A 7-Step Guide To Ruining Your Relationship
By Dr. Margaret Paul. Posted on .
Your job is to gain control over getting the other person to completely give him or herself up and focus only on filling your emptiness and needs with their love, approval, attention, sex, devotion, time and adoration. Be the best taker you can be, making sure to keep your partner feeling guilty and responsible for your feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem.
4. Be the victim. As your relationship starts to decline, move more and more into thinking and behaving as a victim of the other person's choices. This will lead to more fights or to distance, lack of passion, lack of fun and a complete inability to communicate about anything — even minor situations. In any discussions, be sure to seek to be right, win your point and make your partner wrong. After all, this is a competition for who is the good one and the right one. Or, just collapse and give in, a great way to be a victim.
5. Withdraw from your partner. Start to spend less and less time with your partner, spending it alone or with other people or in front of the TV. Convince yourself that your misery is completely your partner's fault and that you picked the wrong person again. Never ever take any responsibility for your own feelings, needs, behavior and choices. Never forget that you are the victim.
6. Get your partner into counseling. Seek counseling to get your partner to change. Do not enter counseling to deal with your own controlling behavior of being a taker or caretaker. Rather, be sure to tell the therapist everything your partner does wrong, using the therapist's office as just another arena to prove you are right and your partner is wrong or you are the good one and your partner is the bad one.
More from YourTango: The Goals of Controlling Behavior In Relationships
Above all, do not practice Inner Bonding or join the Inner Bonding membership community. After all, it is your partner who needs to do this, not you!
7. You did it! Congratulations! You have succeeded in creating a terrible relationship! Now you can miserably and righteously leave your partner and do the whole thing again! You get to complain to all your friends about what a terrible person your ex-partner is and get sympathy for all you've been though. What a reward for all your hard work!
More from YourTango: Soul Connections
To begin learning how to love and connect with yourself so that you can connect with your partner and others, take advantage of our free Inner Bonding eCourse, receive Free Help, and take our 12-Week home study eCourse, "The Intimate Relationship Toolbox" – the first two weeks are free! Phone or Skype sessions with Dr. Margaret Paul.
Connect with Margaret on Facebook: Inner Bonding, and Facebook: SelfQuest.
