Red Flags In Long Term Relationships

I hope you’re having an amazing day! Thanks for joining me in this little love exchange I’m trying to foster between us :) I love our connection and would love to hear how you’re actually doing! Feel free to click reply to this email and let me know <3 

So… back to the elephant in the room… 

I said it.. 🫣

Normalize feeling disgust toward your partner in long term relationships… 

Normalize feeling so triggered you can’t imagine spending one more minute as a couple, let alone a whole lifetime. 

Normalize seeing and feeling red flags in long term partnership. 

Normalize seasons of feeling distant, turned off, and dried up in long term partnership. 

Normalize fight and flight and freeze response being triggered in long term partnership. 

Normalize the dark side of long term partnership, so we can collectively reap the benefits of folks who have committed to the ceremony of long term partnership… and learned to grow together with empathy through all of the different seasons a long term relationship will inherently present. 

The level of growth that allllll of the interpersonal — and also intrapersonal — work that only a long term partnership can offer is SO needed in the collective right now. 

I know this is nuanced… but hear me out.. 

I have been seeing posts shared on instagram lately that encourage women to dump guys for specific red flags.. These ranged from your partner wanting you to be on birth control to the partner raising their voice to them triggering your nervous system. 

Let me tell you, our deepest false programs and our deepest wounds will always be triggered in long term partnership. 

The partner who wants you to go on birth control?

I guarantee if you lovingly explain the benefits of non-hormonal methods of contraception and also lovingly wrap his wounded inner masculine (who has likely been fed many stories from Culture about how a woman will trap him by getting pregnant because 🤪how could she possibly know how to avoid getting pregnant without birth control🤪) with love and compassion, PROVING that all parts of him could be loved as well as updated with a more aligned and modern program… 

He would open his mind. 

The same goes for all other red flags… 

(Unless it doesn’t work… then you can say at least you tried in the most loving way!)

Sometimes people just need to be educated. We are in long term partnership so we can mold each other into the perfect aligned True versions of ourselves. 

Leaving a long term relationship because our nervous system gets triggered sometimes feels — to me — like part of our ego wants to hold on tight to the status quo and is resistant to love and curiosity, to adopting a deeper version of Truth. 

I’m not suggesting anyone stay in a relationship that is inherently unsafe or that has come to an impasse that is not navigate-able… 

But I think there’s a difference between a nervous system that doesn’t have the capacity to handle big adversity/triggers in long term partnership…

… VS an inherent lack of safety. 

Plus, people can change.. especially these days. 

Do you know how people (including ourselves) can change the absolute FASTEST? 

THROUGH LOVE… 

The value of the medicine of being witnessed, held, and loved THROUGH a moment of flight response or of waving a red flag is UNQUANTIFIABLE. 

The value of the medicine of being loved THROUGH a moment or a season of chaos, confusion, resistance to intimacy, etc… instead of being stonewalled, judged, ridiculed, and abandoned is immeasurable. 

We all have dark sides.. We all have programs and traumas and coping patterns and behaviors that we carry and exhibit, even if some of them are not fully “ours” to carry…. 

We are all works in progress. 

Long term relationships have dark sides, too. And the dark side is our invitation to GROW and EXPAND our capacity for love, giving and receiving it. 

Gathering the tools and the capacity to be able to BE the person who consciously chooses to lean in and LOVE all parts, all seasons, all expressions in long term partnership will change the game for you completely… and it will create actual true safety within the relationship, which will nourish the connection and allow it to really flourish. 

I am not advocating for states of disconnection, disgust, trigger, etc to be MAINTAINED.. I’m advocating for these states to be melted away and shifted through LOVE and COMPASSION. 

(While maintaining strong boundaries, of course. You don’t have to enter into the world/story of your partner. An example of this is below.) 

I learn this from my partner, Taylor, all the time. (He learns it from me, too.. that’s what long term partnership is about! We teach each other how to be our perfect partners, which takes time and energy and doesn’t “just happen.”) 

Recently I went through a phase that I like to call my “Hermit Phase,” where something shifted and my energy pulled into my Self and had a very inward-feeling protective vibe. 

I have been working on this inner piece of me, who — when I tune into the somatic experience and then even deeper to the energetic experience in my body — looks like a young woman stranded and scared in the middle of a blizzard with a cloak wrapped around herself, shutting herself off from everything. 

So I was in my hermit phase, and I could NOT bring myself to desire intimacy or touch from my husband. 

I have normalized this season that I go through, and I’ve worked hard to connect with and heal the inner young woman in the blizzard within me who just feels scared and alone and protective against danger… 

It’s clear to me now that sometimes I’m just in hermit mode and there are energetic processes happening within me that should not be disturbed, no matter how well I love the woman in the blizzard. Maybe I’m not meant to be mixing energy or DNA with anyone else, even my beloved, during this time… 

And yet it still is triggering for me every time.. I can be so grounded and caring to myself and there will still be thoughts and feelings swirling around that I’m doing something wrong, that I should be giving love to my partner at all times, that withdrawing into myself is hurting him and hurting myself, that it’s not normal, etc… 

BECAUSE I AM IN PARTNERSHIP and have been for 14 years, there is a lot of PRESSURE that would not occur if I were single and going into hermit mode as a single person. 

Pressure turns coal to diamonds, babes, as you know, so… I try to roll with it. 

But what makes the biggest difference is not just my own love for all parts and seasons of my Self, but the fact that my beloved, Taylor, CHOOSES and CLAIMS me in my hermit phase (and all other times, too). 

Toward the tail end of my hermit phase, I had a session with my somatic healer and she helped me discover this deep feeling of disgust I carried within myself toward my partner while I’m in this hermit phase. 

Which made me TERRIFIED. ”Am I really supposed to be with someone who I have disgust toward, ever?! Should I leave him to put us both out of our misery? So he can be with someone who actually wants to satisfy his insatiable sexual appetite?“ 

And my healer also asked me, “What’s the worst thing that could happen if you did leave him?“ 

Uff… I would be branded with this stamp of “quitter”.. someone who ran away when it gets hard… someone who wasn’t actually able to commit to the lifetime of ceremony that IS marriage. 

So… after my session I laid in bed and asked Taylor to join me so I could express how I was feeling. 

I told him how scared I was that I felt disgust, how worried I was that I’d never want him to touch me again, how maybe just ending the relationship would be easier so he could feel happy and cared for and satisfied. 

And the most beautiful thing happened. 

Taylor sat up, looked at me in the eyes, and told me, in all of my chaos and trigger and feminine spiralic “confusion,” that I am his person. ”Even if this is the beginning of the end, or even if you never want to have sex with me again, YOU are MY person. I choose you. Every day. Forever. No matter what.” 

Oh LORD, the medicine I received from that choosing, that CLAIMING of ALL of me… it did something to my emotional and energetic state, my shadow, that NOTHING else could have come close to touching. 

A couple of days later, I woke up, my body told me to fast, I went to the beach, prayed, and then came home and suddenly felt a huge YES in my body to intimacy, for the first time in WEEKS. 

My hermit phase ended :) And we celebrated by finding God in each other’s bodies and in our physical union once again. 

So, THIS is how I know that EVEN something that is the “worst case scenario,” or even a behavior that seems like a HUGE red flag… if even THOSE can be claimed, seen, and loved by a grounded, compassionate, loving partner… 

They can slowly begin to melt away and reveal the Truth that lies beneath. :) 

Thanks for joining me in this deeply personal (and for some, deeply triggering, I’m sure (I love you no matter what you think about this writing!)) share.