us into these types of relationships, and how to begin to see through the fear and understand where the fear is coming from and begin to address that fear.

1:42 A quick reminder remember. The more we focus on something whatever that is, the bigger it becomes. A good example is if you think about news media, they use fear as a scare tactic to make you worry, right, They scare you into worrying things. So you see it on the news, something playing out, and they're constantly showing it to you. They're constantly scaring you with it. They're constantly making you feel more fear. You become completely overwhelmed, and you get into this overwhelmed feeling because you're focusing on this news story that they keep showing you every hour on the hour, and so it builds more and more fear within you, making it feel more and more realistic, and you begin to own that fear. So one of the number one fears for a lot of humans in society today is the fear of being alone. You'd rather be with someone that you can't even stand. But the funny thing is it doesn't start that way, right. It doesn't start that way. It's not like these relationships begin and you meet this person and you can't stand them, and the idea of being around them literally, you know, takes away you know, your love for living, you know, it takes away your zest for life. What happens is you get to know these people, and in the beginning, you don't really see that person for who they are. You don't really see that person

3:14 for what they're honestly bringing to the table. You don't really see them really at all, because you're too busy creating this reality. In your mind. Of this perfect relationship that one can never exist. But you start creating this concept in your mind's eye around this person. And it's interesting because in the beginning, a lot of times these people are great because they're helping you create this false reality too by love bombing you and giving you. Lots of attention. Right, But the love bombing and the attention is not truly who they are, and that's going to be pulled away quite quickly. However, in the beginning, you're like, Wow, the this is the relationship that I've wanted for so long.

4:02 This person's constantly thinking about me, calling me you know, buying me things, giving me all this attention. It feels so good. It's such a great feeling. I absolutely love this. And you get all entangled in this, right, and so you end up doing everything with this person. You normally have absolutely zero personal time of your own. Your life has changed. You become literally this person's appendage. Basically, you can't leave them. They're like, oh my god, I found the love of my life. Right, But it's interesting because you begin to be on a daily basis with this person and they continue to stretch out this concept with you.

4:42 But it's not until you finally get married to this person, have this relationship with this person where this person begins to augment and change. And I know that many of you are like, wow, they just changed out of the blue, like everything started changing. Like you know, she was like, you know, this great homemaker and did all these things around the house, and now she doesn't do anything and she doesn't cook or clean or anything. I guess she's changed. Well did she change? Or was all that just a version They knew that you wanted, and so they played out the version, the role right, the Hollywood roll for you, and then they change, you know, It's interesting when these roles end up stopping like all of a sudden and it's dead in its tracks, like they're no longer doing what they were doing forever, and now things have augmented. You know, they're no longer that stay at home wanting to be there for you, this conservative woman, or he's no longer doting on.

5:44 You and there for you. It seems like he doesn't have time for you anymore. There's all these things that start happening and you're like, wow, this person really changed. I don't know how this all happened. Well, no, they didn't change. They didn't change at all. They were always wearing a mask, pretending to be somebody they weren't. And you though there was lots of red flags, right. A lot of times we have these red flags, but because we have that fear factor of not wanting to be alone, not wanting to die alone, not wanting to be without family, we overlook these things. Right. There's the red flag here. It's like we're in communist China. There's so many red flags, right, but we're not seeing it because we don't want to see it. And I want you to think about that. A lot of us get into these marriages, right, and it's not until really like year after year one. So let's say you got married.

6:38 You've been together for several months or a year, you get married, everything seems good, and all of a sudden, the wheels start coming off right, you know, the personality starts changing. There's a little bit of anger or resentment or tinge that you begin to feel. You know, for many of you, you say, well, you know, it was like the like right after the wedding, the sex stop, like that was all over with like I don't know what happened, but that was it. You know, all of a sudden, some of you might say, well, it looks like doctor Jekyl or mister Hyde. I don't know who's showing up. It's at one moment everything was good and now we're not. And it's interesting because see it's twofold. It's not just that this person was pretending to be the person you wanted them to be. You played along with this role play. You know, it's almost like y'all are at comic con and you know, everything's great. And some of you also have these long distance relationships too that made it even harder. You were dating, you were in different cities. You were seeing each other like every two or three weeks. You know, you're jet setting around the country, you're hanging at at really great hotels, you're eating great food, you're drinking, you're partying. Oh, it's the best relationship possible. But then it's not. Then it's not.

7:52 And I want you to think about that, because when we get into these relationships, we're creating this in our head. We're creating the relationship we want. We're kind of taking that other person and wrapping up up in something else, right, creating this different reality around them. And then there's parts of us too. It's not like this one person is like pretending. There's also parts of us that are probably on our best behavior, you know, especially if it's a long distance thing, Like you're not seeing everything, Like you're not seeing like, you know, the personality in the morning. You're not seeing the tatted up pj's, you're not seeing some of the loose sins, the blind spots. It's all perfection because you're only seeing each other a few days a month. I mean, it's not really that hard to be on your best behavior a few days a month, right, But it's very far cry from those few days a month to really understanding who this person really is. And many of you might even be in the same place as far as you're dating. You're together, you're seeing each other all the time, you live a few minutes away from each other. But again, you're still changing and augmenting that person to fit the thought process in your head for the best person, like, oh, this person does this and that and this and that, and I just love this person. That make me so happy. And that's one of the biggest interesting caveats too, is this concept of somebody making you happy. You know, somebody cannot make you happy.

9:20 They can offer things in your life. They can be a helpful person, they can be a harmful person. But you should be making yourself happy, not referring to someone else to make you happy, because it's remember just as much as someone can make you happy, they can make you sad. Just as much as someone can bring joy into your life, they can also bring pain. The second thought that I want to talk about today is many of you want a family. You want a big family. You never had it. You want this family. You never felt like you had the family you wanted. You want a big family, and it's interesting because you have these people that you know. You kind of look around and you're you're meeting folks, and you end up meeting people and you find someone that has this great, big family and you're like, oh, wow, they have this family I never had, and you're not really looking at that person anymore.

10:14 You're kind of taking into consideration their size of their family, how you feel the family is. You've been around them a few times. They seem amazing. Oh, they have such a great family. So it's like, who are we dating here? Are we dating this person? Are we dating their family? And many of us get confused by that. Seriously, I've had many clients who said, Oh, I met their family and I knew this had to be the person that I got married to. Well, you're not marrying the family. Okay, I just want to say that for the record. I've seen too many of these situations go bad. Okay, you're marrying this one person, it's not the family, and so you're no longer looking at this person. You start like judging them by their family dynamic. And it's kind of funny because now you've gotten into a relationship with this person, but you're actually more in a relationship with a family than you are with this particular person. And this could be really painful because some of these relationships do not work out. Most of them don't. And so you're trying to keep this relationship working, which is hostile sometimes at best, at some point out for the marriage, and you have some of these family members that you really like and you really care about. But eventually you know that this marriage is not going to work, so you're going to have to get divorced. And you also realize that over time, unfortunately, when you get divorced from this person, you're also going to lose this family. So this entire concept of instant family goes out the window. The thought process of this, you see what I'm saying. So one big caveat is, I know many of you don't have.

11:44 A big family. Many of you only had a single mom or single dad raising you. You didn't have that really great well family nucleus. Maybe you didn't have any brothers or sisters, or you had a brother or sister die or something like that. And I know that we're always trying to like get that close knit, you know concept, But it's I found that friends can do that for us. We can meet friends, we can connect with other people, We can have a close knit group of people around us. It doesn't have to be people who are married into. Another interesting situation too, that I find with people is you have what I call the only children, the only child. When you were an only child, you didn't have brothers and sisters, You didn't have like this really cool family dynamic. You were on your own. And many only children didn't have a lot of help. They didn't have a lot of parental guidance.

12:40 Parents were working or traveling. There was no brothers and sisters to really connect with. So for many only children, it's a very lonely dynamic. And I understand that, and so many of you out of fear of having that loneliness growing up lonely mom and dad were always working, or dad was not in the picture, or mom was not in the picture, and you were kind of raising yourself. For any of us, I know, in my demographic, for sure, like in my age group, my demographic, even you know around that within you know, like a like a ten year you know, span of time, many of us raised ourselves.

13:21 We took care of ourselves, we made our own food, we put ourselves to bed, and some of you never really got over that. Some of you really could never get past that and really wanted to have a family dynamic. And I understand that, I get that, but I find that when we go out looking for that, we throw out this big net and we lower the bar to what we want. We also don't realize that we could find that in friendships. We also don't get right with us and really focus on how we can grow and become more. Solid in our life.

14:04 We throw that big net out and we see what we catch. And many of you, you know what I'm talking about. You might be currently in a marriage like this right now, where you got married to somebody because he didn't want to be alone. Perhaps they had a larger family dynamic that you like. But many of you, unfortunately, you're realizing now you didn't marry the family. You're also realizing that you know things have changed, but actually they never did change. Unfortunately, this was our own thought process of what we were wanting that wasn't actually our true reality. One of the. Biggest problems that I find with a lot of my clients is they end up meeting somebody wanting children, wanting to have a family, so bad that they have children very quickly, and you have children with somebody very quickly that you don't very much know that well at all, and one of the hardest things you can do. And I want anybody that's listening to this podcast that doesn't have children yet and has not been in a marriage yet or not had children yet, please heed this word.

15:12 Be very careful of the person that you have a child with. Be extremely careful with having a child with somebody. This is one of the biggest things you will ever do. This person can be an asset or a pain in the ass. This person can be helpful or the most harmful person you've ever entered into your life. And I've seen it so many times where people have children with women or men and that woman or that man brings them hell, some of them even trying to take their children away from them. I have clients who are still fighting to get their children back after years and we work through this, and we eventually get through this. But the pain and suffering that you go through because of this other person is unimaginable. And I want you to think about that, because we don't really think about the fact that the person that we're having a child with is so important because that person needs to be somebody that even if you are not together with anymore, you can communicate with, you actually somewhat like, you don't hate, and it's somebody that is not going to ruin your life.

16:30 And ultimately, some of these people actually take children away. I've seen it where they literally lie and coerce the court system to get these children taken away just for their narcissistic needs, just for self validation, just to also prove a point to hurt that other person, where that other person is stuck in court for years trying to get access to their child. And I want everybody to think about this, because this is very important. The person that you choose to marry is very very very important. More important than that is the person you choose to have a child with is beyond important because you're going to have to deal with that person for at least eighteen years. And you want to be with somebody that you don't want to hurt. You want to be with somebody that doesn't want to hurt you. You want to be with somebody that you can deal with.

17:18 And what I. Found is when we add fear into this situation, we overlook the red flags. When we add fear into the situation, we allow people in our lives that we should not allow into our lives. When we allow fear into our life and we focus on I'm never gonna have anybody, It's never gonna happen for me. I'm gonna die alone. I'm gonna die on this hill by myself. There's never gonna be anybody. I'm gonna have nobody take care of me. I'm gonna die on my own in a hospital with no help. If we focus on that, we literally bring the lowest common denominator to us. We usually bring predators, We bring people that are going to use us, take advantage of us, and ultimately those people will not be there for us. So it's a lot of energy given to somebody that's going to eventually leave, no matter what, causing us pain and discomfort, only to be alone again.

18:18 And so ultimately we have to focus on this concept of. Where are we fearing the most. I was trying to sleep the other night. It was very interesting. I was trying to go to bed, and I don't know about you, but if you've ever had a night where you try to sleep and you feel so exhausted, you're getting to bed. You're like, oh, this is gonna be the greatest night sleep ever. This is amazing, and it doesn't happen for you. I literally took two melotonin. It's great, it's great. Okay, hours later, can't sleep, turn around, made up the couch, try to sleep there. Two hours later. That didn't work. Okay, so we're worried about two am in the morning. At this point, tried a couple more melotonin, and I normally don't do that, but I tried, didn't.

18:58 A couple hours go by, and in those next couple of hours, I started thinking about being alone. I started thinking about people. You know, I have a friend of mine that's always worried about being alone, about dying alone, and I was interested in that concept. I started thinking about It was probably about three in the morning, and I started realizing, you know, most of us are going to die alone unless we die like in a big you know ship that you know that sinks like the Titanic or uh, that's a funny, little, funny little story in and of itself, right, the Titanic. But you know, whether it's that or you're in a plane crash with a bunch of people or something like that, you know what I'm saying, or like an earth disaster, you.

19:45 Know, But for most people, they die alone. They die and they're sleep they die wherever they you know, it's not something that you know, it's not coreographed, it's not stunned, it's not timed out for most of us, right, that's what's the situation. And so I was thinking about that, and some people go to all ends of the earth to not be alone, but in the end, even then, they're going to be alone. And I have a friend of mine that has so much fear on that, and. I asked him, I said, why do you corner the market on fear of being alone? People are going to be alone. But there's that acceptance and understanding of being alone and having to basically get right with yourself and understanding, hey, it's okay, I might be alone. That's okay, but getting okay with it, Like, where is the fear of being alone?

20:32 How do you overcome that? And I feel like the only way to overcome that is to walk through it, to walk through the pain and the fear of being alone, because I believe that that started at a young age for many of you. It might have started after a divorce. So maybe, y'ell, we're in a relationship with someone there was a tumultuous divorce. The person was. Very angry about the divorce and started yelling and screaming things like, you'll never be with anyone, You're going to be alone. You're a horrible person. You're going to die alone. Many of you have heard this from somebody that was very angry. Some of you have. Heard this because you were in relationships with people that were absolute toxicity. They were complete toxicity. They knew they were toxicity, complete covert narcissists or malignant narcissists that knows that you know, if you leave them, they got nothing.

21:24 So they got to play the game with you. You know, they got to put you down. They got to make it feel bad, They got to make you feel like shit. They got to let you know. They got to like, you know, gaslight, manipulate you, put you down, put you down, cut you down to size. Right. Oh yeah, you'll never find anybody. You're this, you're that, you're fat, you're old, you're this, you're that, whatever it is that they're saying. And so start realizing where a lot of these thoughts came from whether it was maybe a maybe it was a family dynamic, you know, maybe it was somebody that told you that maybe you're an only child, and you just never wanted to be that only child. You always felt like you were alone. So I need you to kind of get right with that, Like, how do we begin to get right with our inner child?

22:05 That it's okay? Because I also realized too, that there's a lot of relationships that many people are in that they would actually be better off alone. Like the level of toxicity and lying and pain is so extensive that they should be the better off. Being alone because eventually they're going to be alone. Any way away from. This person, there's going to be a sigh of relief, but then there's going to be all this back work on trying to get better, to do you know, to do therapy, to do coaching, to get better, to get right with their life. You see what I'm saying. There's going to be all these different levels because of all the pain and suffering that you had to go through. You know, when you think about it, it's interesting because of the fear, we create more pain. And I find that that's an interesting dynamic. I find that if we can see the fear, So is it the fear of being alone? Is it the fear of dinal in? So if you get right with the fear of dyn alone, hey, many of us are going to probably die by ourselves and we have to get right by that. So that means that we actually have to get to know ourselves very well, find love within ourselves, take some of this time that we're focusing on all this external world, and put some time and effort into ourselves, because that means that you need to have a really good relationship with you, probably right the most important relationship there is. Actually one of the things that I teach in my work is that every relationship helps us to see ourselves better. And that's what it's all about. Yes, it's good to meet other people, and I have connections and relationships, but first and foremost, your purpose is to figure out why you were here? Why did I choose to come here again?

23:39 Why did I choose to be here again? Why am I doing this again? Good question, right things to figure out before you leave. And in order to do that, you can't be you know, like literally stuck in tumultuous relationships that are adding to your stress level, bringing you down, making you feel bad, taking you out of your element, taking you out of your comfort to understand who you are dealing with all this manipulation and gaslighting when you could be actually living a life that, yeah, maybe you feel a little more lonely, but you have more time to actually focus on reality. You have more time to focus on what really matters. You have more time to express yourself and understand yourself. You know, I mean the amount of time that it takes to have a child with somebody and everything's good for a little while, and then it's not, and then you're dealing with eighteen years of pain and suffering. Is eighteen years of pain and suffering.

24:39 And I've realized that many of us bring our own pain and suffering to ourselves. We are the person that literally shows up. We go and we order the pain and suffering, whether it's in the form of a man or a woman, whether it's in the form. Of a baby daddy or baby mommy or whatever it is, and we order it up. We go there and we wait for it. We get our old ticket, we wait our number, and we get Oh, here's a big serving of pain and suffering. Here you go. This one's gonna last for a long time. It's gonna cost you money, It's gonna cause you blood, sweat, and tears. It's been might even cost you your freaking the way that people see you. You might have to go through, you know, a you know, a blood bath. You might have to go through a lot of dirt and mud to get out of the situation. Because you have somebody in your relationship with you that does not care, that has nothing absolutely.

25:26 To lose in their life. The only thing and the only one that has something to lose is you, and many of you right now, because of your fear, has gotten into a relationship with somebody that has zero to lose and they have zero to offer you. And in this process, unfortunately, because of your fear, you continue to try to help this person, save this person, get this person to see your value, get this person to see their own value. Step up to the plate, wake up, be a citizen. All that great stuff, and it's falling on deaf ears.

26:07 And I get it. I know that some of you try very hard. But if you tried as hard with yourself as you did with them, wow, if you tried as much with yourself as you do with them, your life would be completely different in a more positive, healthy, overwhelmingly awesome way. And I want you to think about that. How many of y'all are dealing with unhealthy people in your life? How many of you are putting so much time and effort into them, and how many of you are putting yourself on the back burner. If you're in your car, if you're at the gym, I want you to raise your hand to yourself. How many of you don't have time to work out because you're too busy taking care of a toxic relationship that has taken.

27:02 Over your life. How many of you are being pulled into court so much over a child and you look back and you go, I wish I would have never had a child with this person. Don't have another kid with somebody ran And we need to figure this out, We need to take our life into our own hands. But how many of you actually can learn this lesson before going down the path? And I know many of us have to learn the hard way, but not all of us do do we? How many of you can step back and say, you know what, that's true. I don't need to have a child with this person. I really need to get to know this person better and see and honestly understand if this is somebody I want to entangle myself with for this period of time. And also children. One caveat too is I know that some people don't want to be alone, so they'll have children at all costs. But sometimes children can be amazing, and sometimes children can be a very challenging situation. You know, I've known people that have children and they died, or they kill themselves, or they a drug overdose, or they hated their parents, they weren't around, they took off, whatever it is. And then I've seen some people have the most amazing children and they have these great relationships.

28:14 But you might not be that one. And you know, you never know. And so when we're having children, we need to have children because we want to have a child, not because of what they're gonna do for us, not because they're going to make our lives better. I mean, we have to go into the situation knowing that things could go either way. It has to be something that we want, not based out of fear. We don't want to have children because we were in fear. We don't want to have children because we're worried that we're not gonna have anybody take care of us. We don't want to get married to somebody just because we're word we're gonna die by ourselves. We want to have people in our life because they bring joy to our life or they bring a good, positive thing to our life. And because think about it, when we have that fear, we open the floodgates up to whoever comes into our life, and we just kind of go along with it. I mean, like if you want to have friends, and you'll have friends, and you open the floodgates up to all these people.

29:05 I mean, that's one thing that's fine, but you know you're putting a low bar or not that we need to judge people. I'm not talking about judging people. But you can understand people that get along with you and you have the same values, and you can understand where there are people that do not have your same values at all. In a story done, but in order to recognize things, you have to let go of the fear. You have to be willing to. Let go of the relationship. You have to be willing to move on. It's almost like going to that car dealership and dud and you see the car and they're like oh yeah, and you're like, well, I'm gonna think about it. Well, this is the last one we have. If you don't get this right now, you're gonna miss it. You have to be you know what. I'm okay if I miss it. If I miss it, it's not for me anyway. If that wasn't gonna work for me, it's fine.

29:54 Same with relationships, take it or leave it. Watch that person get to the ow them, not rushing, seeing them for who they truly are, not who you want them to be, and understanding that fear only gets us into relationships and dynamics that only hurt us. They don't bring happiness. They just delay the inevitable of more loneliness. And so I want you to think about that. A toxic relationship delays the loneliness. It delays it because it's going to happen anyway. So you're going to have to get a handle on it and begin to work on yourself. I have a book out, The Ten Day Challenge to Live Your True Life, and it's been out for years, The Ten Day Challenge to Live your True Life. You can find it on Amazon, you can find it on my website Ashleyburgess dot com, b Eerges dot com. And it's all about being able to work on that relationship with yourself, cultivating it and understanding it.

30:56 To get what you need to get out of it. Because once you understand yourself and you realize the depth that you have, all of a sudden, the other relationships they're great, but they take a backseat to that relationship because you are. And it's not about being narcissistic. This is not at all narcisstic, because people that are narcisstic have no clue who they are, and they hide behind masks and they're so far removed from their truth. I'm expressing the fact of finding value within yourself, not having to go outside to find value, because once you find value inside, you don't need it outside. So the characters that come around that are toxic, they fall by the wayside because you can see through them. You don't need them around you. No external validation needed here. And that's what I help my clients do. If you work with me, that's what I do. So you can always set up an appointment online on Ashleyburchas dot com. Go to the coaching page, click on it. You can scale right there, and it's amazing because we work through these processes to overcome this toxicity, to get out of these relationships, to begin to find ourselves, to work on ourselves, and to not repeat what we've done in the past. If you ever and already, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Go to YouTube find life Coach Ashley Burgess. You can find me on YouTube Life Coach Ashley Burgess. We're almost at two hundred thousand subscribers. Please subscribe and follow share those

32:28 videos with anybody you know that needs them, especially yourself or family or friends. So I hope this podcast will help you. If you'd like to, you connect with me by going to Ashleyburgers dot com, clicking on that contact page reaching out. Looking forward to hearing from you, and in the meantime, be aware of your fear, understand the fear, because fear has a large control. We want to dismantle the fear, dismantle the control that it has, and find our truth. Till next time, see you later with the Ashley burdg this podcast and don't forget to live your true life. Wom