There exists a silent type of conditioning that isn’t instilled within one’s mentality overnight. It takes time till it gradually takes root, through factors such as past relationships, family dynamics, cultural demands, and even unnoticeable neglect of the emotional sort. With time, it can mold and alter one’s beliefs about what they deserve in a relationship, unknowingly and unconsciously. One doesn’t just awaken one day and decide out of nowhere that they accept less love, affection, respect, and value within their relationship. With time, this belief is solidified and even gets defended by the one within who it has calcified. There are certain signs that start appearing when one develops this belief, and they are explained as follows.
You Feel Guilty for Wanting More
You start feeling guilty for wanting even basic needs in your relationship like consistency, attention, emotional understanding, safety, and so on. Your partner chastises you for it and makes you feel like you are being too demanding until you end up apologizing to them for it.
You Over-Celebrate Bare-Minimum Effort
When you are reciprocated with the minimum of effort and investment by your partner, then it elates you to the degree that you start excessively celebrating. This only shows that your partner has made you so used to the idea of inconsistency that even the tiniest bit of effort feels huge to you.
You Explain Away Behavior that Hurts You
It is a sign that you are getting less than what you deserve when you start justifying their disappointing and neglectful behavior. You blame their stress, call their intentions mistaken, and simply rewrite details just so it becomes easier for you to digest their indiscretion and mistakes.
You are Afraid of Being “Too Much”
You start watching and adjusting your reactions, desires, tone, and more around your partner, perpetually compromising and shrinking yourself just so you don’t end up pushing them away from you.
You Confuse Inconsistency with Excitement
Inconsistency, the act of being unpredictable with one’s emotions and caring, seems utterly intense to you, even addictive at times, because your partner embodies this propensity thoroughly. You haven’t seen what stability is in this case and therefore have no idea just how amazing it might feel. You call it boring because you are unfamiliar with it and haven’t seen it in your relationship.
You Stay Longer Than You Should
There comes a time in your relationship when everything seems to be going wrong, but yet, you don’t walk away. You stay and wait, hoping against hope that things might improve between you and your partner. You have learned to tolerate and endure instead of stepping back and evaluate.
You Measure Your Worth By How Much You can Tolerate
Patience has become a defining feature of your personality and overall identity. You take pride in the fact that you can take on almost all of the neglect, disrespect, and pernicious attitudes of your partner. You completely ignore the fact that this endurance is gradually wearing and weakening you, emotionally and physically.
You Avoid Difficult Conversations
You would rather stay quiet and constrict your words than speak and invite conflict in your relationship. It feels incredibly risky for you to speak up, as it might cost you everything: your partner and the connection that you share with them.
You Feel Relieved by Basic Respect
You feel profoundly relieved and energized when you are treated with basic respect and decency by anyone, a phenomenon that you find incredibly extraordinary instead of normal. This shows just how much disrespect you are knowingly tolerating in your relationship.
You Keep Giving Without Receiving
You keep giving and giving in your relationship by being more active and supportive, initiating everything, fixing issues, and even forgiving. But the real kicker is that despite all your efforts, your partner doesn’t deign to reciprocate in kind at all.
You Doubt Your Own Expectations
You always second-guess and doubt your own standards and expectations within your relationship, whether they are too high or unrealistic for your partner or not, even when they are completely balanced and reasonable.
You Have Internalized “This is Just How Relationships are”
You have developed an unhealthy and inaccurate perception of what relationships are supposed to be like after being exposed to pernicious patterns in your relationship for so long. You have now started seeing them as normal and inexorable, a staple in every relationship.
You Feel Anxious When Things are Calm
Peace feels completely alien and unfamiliar to you. You have become so acclimated to chaos, capricousness, and instability that calm and consistency start feeling unnerving to you. They make you uneasy and uncomfortable.
You Struggle to Recognize Healthy Love
You don’t fully understand or recognize healthy and positive love in your life. When someone shows up and offers you consistency, honesty, and respect, then you don’t completely trust them or their intentions. Your relationship has wired you that way.
You Believe Deep Down that This is the Best You Can Get
This is the most silent and most potent indicator of them all; you believe that you are already in a relationship that offers you the best that you can get and deserve. This is a belief that you don’t proclaim out loud but have come to terms with completely internally.
Final Thoughts
Being trained to accept less than what you deserve doesn’t imply that you are weak; it simply means that you have grown accustomed to things that you are required to adhere to, what you have been exposed to for so long. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t break the programming and escape this conditioning. All you need is intent, the resolve to break this cycle, and to regain control of your life.
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