Digging up Dead Corpses

I was having a nice chat with a fellow therapist and healer the other day. We were talking about why we as therapists and carers often feel the need to fix people and sometimes we get into relationships where we become their therapists and not their partners and if they have problems want to fix them.

Obviously as everyone knows the only person we can fix and change is ourselves and people will only change if they want to. 

Its not just therapists that want to fix people up. People who are co dependent want often feel the need to fix others up rather than fixing themselves up.

I often have to remind myself when I am coaching people that I have to be on top of my own things as well and I am always analysing why I have done things myself in the past.

I was asked by a very dear friend of mine a couple of times when I kept going back to the relationship which was clearly NOT working, why I felt the need to go back again and see why it wasn't working. Only for it to be ok for a while again then be back to square one.

She came up with this analogy of “digging up dead corpses”. She said Sarah you go back and check the relationship is OK and then find out its not. You bury it again and then a couple of days, weeks or months later you go back and dig it back up again.

Why you you want to dig up a dead corpse. You dig it up . Realises its half alive and then after a while the relationships dead again and you bury it. You say to yourself. “Yep its dead, I'll stick it back again” and so the cycle continues.

Often its a good motivator thats reminds us why we keep going back to same old destructive patterns. For example it we are stuck in a bad relationship we may keep going back because its the little “nice” things that keep us there and we forget all the bad things. Perhaps the way they made us feel when they kissed us or the way the made us feel when they did the occasionally nice thing.

But sometimes we need a negative motivator to get us out of a relationship and some are not enough why because we have invested so much in a relationship

There is an expression when you have invested so much in a relationship its like a slot machine. You put so much into the relationship and every so often you get a small payout hoping it will be nice. And occasionally you do get a small payout hoping for some jackpot at the end; but the reality is there is no jackpot because the prize at the end is broken.  Yet you still keep in investing and staying for longer because you think you might lose everything you have invested.

So then you convince yourself even after all the negative things that you can try one more time.

When you are in this type of toxic relationship all the negative motivators in the world will not be enough to get you out of the the relationship until the penny finally drops

and therefore I came up with my friends analogy of the dead corpses.

If you really want to be out of a relationship that isn't working ask yourself this?

Why on earth would you want to be digging up dead corpses ?