Ten years ago, Natalie Lue was a (self-described) hot mess.
“I thought I just had a stroke of bad luck with men,” said Lue. “That I had a sign on my forehead that said: UNAVAILABLE MEN WITH MOMMY ISSUES, PLEASE APPROACH ME.”
She was stuck in yet another “barely there” relationship where, after five months, he decided to admit that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. “Before that, I’d been involved with a coworker who had a girlfriend, as well as a string of other toxic relationships.”
Her health suffered; she had lost her sense of self-worth.
It was then that she realized that in all of her relationships, she was the common denominator. “We are the only person that shows up to every single scene in our life,” she said. “If we keep experiencing the same thing time and time again, we have to ask: What am I bringing into this situation?”
She decided to make a change, and Baggage Reclaim was born. Through the site, she gives no-nonsense advice on taking responsibility for behaviour, building emotional maturity, and learning how to recognize (and end) toxic relationships. Since then, countless women have contacted Lue looking for guidance on things like: Future Fakers: Understanding Why Someone Fakes a Future With You, Commitment Phobia, Getting back with your ex when the reason for the breakup hasn’t changed and Understanding the The Cheater.
She Does The City: A lot of women approach you for love advice. What is the most common complaint?
Natalie Lue: I tend to hear variations of the same thing. It’s women feeling that they have been and done whatever they think is needed in order for their partner to reciprocate in the way that they want – so they cannot understand why it’s all going wrong.
As women, we can have these set ideas about what we think constitutes an attractive woman, a desirable woman, and what we think that men want. So even if somebody is unsuitable for a committed relationship, a loving relationship – we tend to focus more on ourselves and think, “Well, I do everything for him. I’m so kind, I’m so caring, I do this, I do that…why doesnt he want to be with me?”
I get emails from people who are having an affair, and they don’t understand why the guy wont leave his spouse for them. I get emails from people in casual relationships (booty calls, FWB’s, whatever) and they don’t understand why won’t he make it anything more than a booty call.
It’s always about how we think that the world works. What we think somebody should do because of what we are or what we do. We want a return on investment. One of the things Baggage Reclaim is about is teaching people about where to invest your goodness, and where to invest your energies. Just because you decide to invest your energies into a boat that’s basically sinking, doesn’t mean that it’s going to float and move like a normal boat!
SDTC: My friend is in a relationship with a guy who is an asshole/emotionally unavailable/married. What can I do?
NL: It can be hard especially when it feels like whenever you see them, all you talk about is this guy. Compassion goes a long way. You’re not saying “I totally agree with what you’re doing”. Sometimes, you need somebody to be there, not to be judging you. Just that you know that somebody out there – even though you’re involved in this situation – that they care about you. A lot of people in unhappy situations stop talking to people about it. They close off and so they feel alone and isolated. That just exacerbates the situation.
SDTC: You often counsel ‘the other woman’ in a relationship. Do you ever get flak for this?
NL: Occasionally I get what I call ‘The Vigilante’ who feels it’s their job to chastise every woman who finds herself in the ‘other woman’ position. I’m empathetic because I think its tough to discover that your partner or husband has been cheating. At the same time, I have a lot of readers who have been cheated on by a partner and are still empathetic to the ‘other woman’. Because they recognize that we live under this myth that there’s the harlot woman who tricks the weak man into dropping his pants and having sex.
As women, we have to get behind the sisterhood a little bit more and stop treating men as if they’re king of the world. Stop thinking that if your man cheats on you it’s not something to do with him, it’s because some ‘harlot’ woman has tricked him into it. When I get approached by women who are going down that track, I say listen, I totally understand that you feel angry and hurt, and your husband or partner did this or that. And I’m not here to take away from that. But people do make mistakes. And these are women who are trying to figure out why they made these mistakes. I’m not saying you have to agree necessarily. But they come to Baggage Reclaim because they don’t want to continue being the other woman, and they don’t ever want to be in that situation again.
SDTC: How do you know it is time to end a relationship?
NL: A good time to give up is when you’re basically bankrupting yourself of your self-esteem. When the person is chipping away at you by making a lot of underhanded or direct comments, mind-fuckery, covert abuse where there are underlying threats, any cheating, any ex lurking around in the background that they’re still flip-flapping around with – those are all red flags. If you can’t treat yourself with love, care and respect as long as you’re involved with this particular person, that’s about the time you should be making an exit.
There are certain types of toxic people – narcissists and sociopaths – that simply can’t use what they don’t have. You cannot have a mutually fulfilling & successful relationship with a person who doesn’t have empathy. They will use you to meet their own needs, expectations and desires at whatever cost they see fit.
Finally, if somebody can lay their hands on you and they lack that impulse control, then where do you have to go from there?
I’m not saying that people can’t change, but particularly as women, we have a habit of remaining with the person in the hopes that they will change. We don’t know our line on these things – because then we start looking for a return on investment. It becomes a case of; we’ve been together for so long, and I’ve been through so much with this person – to leave now would almost be a waste! What if I leave and they end up being with someone else and become a better person in a relationship with them?
If your relationship is reliant on them having to make some big change because you cannot accept them as is, the relationship cannot work.
SDTC: What is your advice to women stuck in toxic relationships?
NL: If you feel like you’re stuck in a toxic situation, there’s nothing wrong with going to therapy – self-awareness and self-knowledge are a really important part of your toolkit. When you understand you better, and why you may be choosing to do certain things, then you have a better idea of what does and doesn’t work for you. If you’re really struggling, there are very good grief and breakup support groups. What causes a lot of people to remain in these situations is they think that they’re alone. These groups can help you step outside of your situation and open up your perspective.
I didn’t go down the therapy route, but I found that getting into things to take care of my overall well-being gradually gave me the strength to deal with other aspects of my life. I was taking care of what I was eating, I was thinking more about me, and as a result of that, I was having to set healthier boundaries in my life. Suddenly, I found that being around guys who just didn’t want to step up and show up and be available – actually didn’t work for me. If you can focus on self-soothing and self care, you’ll find that confidence gradually starts to grow and the perspective starts to alter and suddenly that person doesn’t seem so vital.
SDTC: You talk a lot about the ‘No Contact’ Rule (cutting off ALL forms of communication with an ex) after a relationship ends. How did you happen upon this?
NL: I stumbled into ‘No Contact’ purely by accident. I did it for self preservation because I was working with the ex that I needed to step back from. I realized that the more we try to do this ‘let’s be friends’, ‘let’s hang out’ thing, the worse I felt. I kept inadvertently giving mixed messages. When he wasn’t really respecting what I was saying to him, I found that I just had to cut it off. If he emailed me or texted me or called me about anything that was unrelated to work, I didn’t respond.
It used to be that it you broke up, you broke up. Unless you worked together or you had kids together, if you wanted to know what was going on in your ex’s life, you had to practically stalk them to find out. You had to be follwoing them and be all up in their business. Now? You’re a click away. You can be on Facebook or Twitter, monitoring their movements, or they’re monitoring yours. We’re obsessed with this whole thing of keeping in touch after you break up. You can’t move on when you’re doing that. You have to give yourself time to reset and reboot. You have to put your lives back together without each other.
The “No Contact” rule works in toxic relationships, but it also works in those ambiguous relationships you can get into with the Mr. Unavailables of this world. Because its’ so ambiguous when you’re together, when you both go your separate ways, it ends up being an ambiguous breakup as well. He may seem fit to keep dipping in and out of your life, and that’s frustrating, because we misinterpret the fact that somebody keeps texting us, or Facebooking us, or liking our picture. We think; ‘Oh! They want to be with us! They want to get back together!’ Then we reignite our feelings and thoughts about the whole thing, and then we approach them, and get burned all over again.
SDTC: Have we moved away from taking responsibility for ourselves?
NL: There has been a definite shift. It took a while – I joined Facebook in 2007 – but in the past 5 years, most emails I get from people talking about the problems they have with their relationships, have an element of Facebook or some sort of social media immaturity involved with it.
I hear from people who fret that they posted a picture and it only got x number of likes, or their ex liked this person’s photo. We’re collecting attention all the time. We’re always looking for strokes, looking for validation. Doing things only because they will garner likes and attention from people. That’s just no way to live. It’s exhausting.
I think that we live in a time when we’re a bit more disposable about people. We’re treating people as if it’s a people supermarket, that they’re commodities that are just dispensable. We take people for granted more, and we have more of a sense of entitlement as well – we feel entitled to linger around and stay in our ex’s life. We feel entitled to have a casual relationship with a person, even if that person isn’t responding very well to it. We feel entitled to mistreat people.
I hear a lot of ‘I told her I wasn’t looking for a relationship” – yeah, but even when she backed away from you, you started messaging and texting her all the time! They absolutely will not take responsibility for it. As humans, when did we stop being conscientious about other people’s feelings? When did we stop having integrity? If you know that, realistically, all you’re really going to do is use somebody, why are you trying to act like its something so much more than what it is? If you feel entitled to do what you’re doing, why aren’t you honest with the person about it? Why is it that when the woman backs away, you then chase her down and say something to get her back into your life and then dump her all over again?
It’s an ego thing. They feel out of control when you’re not interested or they’re in danger of losing the relationship, so they get things back and then they lose interest all over again.
SDTC: How can we develop emotional maturity?
NL: A lot of us come into adult life and expect that things will all just slot together. Adulthood is about unlearning some of the unproductive stuff we’ve learned along the way to get to adulthood. We have to take over the role of raising ourselves. We have to figure out who we are and we have to figure out our values. But if we want to have these loving relationships that we desire, if we want to be understood, if we want to have intimacy, if we want to have commitment, then we’ve also got to show up that way as well – with those components ourselves.
Before I started Baggage Reclaim, I was a hot mess. You would look around and see magazine covers – “10 ways to please your man” and “10 Ways To Seduce Him”. It’s all this superficial stuff- prance around in sexy underwear, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, blah blah blah. That narrative is really disempowering for women, actually.
We’ve been raised on a diet of this foolishness from when we were kids. Like when you were in the playground and a boy is mean to you – and people tell you the reason why the kid is being mean to you is because he likes you. When we get to adulthood, if we don’t differentiate between childishness and someone actually being mean to us, we’re going think that when a guy is mean to us, it’s just because he’s really really keen on us.
If we’re staying in relationships with men (or women) who do not value us, who do not treat us with respect, where there isn’t that mutual trust, where there isn’t that mutual care, where we’re basically almost like a child in the relationship because we feel so diminished and powerless, then we have to ask; why do I feel I need to behave this way? What is it about the way that I feel about me that might be influencing the types of relationships I choose to be in in the first place?
If we want to have command over our lives, if we want to feel happier, if we want to have more influence over the way we feel and the choices that we make, we can’t just blithely go along and be like; “oh, eventually things will go my way!” Once we realized that we are the common denominator, we can take back our power, we can take back that driving force for change in our lives.
SDTC: Is there some way we can expedite our own emotional growth?
NL: There isnt a magic bullet as such. But you can make changes within your own life and improve the way you feel about yourself in a relatively short period of time, especially when you compare it to how long you felt bad about yourself or how long you may have been engaging in bad habits. If you want to have more loving relationships, you first have to take a break from relationships. If you’re not in a relationship, have a dating break. You may be surprised – this is where you really test out if people actually want to expedite their own emotional growth amd self-esteem. A lot of people are afraid of taking a break – they think, ‘If I take my eyes off this dating website for 2 or 3 months, my dream man will have disappeared and be snapped up by somebody else.’ If you want to feel better about yourself, take yourself out of the dating pool for a while if you can. That allows you to get acquainted with you.
Keep a feelings diary: Keeping track of how you feel and what you do on a daily basis is very good for self-awareness. It stops you from doing things for the wrong reasons, you start to see patterns within your life.
Ask: What is it that I am looking for others to be and do for me that I need to be being and doing for myself? If you start to do those things, your confidence and contentment with you actually goes up. A lot of the time, our relationships provide a window into understanding what we need. If you’re looking to grow quickly – be honest. What was it that really frustrated me about the relationship? What was it that was missing? Whatever it was that frustrated you or was missing, handle that within yourself, and you will get closer to that relationship that is more befitting of you.
We get into relationships and when we don’t have that self-awareness – we think; ‘ Oh, I’m having such a great time, I really really like them’ and however many weeks or months down the line we go; ‘Oh, that’s a bit weird. I’m not feeling particularly happy and I don’t understand why’. How is it that I’m really into this person and I don’t really like them – as in, I don’t like their values, or they don’t want to commit to me.
Instead, if we are honest with ourselves about what our needs are, what frustrates us in a relationship, and where we can step up ourselves, we are that much more personally secure. Personal security helps us to be so much more confident, and it also makes us more attractive to someone who is an available partner. Water seeks its own level.
You can access all of Natalie’s books, podcasts and posts at Baggage Reclaim. Her books will be available on Audible in Spring 2015.
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