Relationship Red Flags Are Gifts Not to be Ignored
Learning about relationship red flags is a vitally important topic for us from our codependent, perfectionist and people pleasing habits! Because we are constantly sourcing our self worth outside of ourselves. When someone wants to date us—while I’ll be framing this in dating, we can take these same lessons and apply them outside of a romantic relationship context—our desire to be validated by feeling wanted by someone else can outweigh or outshine those red flags.
As we are doing the work of overcoming our codependency, perfectionism and people pleasing, we may start to see the red flags in our past and present relationships, red flags we may not have been able to see before or while we were in the situation, places where we didn’t have our own backs where we didn’t trust ourselves, or intuition or discernment, because so often we do see the red flag… and we keep on going anyway.
We didn’t trust ourselves to say, this doesn’t work for me and to let that be okay, to trust that tiny calm quiet voice inside that says “mi amor – andate YA” – “my love – go now.” Or we’re worried about other people’s feelings so we feel obligated to stick around.
And so, with each red flag ignored, we continued living from our old habit, one often learned in childhood, of trading acceptance by others for our own authenticity, we traded our alignment with ourselves for that acceptance too.
We said yes to things that didn’t feel good for us, didn’t feel like the right choice for us, didn’t feel like they were aligned with our wants or needs, things that didn’t serve us.
We said yes to those things, as a way to establish acceptance and connection with others, and in the process gave up our authentic connection with ourselves.
And this is what we do, on a subconscious level from our codependency. All humans seek what feels familiar to them, and we seek what feels like safety, what looks like connection, what smells like approval and validation, what has that shiny sheen of potential love from other people.
In looking for all of that externally before we have a solid connection with our own ability to create safety, connection, approval validation and love internally, for ourselves, we gloss over all the red flags.
Especially if they are the same red flags that were stand-ins for love, acceptance and connection in our childhood. That is, if you’re dating someone and they’re emotionally unavailable the same way one of your parents was, then your inner children and your nervous system are like “I know how to manage this, lemme try this situation again.” It’s called reenactment in the nervous system world my nerds. And let’s see if I can give and give and overfunction and prove myself and suffer and tolerate enough this time to create a different outcome. One where that emo unavailable person suddenly changes just for me because I’m that powerful in this fantasy world of mine in which I can control other people.
Now sub in any old red flag for emotionally unavailable.
- Is unkind to waitstaff
- Doesn’t share your values
- Is unkind to you
- Doesn’t ask you any questions about you
- Talking down to you
- Invalidating your lived experience
- Does that hot/cold, push/pull emotional game
- Inability to reason/talk through things with empathy, openness or love
- Buys you expensive or lavish gifts or experiences like trips or tickets when they mess up instead of taking responsibility for their actions
- That person who doesn’t communicate with you the way you want to or ghosts you for periods of time
- Who doesn’t respect your boundaries, your limits, your friends
- Who disrespects your emotions or sensitivity
- Who isn’t emotionally present when you’re trying to have a conversation
We have the tendency to push these things aside when our goal in dating is to fill the void of unworthiness in our hearts, when our goal is for someone else to validate us or give us the love we aren’t giving ourselves instead of looking to dating as being in relationship as a way to grow.
And when we are so used to tolerating bs in the name of love, a lesson we often learned in childhood, then these red flags may seem “tolerable” at first but really wear a person down and breed resentment over time, and take us father away from building deeply loving and interdependent relationships, and further down the rabbit hole of codependent pain and suffering.
When you look the other other way, especially early in the dating process, when you self abandon and betray your adult self from an inner child script about safety and belonging, those little hurts tend to snow ball and become huge misalignments a year or 10 down the road.
Continuing to look past the red flags is setting yourself up for massive and painful disappointment, and potentially pricey divorce lawyers, down the road.
We can actually shift the lens on red flags and to can actually look at them right in snout, can step into the recognition of them, and can thereby start healing them, using the awareness of and the noticing of them as a helpful tool for our personal growth and our growth in our relationships
So the first thing is to start to consider that seeing a red flag, noticing it, taking stock of it, labeling it, naming it like ooh, that is that doesn’t feel right in my body.
The way that person talks to me, the way they talk about me or about their exes, the way their values, what matters to them in the world, that’s not aligning for me.
And that feels like a red flag about how our relationship could go in the future.
So noticing the red flag and naming them is an amazing gift to give yourself and the people in your life because it helps you to see the roads you don’t want to go down.
Because previously in my own life, I saw those red flags and thought “Ooh, shiny. I love red.”
And the work is to be present with and for ourselves, to be clear on our inherent self worth and the fact, your scientist said fact and you know that science nerds don’t say fact lightly but my love it’s a fact that you were born so deeply worthy of love and care and goodness. When we date from truly knowing and believing that, and not from a place of wanting someone else to evidence that for you, then you go in with your eyes wide open, conscious of what is, radically accepting what is and not projecting your desire to be loved on to someone who is not ready, willing and able to love you the way you deserve.
So the work is to learn to be mindful so you can see the red flags and can make note of them and be like, “Oh, it’s time for the pause button.”
So you can say: I don’t like this, or that doesn’t work for me. What this person offers is not what I want in my life, and you can own that with less guilt and shame, because you’re owning it from self love, not from judging or criticizing them, but from your autonomy, your intuition, your discernment.
From listening in to your body to hear the difference between this is a yes in my bones, this is a no in everything or… I don’t know yet if it’s a yes or a no, so it’s time to go slowly, and to gather more information before I spin off into fantasy land about what may be when I don’t know enough yet.
So my take on red flags is this: they are such a massive gift when we can spot them and honor them and heed them.
They give us so much information about who we are, where we are in our lives and our growth in our healing, and where we want to go, the work we still want to do to be in right relationship with ourselves, what we might want to explore about ourselves, our past, our future desires, our own inner workings.
Spotting a red flag is an opportunity to get curious.
So some questions that we can ask ourselves around the red flags that we’re seeing in our past relationships and current relationships are:
- What part of me, of my body, my mind, is reacting to what I’m seeing in this other person?
- Why am I calling it a red flag? This question is important because it helps us understand if we are coming from judgment or from feeling like something is out of alignment for us.
- What does a warning sign feel like in my body? When and where have I felt this before?
- Is this familiar behavior? From when? From whom?
- Where in my past have I seen this before? What was my relationship with that person who also acted this way? This is important to ask because if this is similar behavior to an attachment figure like a parent whose love you craved, you may be attracted to that energy because your nervous system finds it cozy and comfortable because its familiar to you.
When you’re thinking about past relationships:
- Was I able to see red flags in the moment in past relationships?
- Was I able to honor that internal emotional check engine light or did I just keep driving?
- If the latter: what allowed me to just keep revving the engine when my foot wanted to hit the brake so hard?
- Aka: Why did it feel easier to bypass my own knowing that something was off rather than take care of myself?
- Was I putting someone else’s potential hurt above my own?
- Where did I learn that codependent lesson?
- What lies did I have to tell myself, and my friends, to make sense of a situation that didn’t feel right?
- What basic human need was I seeking to meet: love, acceptance, connection, validation, belonging, care, etc.
- How can I start to give myself these things I looked to others for?
- How can I get these needs met by other relationships, like friendships, so I can go slowly in dating and can have my eyes open?
- What feelings was I attempting to avoid by staying in a relationship once I saw the red flags? Feelings like abandonment, disappointment, loneliness, shame, guilt, loss, etc.
- How can I begin to practice sitting with those uncomfortable and challenging feelings? What are my internal nervous system resources that can support me?
- From what I know now, from who I’m learning to trust myself to be in the world, how can I give past me the love, care and compassion I need to grow?
- How can I be kind to past me for not knowing what I didn’t know when I didn’t know it?
- Finally, what lessons can I learn from past dating and relationship experiences that I can bring into the present and the future so I can craft the love life I truly want and can see the red flags and can walk the other way?
What these questions point us to is that if we are to do things differently in the future, we need to take stock of why we did what we did in the past, so we can create a new story, a new narrative, a new self concept.
And the key here is your self concept, the story of who we are in relationship to ourselves, to lovers, to friends, to work, to parents, to children, to siblings. Who are we in relationship to ourselves and the world. And part and parcel of that is knowing what is and is not acceptable behavior in our lives in the future, we can know our limits and can set boundaries
This is how can we take care of ourselves, protect ourselves, and how we can make choices that really honor the us we want to be moving forward.
Sure, a lot of this is easier said than done, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than waking up 10 years into an unhappy marriage where those small red flags from your first date have turned into your daily or weekly fights or conflicts.
This is where we need to really sit with the discomfort of looking at our past and from there, recognizing that we have the power to craft our future, to truly write the story of the next chapter of our lives, based on where we’ve been and with a real real consciousness of where we want to go moving forward. So that we can start to value ourselves and what matters to us more than we value someone else liking us, someone else, providing a temporary sense of safety or connection, a temporary sense of significance or importance.
And we can really start to embody that significance for ourselves.
We can look to other relationships, to get support and love and care while we build that within ourselves.
So if you find yourself, chronically dating the emotionally or physically unavailable person, if you find yourself chronically dating someone whose values are wildly unaligned with yours, but happens to be the person who likes you. If you find yourself looking back on your past relationships and saying, I should have seen that red flag, this is your moment.
This is your chance to pause, to step into self love and self acceptance, to bring in compassion and to say, “You know what, I did that. I was in those relationships. I saw the red flag. I went running into another relationship that mirrors the relationship my parents or caregivers had. Another relationship where I am showing up inauthentically, not as my deepest self.
But I showed up and chameleon, I shaped shifted. I tried to gain someone else’s affection and approval over my own. And what happened is that the relationship ended, each and every time because of course it did!
Because the red flags that you see at the beginning of a relationship will multiply.
They will become bigger and bigger and bigger because we are generally on our best behavior at the beginning of a relationship, so if you’re already seeing that big ole red stop sign that says no, it’s just gonna get bigger and bigger as the relationship continues. So I’ll invite you to pause, to see and heed those internal cues, and to take the time to ask yourself the questions I posed here for you.
Because that person who doesn’t want to have kids when it’s all you’ve ever wanted, that person who’s not financially secure, when that you’ve worked so hard to be, when someone’s values—what matters to them—is not aligned with what matters to you, those are issues worth your attention.
So when your values, your wants in life, your needs in relationship, your ways of being in the world are not aligned from jump, you get to tell that codependent fixer part of you that they need to slow their roll and back it up and stop believing stories like, “Well if I just love them hard enough they won’t be a slob. If I’m just like such a good partner, then they’ll want to have kids with me. If I’m just such an amazing teacher. I’ll show them the value of saving money and respecting your belonging and your space. I’ll show them the value of cleaning up and having mutuality and reciprocity. I’ll show them and then they’ll see!”
Baby, none of those stories serve you or the person you’re trying to change, and it doesn’t serve you to shape shift to try to make someone work in your life when your discernment says no.
So if you see the red flags, honor yourself and the other person. Pause, run a reality check with your friends. Get an outside opinion while you’re learning to trust your own and just pause. If something in your body says, “This doesn’t feel right.” Trust that it’s not right. Ask yourself the questions I posed here and learn to honor yourself, your discernment, what’s real about you and that other person right now, in this moment, and give yourself the massive gift of radical honesty and radical acceptance. You deserve nothing less.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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