Ep 123: Your Relationship Isn't Broken. Your Pattern Is
By Charlotte Cummings | Feel Better Podcast
The Part You Play in Your Relationship (Without Blaming Yourself)
There’s a moment that can feel both confronting and strangely empowering in a relationship.
It’s when you realise the blame game isn’t working anymore.
Maybe you’ve found yourself noticing all the ways your partner is falling short. The things they’re not doing, the ways they’re not showing up, the patterns that frustrate you. But underneath that, there’s a quieter awareness starting to surface… I’m part of this too.
That’s not always an easy place to land.
Because the question becomes:
How do you reflect on your role in what’s not working… without turning it into self-blame or talking yourself out of what’s actually not okay?
This is where nuance matters.
One of the things I say often in my work with couples is that relationships are 50/50. Not in a transactional way, but in the sense that you are both contributing to the dynamic that exists between you. No one holds more than their share, and no one holds less.
But that doesn’t mean you swing from blaming your partner to blaming yourself.
We’re not aiming for shame, where everything becomes your fault. And we’re not staying in blame, where everything sits with them. The work sits in the middle — in understanding what you’re both co-creating.
Because you don’t fix a relationship by diagnosing the other person.
You change a relationship by becoming more aware of how you show up inside it.
And that starts with getting curious.
One way to do that is to zoom out beyond your current relationship. If you lined up your past partners and asked them what it was like to be with you, what themes might come up? Not to criticise yourself, but to notice patterns. The things you tend to bring into relationships, especially when things feel hard.
Another layer to this is understanding what I call your “unbearable feeling” — the emotion you’re most wired to avoid. For some people it’s rejection. For others it’s failure, not being good enough, or feeling out of control.
Whatever it is, it shapes how you react.
If one person is highly sensitive to rejection and the other is deeply triggered by feeling like a failure, you can start to see how quickly things escalate. A piece of feedback lands as criticism, which triggers defensiveness, which then feels like withdrawal or rejection to the other person. And suddenly you’re both stuck in a loop that feels impossible to get out of.
This is what I often describe as “the dance”.
Every couple has one. A predictable pattern of how conflict plays out. One person says something, the other responds in a certain way, and before you know it you’re moving through the same steps you’ve done countless times before.
But here’s the important part: if one person changes their steps, the dance changes.
That’s where your power sits.
Not in controlling your partner. But in shifting how you respond. In noticing your instinctive reaction and choosing something different, even if it feels unfamiliar at first.
And often, underneath the frustration or anger that shows up in these moments, there’s something much more tender.
Grief.
Disappointment.
Sadness.
A sense of disconnection.
When you allow yourself to access that layer — and communicate from there — the conversation changes. It becomes less about proving a point, and more about being understood.
There’s also a question I think is quietly confronting, but incredibly useful:
Is my behaviour moving me towards the relationship I say I want… or away from it?
It’s not about getting it right all the time. But it does invite honesty about whether the way you’re showing up is actually creating the connection, closeness, or teamwork you’re hoping for.
Because wanting a certain kind of relationship and behaving in a way that supports it are not always the same thing.
And then there’s your story.
The experiences you’ve had, the patterns you’ve learned, the things that have shaped you over time — all of that comes with you into your relationship. Not just the big moments, but the subtle ones too. The beliefs you’ve formed about yourself, about others, about what love looks like.
None of this is about picking yourself apart.
It’s about taking ownership in a way that feels grounded, not personal or attacking. Seeing the “issues” as something separate from who you are, so you can actually work with them.
Because when you can say, “I can see how I’m contributing here,” it becomes incredibly disarming. It opens the door to a different kind of conversation. One where you’re not on opposing sides, but actually looking at the same thing together.
Relationships are an exercise in co-creation.
And when you understand your part in that — without shaming yourself or excusing what isn’t okay — you create the possibility for something to shift.
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Welcome to this episode of Ask Charlotte, where I'm answering a listener question about reflecting on the role that they're playing and things not going so well in their relationship.
I've slipped into a pattern of criticizing my partner lots and just seeing all the ways they're falling short. But I also know that I'm part of this dynamic. So how do I reflect on my contribution to what's not working in our relationship without excusing your behaviour or gaslighting myself? Great question and really good insight to reach a point where you realise that the blame game isn't working.
One of the key things I say to couples who come to me for counselling is that relationships are 50-50 and that you're both responsible for half of this. No one can be more responsible and no one can be less responsible. We both contribute to the dynamic that we are creating in our relationship.
Now I think a key thing that this listener has talked about is wanting to avoid gaslighting themselves, wanting to avoid doing so much reflection that they end up in a place where they feel stuck or ashamed or that they're the one who's the problem. And if only they are better, then things will get better in the relationship. And we definitely don't want that.
I think that there is a balance in all thinking that we do around relationships. We want to avoid shame where we believe that it's all our fault. It's all our problem.
And then on the flip side, we want to avoid blame. So believing that it's all our partner's problem. And I think what this person is reflecting is that they've been stuck a little bit in the blame game.
Now what you don't need to do there is move over completely to shaming yourself and putting all the blame onto your shoulders. The real question from a growth perspective is what is my part in this and how am I showing up in this relationship in terms of what we are co-creating together here. So I'm a big believer that you don't fix a relationship by diagnosing the other person.
You grow and improve a relationship by reflecting on what you are creating together. The more you can understand that, the more options it unlocks for you going forward. Now a question I encourage you to reflect on if you're thinking about your current relationship is actually taking a step back and thinking about all of your relationships over your dating past.
If I lined up all of your past partners and asked them what was it like to be with you, what might they say and what are the themes of what they have said. Now of course if you put two people together in a relationship, there are often differences about the dynamic that plays out interpersonally between those two people and the issues they're both bringing to the table. But it can be helpful to step back and think about are there actually patterns or themes that would probably be fairly consistent across all of my relationships.
I was working with someone recently who was reflecting on how the overworking contributes to the dynamic they've had with all of their partners. So this is a helpful question, being able to step back and think across all of my relationship, what are the patterns or themes, what am I bringing to the table that shows up in my relationship and ways that are problematic. Now leading on from there I think it is really important to think about your unbearable feeling.
And if you haven't listened to my top podcast episode of all time, episode 30 seven is all about this foundational concept and how I work. The idea that we all have a feeling that we are avoiding, that we find most uncomfortable, that we structure our lives around being on the run from. So you want to think about how your unbearable feeling contributes to your relationship, how it impacts your reactions to your partner, how it impacts what your own life looks like, and then the intersection between you and them.
I did a follow up podcast episode all about unbearable feelings and relationships, so that's another good lesson here. But what are the dynamics that are going on in terms of the feelings that you avoid, the feelings that you fear, that you try and keep out of your relationship. For example, if one of you really struggles with rejection and the other struggles with feeling like a failure, that is going to be a difficult dynamic.
Because every time one person goes to give feedback or debrief or talk to the other person about an issue, they're going to feel like a failure. Their response is probably then going to make the other person feel rejected. So you can see there an example of how two people's unbearable feelings would play out in a relationship and become a really difficult dynamic to get through.
The more alert you can be to what your unbearable feelings are and how they're playing out, the more you can see in their equal kind of tone how you're both contributing, the dynamics you're both bringing to the relationship and what it is that's happening in terms of the interface between these two issues. Now some great reflective questions that you can ask yourself to are, when we argue, what do I do first? What is the passion in terms of your reactions when something difficult or problematic is happening in your relationship? And behind that you can consider, what am I afraid will happen? What about this makes me feel unsafe or threatened in some way? So really here you're trying to get analytical about what's going on. This is not about blaming, this is not about someone being more responsible than the other person for the issues within the relationship.
This is just practically getting analytical about what is going on. This is where I sometimes introduce to couples the concept of the dance. The idea that in our relationships we have this predictable way of playing out interactions with one another, especially conflict.
Now it just so happens that usually one person starts the dance, there's usually something that kind of kicks off that becomes then the predictable steps that we follow as a couple. So they do say this and then I respond by doing or saying this and here we are in this almost reversible dance that we typically move through. So it can be helpful to map out what are the steps in our dance, what happens here in terms of how I react to them and how issues commonly play out between us.
And what's my responsibility there? You know a dance changes if one person's moves change. If we respond in a different way it's like moving the goalposts in our relationship. And the other person has to respond to us differently because things have changed.
So if you change your moves this is a really great way to feel empowered again about your relationship. It can be like a pattern disruptor, to do something different where we replace how we commonly react with a different way of being. Now another really deep question you can ask yourself is where is the grief for me? So often in working with couples I see anger, I see frustration, I see rage.
And when you peel back the layers there you're often left with grief and sadness. Someone might be presenting as really angry about feeling unhood in the relationship or disrespect it in some way or feeling like they have failed. But behind that is a sadness at the lack of connection.
Behind that is feeling not good enough, something much more tender that needs to be acknowledged. So asking where is the grief for me in this relationship can show up the disappointments, the struggles and the challenges in a way that helps you own actually the sadness here. And that sadness is often easier to work with than the anger and rage.
How do I communicate about those emotional needs and invite my partner to respond to that? Now a little bit of a confronting question that you can ask is, is my behaviour moving towards or away from what it is that I say I want? Now this is often a bit of an ouch moment if I'm working with a couple. But I can sometimes hear from people all of the things that they want in their relationship. I want it to be like this, I want it to feel like that.
But actually if we step back and look at what is your tone in this relationship? Does that lead to the connection that you want to happen here? Or that sense of teamwork that you're desiring is your behaviour contributing to the being teamwork between you. So getting honest about is what I am doing contributing and moving our relationship towards what it is I say I want. I think another thing that is worth reflecting on is where your experiences earlier in life have shown up in ways that impact this relationship.
So what are your traumas? What are the things from your past that were most difficult? And remember here we're not necessarily just talking about big incidents or events but the things that have shaped you over life. How is your own story and your experiences up until this point influencing what's playing out between you and your current partner? I think some of the key things to say here are adopting that curious analytical almost transactional analysis way of approaching thinking about our relationships. Can avoid getting into a space where we feel it's all deeply personal.
Now I am asking you here to think about things that are of course personal in nature in particular to you and to your partner. But my encouragement here is to remember that issues are just issues, people are people. And if you can put issues out on the table in a way that's a little more neutral with our externalised from you, you can take greater ownership of what it is that is going on.
And it is incredibly disarming in our relationships if we show up and own what it is we're contributing. So being able to say to your partner, hey actually I recognise that I'm doing this. I've been reflecting on how what I'm doing here isn't actually helping us.
You know bet them some of those balls just sharing your reflections in this space can be incredibly helpful in your relationship. But all the couples I've ever worked with have heard me say when it comes to baggage and relationships it's 5050 just like relationship property. There is no his and hers, hers and hers, hers and hers.
It is all mutual shared ownership. And whatever we're bringing to the table we both have some responsibility around. Relationships are an exercise in co-creation and you are both 50% responsible for what is going on.
I really respect this question and if you're doing this journey of reflecting on how your relationship is and where you'd like to make changes I wish you all the very best. Don't forget that I've got my course, give me 10 minutes. This is a really good option for couples that are busy that could probably do with some therapy but actually can't quite make it to see a therapist on a regular basis for whatever reason.
Over six weeks you listen each week to a 10 minute audio and sit down and have a conversation together. I've distilled the top things that I work with couples around as a therapist and to bite size chunks that can get you both reflecting on how your relationship is. If you feel like your relationships needing that receipt this could be a really good option for you.
