http://www.heathercatherinecarter.com/link-in-bio

Heather Catherine Carter, San Francisco, CA (2025)

02/28/2024

People use belittling tactics to evade, deflect, and gaslight their partners.

The best way to do this is through texting.

The toxic person hides behind texting to demean, detach, and deflect.

These belittling tactics are used to take the focus off of your needs or if they cheated or not...

To focus on you and get you off balance, feeling crazy, and begging for more.

To do this, they use belittling tactics.

+ Criticism

Comments or criticisms that make you feel insecure, focusing on the negative and designed to create self-doubt.

+ Trivializing

A remark that trivializes your feelings, thoughts, experiences, or accomplishments, making you feel unimportant, invalidating your feelings or downplaying them.

+ Discounting

Bringing up past mistakes or failures: this will keep you stuck and unable to move forward or improve. It is negative and disempowering.

+ Manipulation

Speculation over a circumstantial situation: fabricating something to paint an unflattering picture of you.

+ Undermining

Questions about someone’s judgment or competency: this is a way to discredit or attack your faculties and make you feel inferior or incompetent.

+ Condescension

Shaming, embarrassing language: this is meant to make you feel foolish, self-conscious, flustered, or humiliated.

+ Insults

Demeaning comments that make you feel inferior or worthless.

+ Put-Downs

Comments designed to elicit guilt or shame: this could be a form of emotional blackmail that makes you feel obligated. "If you keep asking me if I cheated I am done with you."

Belittling is a covert form of manipulation and abuse that happens gradually.

02/27/2024

A co-committed relationship rests on several intentions agreed on by both persons. If you are willing to make the following commitments but your partner is not, you might be in a codependent relationship.

1. Each of you commits to complete closeness and to clear up anything that stands in the way. The intimacy begins when two people agree they desire closeness and are willing to clean up and heal their barriers.

2. You must commit to yourself healing and development as an individual. You cannot have ultimate closeness without being entirely separate. The more fully developed and healed you are, the more easily you can give and receive healthy love. In a healthy, co-committed relationship, space is as crucial as closeness.

3. Commit to revealing yourself fully in the relationships, not concealing yourself. A major shift happens when we reveal who we are and stop concealing.

4. Commit yourself to the empowerment of people around you. In codependence, you enable other people to be ineffective. In co-commitment, you enable them to be powerful. So much can be accomplished when you and your partner commit to mutual growth.

5. Commit to yourself that you are 100% responsible and the source of your reality. You are not a victim if you participate. Unconscious loving feeds on victimhood, which can only exist when people are not taking responsibility for what is happening to them.

We can be victims of abuse, gaslighting, and people taking advantage of us. But as long as we keep going along with it, nothing changes.

Ask yourself why you keep going along with the abuse, the disrespect, and being taken advantage of.

Are you willing to risk being alone?

In unhealthy relationships, people are firmly committed to...

*Power struggles: who is right/wrong, whose problem is it, who's having a harder time...

*Caretaking-doing everything for a partner and getting little in return

*Cleaning up the other's messes, financial, and internal, conflicts with others

*Cooking three meals a day, massaging the partner's feet...acting as their mother, and wondering why they take no responsibility

02/26/2024

We believe if our partner would give us what we want (the solution), our problem would go away.

We suffer when we expect people to give us what we want.

Suffering is an unmet expectation.

And when you expect people to help you get what you want and you don't get it, you feel fear.

What do we want from our partners?

+ Attention
+ Validation
+ Support
+ Trust
+ Love
+ Respect
+ Commitment
+ Safety
+ Affection
+ Understanding
+ Success

We know we all want these things, but when you grow up in environments where you were never given those things, you don't feel you can trust that you're good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, or worthy enough to be given these things.

So when conflict arises, all your fears are brought to the surface.

You think the conflict is about finances, kids, s*x, you name it, but that adult conversation doesn't happen because your inner child was triggered, and suddenly, your latent wounding and fears creep in.

The adult wants to feel______ instead the wounded inner child feels______

Safe: in danger
Connected: disconnected
Accepted: Rejected
Worthy: worthless
Trust: mistrust
Significant: unimportant
Wanted: unwanted
Commitment: abandonment
Understood: misunderstood

Instead of finding a solution, we react by:

* Withdrawing
* Blaming
* Criticizing
* Using sarcasm
* Throwing tantrums
* Projecting
* Invalidating
* Fleeing
* Being passive-aggressive
* Manipulating
* Controlling

You can stop at the moment and ask yourself or your partner:

P1: I know you are feeling very upset right now. What is upsetting you?

P2: I am afraid of losing you...I feel invalidated...I feel insignificant...I feel disconnected, and it is causing me to feel anxious.

P1:
*Why do you think you are going to lose me?
* How can I help with those feelings?
* Have I been ignoring you?
* What do you need from me?

It's about taking the emotional reaction to the fear out of the equation and fixing the symptom of the root problem.

What is the symptom?

Anxiety.

The root problem is inner child wounding.

02/25/2024

Should I stay or should I go? You're thinking about leaving your relationship.

You've hoped love would be enough.

You believe you have worked to resolve the issues in your relationship, have you?

You may have tried to accept things as they are.

You keep agonizing over the possibility of leaving.

The choices are:⁣
⁣
1. 𝙏𝙤 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙮 𝙞𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥, and seek help. Recommitting to it free of doubt, free of holding back, free at last to pour your love and energy into the relationship, and find and sustain the love and connection you desire and deserve.⁣
⁣
2. 𝙏𝙤 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥, finally liberating yourself from it, free from confusion pain, free at last to get on with a new and better life. ⁣
⁣
You sit in relationship ambivalence when you're stuck, not knowing which choice to make. I deal with this all the time. ⁣
⁣
The problem isn't that you don't know what's happening; you are having trouble sorting it all out. ⁣
⁣
People see more than one difficulty in every problem.

They're trying to find solutions for ten things instead of the actual problem.⁣
⁣
There is only 𝙤𝙣𝙚 problem, not many.
⁣
People come at me with, "he does this, she does this, oh, and that too, and her family, and his friends, and we don't agree on this..."⁣
⁣
While all those things are true, they keep you stuck in ambivalence—𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙥 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙮 𝙤𝙧 𝙜𝙤.⁣⁣
⁣
We live in an age that promotes self-awareness but fails to show us how to use self-awareness to make good decisions. ⁣
⁣
My goal is to help you rediscover the value of your own experience.
⁣
The choice you discover will be one you feel good about after you make it and better and better about as time passes. It will be a choice that leaves you free of regret. ⁣
⁣
I tell my clients that we will either come to a reconciliation or a successful separation. ⁣

When you start planning to leave, the thoughts start creeping up, "Will I be able to afford my life? Will I find love again?"

It's not helping.

Asking friends and family does not help.

The pros and cons list is good if you're buying a car or making a career change, not determining your marriage status.

I ask my client/s 15-20 questions when they need clarification on whether they want to save the relationship.

The answer to the first question, "When things were at their best between you and your partner, would you say they were really good?"

I have had people tell me the only time it was good was on the honeymoon, and they didn't want to marry this person in the first place.

One person told me they knew they made the wrong choice when their husband pulled out a tarp on their wedding night and put it on the bed.

I can't make this up!

Not much here to work with.

Most of the time, it's not so cut and dry. But their answers point me in the right direction.

I can fix what's broken, but I can't fix what never worked!

02/24/2024

Divorce can be hell. It is confusing and tiring; most people think they're divorcing for one reason, but in reality, they're divorcing for a totally different reason.

People cannot understand why people stay married for 10, 15, or 20 + years and then divorce.

I see why, over and over, a true divorce is against our false self.

When we married, for many, the contract was made by their needy and dependent inner child.

One person grows, the other stays stagnant, and the person who grew sheds the mask they wore when they said, "I do."

When one person heals and grows, they cannot live as their inauthentic self a moment longer.

They finally find their true identity, uncover who they really are, and are no longer operating from the inner child but as the adult.

The only way a relationship works is when there are two adults.

Two inner children make most marriage contracts.

If one heals and begins to operate out of their adult self, but their partner still operates from their inner child, the healed partner becomes the parent.

The parent/child relationship is nearly as reactionary as the duo of inner children.

The reactions create the disconnect.

To stop the reactions, you must get to the root of the problem.

In our 20s, we are just learning who we are.

We will change; hopefully, we will grow, heal, and become wise.

When neither partner grows, it will be a disastrous, mediocre marriage where the fights will escalate, or you will end up living with your roommate.

To make it work, you and your partner need to grow together.

The partner stuck in their reactionary patterns and comfort zones feel betrayed.

We cannot feel betrayed because another person has transformed and found themselves.

The choice becomes for the other partner to heal, or they will separate and divorce.

The narcissist hates when their partner heals and finally says, "No more."

I have helped many people walk through a divorce with a narcissist. It gets ugly.

When we are not taught to self-regulate, understand, and process our emotions, we will eat, drink, gamble, shop, or s*xualize them away.

When one partner decides they will no longer use coping mechanisms or are sick of the unrest, the other partner will try to sabotage their efforts.

Suddenly, the partner that is not growing is feeling threatened.

They no longer feel safe or like they belong and will do whatever they can to pull their partner back into the drama.

The hardest thing for the healing partner is to stay the course and not get sucked back in while gently guiding their partner to healing themselves.

Instead of saying to their partner, "Can we talk? I am feeling left out and disconnected?"

They become critical and put down their partner and efforts.

During this time, I have to guide my client on dealing with the attacks that will surely come while staying on course and doing my best to save the marriage and help the partner who is not participating in healing.

Heather Catherine Carter

02/28/2024

02/27/2024

02/26/2024

02/25/2024

02/24/2024

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