Whether you have a partner, a few close friends, or you find yourself surrounded by people who support you, there are some things that could be quietly sabotaging your relationships. Two of them sound innocent enough: expectations and intentions; the third, re-emerging trauma, is fraught with known difficulty. And your practice of mindfulness can be a force for good.
Recently, I was preparing for an upcoming client conversation and found myself playing out what I expected to happen. I didn’t like what I saw in my mind, so I stopped myself. The last conversation with this client was disappointing, but why? I think it was because I had created a set of expectations from my experiences with this client, but that was not my role. I realized that if I could simply let the brilliance of my client shine, I could have a different, likely better experience if I didn’t carry expectations into the conversation.
Expectations are an element of story that humans create about themselves and each other. They’re often based on experiences but can just as easily be based on biases. They can shape how you feel about another person, possibly without any basis in reality. They are frequently unspoken until they’re violated, and then they can explode into conflict or resentment.
Expectations may actually be assumptions and they are slippery slopes. When unfulfilled, they can lead you to develop negative feelings or perceptions about another person. And they can be lethal to relationships if you create them in a vacuum. These ill-founded expectations are like a ransom you hold against someone that they can never fully pay. Here’s the hardest part: you’re doing this to yourself and your relationships.
There is a beneficial way to create expectations: co-create expectations them with the other person. Coming to agreement together, you are using them in a more fair way. That’s not a guarantee that you or they can fully meet them, but it’s a far better way to create expectations than doing so in secret. It’s also more beneficial for your relationships because it involves collaboration and open dialogue and gives each person some stake in the outcome.
This is where mindfulness comes to the rescue. Relationships thrive when each person feels safe. But expectations thwart safety by creating a litmus test, of sorts, that you’ll measure the other person by. When you make yourself aware of the expectations that you create, you can then consciously choose to let them go. Simple, but not easy. You created the expectation, so you can let it go. It really is that simple. And that’s one of the ways that mindfulness can be a force for good in your relationships.
Intentions are another element of story that can damage relationships if you don’t manage them sufficiently. They are the forethought that you hope to realize in carrying out what you say or do. They can be productive and inspirational, but they cannot prevent injury.
To illustrate, imagine that you say something that causes injury to a person you care about. You may not have intended harm, but it occurred, nonetheless. You could stand behind your intentions and avoid taking responsibility for the harm done or you could recognize that what you said resulted in harm, take responsibility, and talk through what happened so you both understand it.
And let’s not forget: there’s not only an injured person, but the relationship you share with that person also suffered. Incidents like this can result in small fractures of trust. Ignoring the injury without taking the time to understand the damage can lead to further damage. And over time, if these small ruptures in the surface are completely ignored, they can give way to a collapse of the relationship.
In this illustration, harm was done. You can’t undo the harm, necessarily, so you can ask yourself if your intention really mattered. As the mother of my ex was fond of saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” She wasn’t wrong.
She also wasn’t exactly right. Intentions are neutral; they are neither good nor bad, intrinsically. But if you use them to justify your harmful words or actions, they become a shield against responsibility. As the person who said or did the thing that caused harm, you could say intentions are good. As the person who was harmed, you might say intentions did not matter because I was harmed. Who’s correct in this scenario?
This is where mindfulness can be a force for good in your relationship. What if you had paused for an instant before speaking? You have something to say and likely know it will get a reaction. In that pause, you could preface your comment to soften it or take a step to prepare the other person to hear it. The pause is one of the simplest (not easiest) ways to practice mindfulness. And in a case like this, one of the most beneficial. But the most dramatic way mindfulness can benefit relationships is in managing re-emerging trauma.
Trigger warning: this section discusses trauma in direct and clear language. Proceed with caution.
Trauma does not heal on its own. And even when you are able to attend to its healing, the residue of trauma lives on in your body and can be activated at any moment.
To illustrate, if fictional Joe experienced years of verbal abuse in childhood, imagine how he might react the first time he hears a partner or close friend raise their voice. Regardless of what motivated the raised voice, Joe’s body may send a signal that he is in danger, which could trigger his trauma response. It happens without warning, potentially pushing Joe into a dark place from his childhood. This is how it might show up in relationships when either party has experienced trauma in the past.
Healthy relationships after trauma are possible with support, guidance, and open communication. If you’ve been through therapy to address your trauma, you’ll likely have an awareness of the things that can trigger it to become activated and, hopefully, some tools to manage it. Even with support and options to manage re-emerging trauma, it can still wreak havoc, so keeping it at bay could be a life-long exercise in healthy, supportive relationships. And mindfulness can play a pivotal role in managing your relationships.
One way to prevent the sudden re-emergence of trauma is to practice mindfulness in service of yourself and your relationships. Mindfulness isn’t a magic bullet, but it does have some magical properties. It brings awareness to the potential outcomes of words or actions. It illuminates the possibilities you can choose from before you act rather than acting without thought. It can empower you to take action when you hear something you think might trigger your partner. And it can give you the space to suspend judgment after something has occurred.
Mindfulness is called a practice for a reason: it’s not something you can master in a day. It requires an ongoing commitment to apply it in your daily life in order to reap its benefits. Sure, you can see immediate impact when you randomly apply it, but if you are not consistent in using it, you may find yourself with uneven outcomes to the smallest and largest of tasks you undertake.
Learning mindfulness can take lots of forms — reading, listening to podcasts, taking a class, meditation, or learning from a professional, like a coach or therapist. It can become an entirely new experience of life for you — one that is more peaceful and harmonious; one that can empower you to choose how you react to people and situations that would normally anger or frustrate you; one where your relationships are healthy and thriving; one that can support you to make trauma an imprint on your life and not a blueprint for your life.
Relationships are the very fabric of our world. They can be as robust as they are fragile and can thrive when the people in them are actively involved in maintaining them by continuing to work on themselves and supporting each other. Attending to and managing the silent relationship killers with a tool like mindfulness can significantly improve the quality and satisfaction you experience in relationships of all kinds. Even the devastating impact of trauma, once you’ve attended to its healing with therapy, can be mindfully managed to blunt the impact of its re-emergence in your relationships.
So, pause. Invoke awareness. Let go of judgment. And recognize the choices you have to manage yourself and your relationships. You have the power to choose your experiences more frequently than you think. Mindfulness can only be a force for good in your relationships if you put it into practice for yourself.
If you’ve experienced trauma and have not yet accessed therapy to begin to heal, I hope you will do so. You can break the grip of trauma on your life and your relationships with the proper support of a therapist who is clinically trained to help you.
