11. The High Cost of Low-Return Relationship

Welcome welcome.

So today we've got a spooky season edition.

And I'm recording this the day it's supposed to go out, not my usual fashion, but hey, progress over perfection.

And it is the beginning of October.

It is Oh, lovely.

We're still getting some heat here.

It's going to get into the 80s today.

But the leaves are changing.

Went on a ghost tour.

That was fantastic.

History pack loved it.

The veil is thin, prepping for the new moon and the full moons like we're going to get some good rituals in here.

So I love this time of the year.

It's a great time of the year.

Great time of the year.

And so I have a spooky season podcast episode for you.

You know what's scarier than goals and ghosts and werewolves?

Low return relationships.

I should have a trigger warning on this.

Don't be frightened, little one.

I will guide you through the land of low return relationships and get you to the other side where you can live in abundance and free from fear and worry.

So as you can tell, we're going to be theatrical today as well.

It's the vibe.

I'm a little tired, so we're going to be a little loopy.

I considered doing an episode I had done before on another podcast that I had started that was really intense and was specifically about romantic relationships.

But I'm like, let me be normal, okay?

It's like diving into the deep stuff at a dinner party, at a cocktail party, meet somebody new and you get into all the existential stuff.

I'm not going to go there.

We're going to talk about low return relationships in general.

Something I see over and over again and see in my own life and have seen in my own life is that we will optimize for everything.

We will work so hard to make things work, to streamline things, but the very thing holding us back sometimes the most, which is our relationships, we will not touch.

And there's so many reasons why we do this, and we're going to get into all of them.

But I want to first set the stage.

Why does this matter?

So low return relationships, I'm defining them as simply where we are not receiving what we are putting out.

And this is not transactional necessarily, and this is not to say every relationship will have the same amount of input versus output in general or in every season.

Like I think about my children, I have children.

I put in a lot of time, money, energy, thought, everything.

And those little gremlins are not reciprocating those things in that way.

Now, just being able to spend time with them and be with them and be their mother is literally the delight of my soul, and just their presence sparks my spirit and nourishes me.

But you understand what I'm saying, right?

This is a relationship where it is very appropriate that I'm not getting a quote-unquote return on what I'm investing.

However, in friendships, we would hope that if we are giving emotional support, we are also receiving a level of emotional support, and that might change season to season based on capacity and what each of us is going through.

But overall, we want to be able to count on our friends that if we're going through something, we want to be able to count on them being there for us.

So lower-term relationships are those relationships where that is not the case, where we are putting in a lot of energy or we are kind of a converse but still negatively withholding a lot of ourselves to make it work.

And these relationships are massive energy leaks.

So I want to be clear.

I'm not saying, as we go through this, I'm not saying put everything in upheaval, or am I?

I'm that girly.

Don't come to me.

If you are trying to salvage a crazy-ass relationship, I will be like, walk away.

Walk away from that friend, walk away from that partner, walk away from that family member.

Life is too short.

If you have given it a good college go and there is not that reciprocation, take a break.

Move on.

But I'm not proposing that you burn everything down this spooky season, but just be willing to evaluate.

So I would be remiss to not talk about the structural and systemic dynamics at play.

I find so often when people will talk about issues that we as humans experience, especially when it's around women, you know, people socialize as women, femmes, et cetera, and we will just like be real cute about it.

We don't want to say any of the archy, we don't want to say any isms.

We don't want to say any archy.

We don't want to seem too radical.

We don't want to seem too whiny.

And so we make these very systemic problems like they're individual problems, like, yeah, baby, you're just not good at creating boundaries and decluttering your relationships and getting in reciprocal relationships.

No, like the system is designed, like we are trained since birth from this.

So we definitely as women, as those who were socialized as women, we're trained to tolerate discomfort and the death of a thousand cuts.

Like how else would a system built on our energy, our beauty, our labor, our wombs, fundamentally our extraction, survive if we were squeamish about being siphoned on, right?

Like from an early age, we learn beauty is pain and how to deal with painful heels and painful dresses and all these different things.

We learn that boys show interest when they're younger by hitting the girls or calling them names.

These boys just being boys, right?

And then we get into college and young adulthood and we learn about more about our sexuality and we learn that men just need a lot of sex.

They just need sex, irregardless of what your body needs or wants, they just can't control it.

And I'm saying all these things, knowing full well, this is not the case, right?

Men are humans with heart.

They're also socialized in a whole different way, but I'm not going to get on that soapbox because you're not going to get me off.

But all that to say that there is a programming done so that when we arrive into adulthood, when we have our business, when we're out in the world, we look up one day and so many of us realize like, what the fuck, I am doing so many things that I would not have deemed to, I would not have set out to do.

I have so many relationships that are not actually nourishing me.

I have so much anxiety around things and upholding things and managing things and keeping up with things.

And so this episode is your permission slip to evaluate one of the, what do they call them, sacred cows in our culture, which is relationships.

It's in the West, hyper individualistic.

We both value relationships, but don't.

We have, we're very flippant about certain relationships.

We're not super great collectively about community and location and place.

But once we have people in our lives, there is a lot of stigma around auditing, around having open conversations about changing dynamics, right?

It's kind of like, fuck community, but then if we're in community, you're in it or you're out of it.

There's no conversation, there's no reviewing of what's the dynamic and the energy exchange.

And so I want to just give us permission to evaluate and to also recognize that it doesn't mean that we have to cut off right away.

There might be something you're like, you know what?

That's the move.

Do it.

But it might mean a conversation, it might mean something that's scarier than cutting off, right?

That vulnerability of saying, I love you and I want more of you and I want more of me to be able to be in this relationship.

So I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but I want to start, start, LOL, as we are minutes, minutes into this.

Here are some signs that you may be haunted by spooky relationship dynamics.

If you're exhausted at the end of the day, now this is, this is really, I don't, it almost doesn't make sense for me to have put this in here because there's so many things that can exhaust you.

But I do want to show, and I do want to recognize that it's exhausting to keep managing and engaging in relationships that are not filling you up.

Another sign is that you find yourself auditing your thoughts.

You might think something or have a desire pop up or consider something and then pretty quickly say why you can't do it or have somebody pop in your mind and how they would perceive this or why you can't do this or how would their reaction be.

You might be consuming a lot of content around relationships.

I know the times that I have devoured relationship content, like friendship, whether friendship, romantic, business partner, whatever, is when things are not going well.

We humans are pretty predictable when things are going well.

We're not looking at them.

We're not checking for them.

If you are reading, especially my marriage book girlies, you are consuming marriage therapist stuff, reading the books, this and that, and we'll have seasons of that.

But if this is, this is your life, this constant stream of information, it might be telling you that more than you needing to fix yourself, there's something going on in this relationship dynamic that is not working.

You may rehearse conversations you'll never have.

I do this sometimes, absolutely.

I'm sure most of us have done this and typically it's when there's something amiss.

If you find yourself doing this frequently, a lot, like your shower, your shower hours are spent having conversations with all these different people, all the things you wish you could say, that's a sign.

You might have specific people in your life that you have such relief when they cancel consistently.

We all have those times.

Shout out to my introverts.

We can have somebody we absolutely adore, love, love, love, and we'll be happy when they cancel because we get that time, the pressure is off.

We don't have to leave the house, whatever.

But if there's somebody consistently where you're feeling that relief when they cancel or that drop in your stomach when they don't cancel and they confirm, yes, I do want to meet up and you don't feel that switch after you've met, then there is something there.

You might be an archivist.

This might be another sign.

If you're an archivist in the relationship, you remember their hard days, their triggers, their mother's surgery, but they don't remember all these things about you.

You may have archived these to make sure you can keep the peace.

If I can appease and stay on top of things and stay ahead, then things can stay afloat.

But you recognize that this same cataloging, they're not doing for you.

You've made being, quote unquote, being the bigger person, a personality, slight after slight, after frustration, after overgiving or after overgiving, and you just tell yourself, this is what good people do.

I'm being the bigger person.

I love them.

This is supporting them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All these things we say to ourselves, right?

You may, in this particular relationship, and so some of these, as you could probably tell, I'm kind of switching and ping-ponging, some of these are just general.

And then some of these are specific to a relationship.

You might find that you don't share good news because you've learned it becomes about them or they have a lukewarm response or it gets one-upped or something like that, so you have stopped sharing.

That's a huge thing.

Your body gives you little hints, perhaps.

If somebody mentions their name or you see their name pop up on the screen and your stomach drops, your heart starts racing, you're stressed, that's a sign.

You, in general, may feel like the word that defines your relationships are almost.

They're almost good enough.

You almost feel safe overall.

They're pretty much there.

There's some things that leave you feeling disrespected and frustrated and exhausted, but overall it could be worse.

Overall it could be worse.

There's a little haunting, but not a full-on haunting.

And another huge sign that you might be dealing with spooky relationship dynamics, and this one especially is after months and years of dealing with this, is that you've stopped trusting your own perception.

Am I being too sensitive?

Am I overreacting?

And all of these are natural in situations, but when we find this being our complete orientation, it's signaling to us that we have been living in discomfort and misalignment for a while.

And so now that I have completely depressed you with all these signs, what is the cost?

I want to dig in even deeper because I want to really impress upon us that it's worth solving this problem.

We are worth it.

And sometimes we don't recognize that until we see the cost to ourselves and to others.

Creativity.

When we are in this low-grade, fight-or-flight, stressed position, we're losing our creativity.

Our energy is expended in maintaining and anticipating and numbing, right?

Numbing is a big word.

Suppressing our creativity.

Suppressing our intuition.

And I mentioned that last sign where you are wondering, am I overreacting?

Am I doing too much?

When we are putting ourselves in these positions where our intuition is saying one thing and we're not listening to it and we're instead internalizing this, instead of evaluating the relationship, we begin suppressing our intuition because to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of being in this space, we make our intuition wrong, right?

We miss opportunities.

We miss opportunities when we are in these low-return relationships.

Energy and time that could be spent with others that light us up, that bring opportunities, we're missing.

We're missing opportunities even with them if we were willing to have the conversation about shifting the dynamics.

There's opportunities to create, to enjoy deeper intimacy.

Like distress, and this is, I think, this is such a huge one.

Long-term effect of stress manifests as physical symptoms.

And women, more than men, experience autoimmune disorders.

And there's research that is linking stress, relational stress, internalized emotions, and chronic illness, autoimmune disorders, literally the body attacking itself, right?

So this is a matter, this isn't just, oh, okay, it'd be nice to be aligned and to be in reciprocal relationships.

Like, no, your body is literally like, babe, I need this.

You're taking years off your life.

And I don't mean to say this to create shame.

I don't mean to say this to create anxiety-inducing urgency.

I'm saying this to say that you matter and it is serious.

It's not a convenience thing for you to get your needs met, you know?

So often we think of our actual non-negotiables as conveniences and other people's conveniences as non-negotiables.

We want to start flipping that.

At the end of the day, being in low-return relationships are a low-grade energetic fever.

And they can sometimes manifest as like an actual fever, right?

Actual sickness.

And it's something that drains us and runs in the background, even when we can't see it front and center.

And I will say also, ancillarily, that remaining in these low-return relationships and not confronting them actually holds people back from their own potential.

It holds our kids back from seeing the power of productive conflict and conversation.

It holds that person back from being invited into deeper connection to themselves, to us, to their openness and giving and community focus, right?

It's an interesting paradox because I know for me at least, I have at times, and I'm sure will in the future, elected to not show up as fully and not balance out the relationship because I felt like I was doing them a favor, I was supporting them in the season.

But I was just perpetuating them not developing certain skills that they needed or not learning how to ask for what they needed in a way that was productive and regenerative for both of us.

And so oftentimes, if we really truly care about somebody, we will allow them to feel the sting of not having somebody who's preemptive and managing all the things and shrinking themselves to keep the peace and essentially acting as the guard from the negative emotion or the skill they need to learn, et cetera.

Hopefully that made sense.

And then we also won't have the energy for the spaces we actually want to pour into.

So there might be relationships and projects and opportunities that we're like, yeah, this is a hell yes, but we spent our energy in this direction that's low return.

It's not regenerative.

It's not extractive, fracking our energy.

And then when the opportunity does come along, we're not as available.

We're not able to show up as fully.

And as you can imagine, all these things, especially as a creator such as yourself contribute to real lost dollars.

I almost hate to mention it.

It feels like I need to, feels like everything is tied to money, right?

Like we need to hear the dollar sign.

But when we're out sick, when it takes us longer to complete projects because our creativity is not as accessible, right?

When we are not as attuned and are not tapping into opportunities, when we're not as magnetic and are having a harder time closing deals, this is all lost revenue.

This is business stagnation.

So how do we move forward?

This is a very personal journey for everybody, for each person, right?

And it also depends on the relationships where you have the hardest time with this.

I will say I've heard how you do one thing is how you do all things.

And I do think there is definitely a lot of truth to that being if you experience a pattern in one area of your life, it's very unlikely that that is the only area of life impacted by that.

So if you only have, if you find yourself in your romantic relationship, not speaking up for yourself, walking on eggshells kind of thing, putting their everything needs, wants, minute whims above your very being, even if it doesn't feel as extreme and even if you might not be doing it as extreme in other areas, you are likely still coming with that same mentality, whatever that may be, right?

Of people pleasing, of feeling like being useful and as needless as possible makes you as desirable and a good friend as possible.

So I would say, no matter where you're at in your journey, here are some steps that can kind of get you going, remembering that Rome wasn't built overnight, right?

The Queen Mother's Palace was not built overnight.

You're already doing great work.

The first step is acknowledging it.

So you're already doing great work by listening to this podcast, by hopefully opening your heart and mind and allowing yourself to just think.

When the list of the cost and of symptoms came up, allowing yourself, you can go back and listen to just see who pops up in mind, in your mind, see what situations pop up in your mind and try to not allow the guilt to stop you from thinking.

That's one of the biggest, most painful things I think with self-editing, people pleasing, that good girl programming is when we literally won't even allow ourselves to think.

I know that growing up in the church, we're like, God knows everything.

He can see your thoughts.

And so there was this suppression of just allowing myself to think.

There's some things that I won't ever need to say out loud.

There's some things I'll never need to write down.

But when we don't allow ourselves to just think, we lose so much valuable information and it is impossible to move through certain things if we can't acknowledge them.

So if you have any shame or stickiness around that, I encourage you to just give yourself space and time, continue to allow yourself to think and allow yourself to acknowledge how you feel.

It doesn't mean you're calling the person a bad person.

It doesn't mean that you even have to do anything about it, but just acknowledging it.

The next step is identifying the fear behind not dealing with this low return relationship.

So I would say most humans in life, right, have a breaking point when it comes to relationships.

And even though some of us may have like a negative breaking point almost, some of us may have a really far breaking point.

Most of us have a breaking point.

So you probably have an example in your life of somebody you've cut off, whether loudly or just quietly, kind of ghosted them, people that you've told off, perhaps, people that you've stood up to.

And for some reason, though, some of these other relationships, you have not been able to get in tune with how they're impacting you and do something about it, right?

And so we want to honor that information underneath it.

There is a reason why this has not been resolved yet.

And it's often fear, and we want to understand what is that fear behind it.

This is not condemnation of us.

This is just the fact of the matter, right?

If having a conversation with your husband about the fact that he takes your labor for granted and feels entitled to having a hot meal every day, even though you guys both work and not doing the same for you, if it was as easy as plucking a dandelion, if it felt that level of impersonal, easy, quick, painless, you would do it, right?

There's obviously a lot of charge around that conversation, which is why it hasn't happened, which is why it often doesn't happen for so many people.

And so we want to get underneath there.

I know some really big ones are loss of connection.

And as communal creatures, loss of connection feels like death.

We are relational creatures.

And at certain points in history, I mean, relationships still matter today.

And without relationships, we will perish.

And it was especially clear when we were in smaller tribes.

And if we were excommunicated, we were essentially banished to die, probably a slow death, rough death of being mauled by an animal or dying of thirst or starvation.

And so that still lives in ourselves and drives us to community and relationship.

And so that can drive us to not acknowledging and handling some of these things.

Obviously, there's fear and programming because the person that you're feeling this with is somebody who is supposed to be permanent in your life, family member, spouse, kid, especially adult kids, right?

A friend who's been around for a while, mentor, and they feel like a permanent fixture like they should be.

And you have the sense that conversations around changing the dynamics and having something that's more regenerative would not go well.

And so you're like, well, what's the point?

Because one option is to completely cut them out of my life or to deal with it.

And I'm picking to choosing to deal with it.

And I encourage you to step out of the binary thinking and see what other options exist, but also do the work to recognize that you are your biggest asset.

And at the end of the day, you are the only one who's going to take care of you 100%, you know, and nothing can come above that.

Nobody else is going to look out for you the way that you are going to look after you.

We might be kind of stuck in that place of thinking that we're irrational, like, yes, I see that this does bother me.

And I would prefer the relationship to look like this, but I feel like I shouldn't.

It feels wrong.

It feels silly.

Any number of things, but once we start making, becoming aware of the fear, we can work with it.

I have an episode on dealing with fear and uncertainty.

I literally just went back and listened to it for myself a few days ago.

I was like, oh, yeah, this is good.

This is good.

It will be linked below.

I highly recommend you listen to that as you navigate the spooky season relationship haunting.

So this was an episode that was very inner leadership focus, but it's so important, like, so important.

I did not there are some things that you cannot move past unless you've dealt with the relational ickiness around you.

I know as self-sufficient baddies, as potentially esoteric baddies, try to build something beautiful, manifest something beautiful.

We think that we can just positive think our way through this.

If I could just be the perfect little girl and just manage my thoughts and minimize this and handle this and did it, it'll be fine.

I won't have to have this conversation.

But you still feel stuck and clogged in these areas.

This thing is waiting to be dealt with.

And you are strong enough.

You are brave enough.

You are brilliant enough to do it, to uncover what you desire to change in that situation, to acknowledge your fear and support those parts of yourself that are afraid and to move forward in a way that is productive for both of you.

I believe in you.

You've got this.

Don't let these relational, this ghoulish, spooky season, relational hauntings suck your energy, suck your creativity, suck your potential.

I'm rooting for you.