RED FLAGS: The Grand Myths and Super Importance
So, now we come to a pretty big juncture in the process of examining self. Really, it’s where the test comes. Joe Frank, my high school wrestling coach, who had coached many teams to State Championships, would regularly speak gems such as, “You cannot get to State on just one move,” only to be followed, weeks later, by the paradoxical, yet oddly wise-feeling, “It only takes one move to get to State.” 🤷🏼♂️ It wasn’t lost on us how nonsensical those two statements sounded tied together. Yet, we also knew the absolute wisdom and truth of them both, even put together. Thus, when plainer ones were spoken, they landed hard, not the least of which was this one,
In everything in life
You’re either learning
Or being tested.
-Joe Frank, High School Wrestling Coach
Y’know how relationship coaches and therapists regularly tell people at the time of breakups and divorces that they need to take some time, maybe a year, to just be by themselves, to do some healing, to learn to be alone, and to look at their own issues, etc.? Well, part of the reason for encouraging that is so that the individual will not carry their own crap into the next relationship. As talked about in Love Cup, unhealthy people come in twos. Therefore, I do have some measure of culpability for the trajectory of the failed relationship, even if it is only complicity. And that culpability reflects issues going on inside of me that I need to go deep into or they will, as a matter of fact, manifest in the next relationship, even if in very different ways. Thus, I owe it to both myself and my next relationship, as well as my next partner, to do that hard, ugly inner work now.
So, for the sake of argument, let’s say I do that work now. Let’s say I take 18 months to be alone and heal, and I actually dive deep into the inner crud that caused me to do, and not do, things in the past relationship that undermined the quality of the relationship, the other person, and my own happiness. Let’s say it’s very difficult but fruitful work, filled with aha’s and changes in me.
The day is going to have to come, if I want to be in a relationship again, where I have to step out of the laboratory doing research and carry that research into actual trials for testing. Everything I’ve learned has to be put into practice. This is where the next step of the journey and the challenge happens. The healing and growing process was its own challenge, because I had to face really crummy stuff from my own behaviors and belief patterns, as well as where it all came from, and the implications of what that says about the people who taught me to believe these things about myself. All of these challenges and revelations pruned me, grew me, and expanded my sense of self and worth.
But, knowing it and living it are two vastly different things, sometimes. Putting it into practice, particularly in the dating experience, or even the entrepreneurial process for those falling in love with starting a business, and/or especially those commencing the parenting process is where old patterns can and will creep back in. New growth will be tested hard. New beliefs will be pushed back on and demand new levels of courage and self-belief in order to become fully cemented.
This is never truer than in the inevitable encounter of Red Flags in relationships.
Intuition & the Problem with the Red Flag Definition
The goal of all my work with you is to help you have greater communion with your own inner voice, the voice of your authentic self – to help you, more and more, both hear it and have the courage to heed it, especially when it’s scary or hard. That is the voice of your authenticity. That is the path to your greatest ALIVENESS! The express purpose of my 64-week Top-10 bestselling book, There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, was to walk you through what it takes to begin and advance that soul connecting process.
Now, what that means when it comes to the discussion of Red Flags is that I view them completely differently from how everyone else does. Fundamentally, Red Flags, as we generally understand them, do not exist. The rough construction of a Red Flag is:
RED FLAG:
Something that’s wrong with the other person
that is a giant problem to a relationship and
tells you there’s even greater problems ahead
if you don’t stop them or the relationship, now;
also, the thing you kick yourself most for, years later,
after the relationship has gone sour and ended.
The failure of this general understanding of Red Flags is that it puts the focus on the other person, as if both disease and cure are resolved by improving your ‘picker.’ This also means, reading backward, that the problems you’ve had in past relationships were largely a result of having chosen the wrong person, in the first place. That is not the root of the problem. And, failing to drill down to the root means that any solution created will be but a half-solution, at best.
As it impacts dating, this old mentality and definition mean that you’re forever reading this person outside of you for cues and clues that might indicate narcissism, love-bombing, and every other problem known in the jargon of the layperson scrolling Instagram or TikTok. It creates a state of hyper-vigilance, a fear-based posture for dating. And, while past experiences may justify such fear, fear and happiness are inversely correlated – the more of one, the less of the other. Plus, in a situation – dating – where opening up of the soul, even if slowly, is more needed and facilitates the connection process, fear enacts the exact opposite in a person. It causes a closing up of the soul, an unwillingness to be vulnerable, an us-vs-them mentality. That never leads to good relationships.
The healed soul, or even the person well along on the soul-communion process sees Red Flags very differently. When you’ve gone in and done the truly deep work of confronting and excising the BS core beliefs you formerly could not even see about yourself, what naturally grows in their place is a greater awareness of your authentic voice and identity, needs and feelings inside and on your skin. See, the purpose and power of awareness is not just in seeing what’s truly going on around you, but, far more importantly, it’s real punch comes from being able to sense, moment to moment, what is going on inside yourself, the real stuff, not just your reactions because of stuff from your past that has caused you to be triggered.
Once you feel and prioritize the movements of your body, which are the voice of your soul speaking to you, and the more fluent you become in the conversation between your mind and your soul – i.e. the better you get at both listening to and acting on that voice of that soul, trusting it with the actions of your life – it really becomes quite irrelevant who the person is that is sitting across from you, whether in a dating/relationship situation, work situation, friendship or family setting. For, you are no longer reading each person looking for clues that might indicate what is wrong with them, as if things are hidden that you must find in order for you to be safe enough to decide whether to open up more.
Becoming more fully aware of what’s going on inside you means that in any situation you need only read yourself, listening intently for how things feel – persons, situations, decisions, or anything else. It’s trusting that your inner self, your vibe, your energy, your vision and hearing, and every other sense is picking up on everything going on in a situation, synthesizing it, and sending a message back to you through your body and how it feels. The reason feelings of the soul and the body are so important to teach a child to listen to, is because that is how that girl’s/boy’s soul is going to communicate with her/him throughout their life. Short-circuit that and you corrupt their own built-in sixth sense for knowing what feels right to do in a situation. Like a deer in the woods, whale in the ocean, or horse in the pasture, the child and the adult sense changes in the environment. They can sense when something or someone feels safe, moment to moment. They sense when to get closer and when to hold their guard. But if that natural ‘reading of self’ mechanism is corrupted by parental messages saying, “Don’t trust your own voice. Only listen to me (an external power source),” then that child and later adult will forever be in danger. For, their own internal guidance and safety systems have been infected with the parent virus.
The more we engage in flushing out all of the pain, fears, and BS beliefs we’ve been taught about ourselves, the more we’re able to be fully present in any situation, fully safe, knowing that when that message rises up from a part of the body it will be heeded to get answers and have conversation for greater understanding and demanding that boundaries and respect be honored.
In short, the more you become connected to your own soul, the less neurotic you are in dating or anything else in life, because you have the power to hear and heed when stuff doesn’t feel right to you. So, whether it’s the beginning of a friendship or 25 years into one, when something doesn’t feel good to you, you act on it, never allowing it to metastasize to the size of something unwieldy or scary. In the past, you might’ve only spoken up when sh*t really spun out of control or got huge. But, that mentality was based on the long-ago embedded notion that your voice, especially when an issue is small, doesn’t matter, “So, shut up!” Whereas, the more you trust and believe in your voice, you act on it when it’s small both because it does matter to you, and because you know.
With that firmly in mind, the definition of Red Flags completely blows up. No longer is it determined by something wrong with another person, per se. No longer is it some giant thing, such as narcissism, that you need to see the signs of and be on the lookout for. Instead, it reads like this:
RED FLAG:
Anything that doesn’t feel good to you,
in any way, whatsoever. Ever.
They’re alerts that something is about to get worse
if YOU do not correct the course of what’s happening outside of you.
Your body and energy are sending signals to you constantly, those pings on the sonar. So, when something feels off in any situation it’s a Red Flag to you, saying, “Listen! This doesn’t feel good. DO NOT SHUT UP! SPEAK UP…NOW! NOW! NOW!” It’s not that something is wrong with them, per se; it’s that something is off in you and demanding immediate attention to restore peace and happiness inside of you.
If that peace, or equilibrium that you’ve created inside of you by the work you’ve done is not immediately re-established by your actions of speaking up and not backing down, it will persist in you. You will let it fester and you’ll begin to question yourself, your judgment, and what you should do in this situation, because you know – you know! – it doesn’t feel right or that something feels off. Your body, and the soul/intuition driving it, are talking to you. And, you’re caught between listening to it and tell it to “Shut up,” like you were fundamentally trained to do, by family, society, and whatever other source.
What happens if you don’t listen to it and act on it? Small things become big things. The very first time you allow an apology to be dropped, a hurtful comment to be ignored, or a commitment to be broken, you create the potential for a pattern. For, all patterns start with a very first instance, every single one of them. Always. The more in-tune with self you are, the higher likelihood your sonar picks up that ping.
Then it becomes an issue of whether you act on it. If you don’t act on it when your sonar picks it up, then YOU are starting the pattern. YOU are allowing for the possibility of a second occurrence. By not standing up and shutting that action down by demanding an apology or correction, you’re greenlighting that behavior, even if you never explicitly state that doing that thing to you is okay. Then, if/when that action happens again, the person can state, “Oh, I didn’t know that wasn’t okay, because you didn’t say anything about it last time.” And, while that may seem like a BS statement on their part, because their action is to you so blatantly bad, their logic is not wrong. You did allow it, which tacitly states that treatment like that is okay.
Now, the stakes radically increased. Because, if it does happen again and you don’t call it out the second time, correcting your error in letting it go the first time, you’ve basically screwed yourself. You’ve ignored, or not acted on, your own soul/intuition speaking twice, which is the beginning of a pattern that has doubled. At this point, it is much harder to backtrack later and correct it. That’s not to say it cannot be corrected, only that with each re-occurrence that is allowed, the more that treatment becomes cemented firmly in the ‘Acceptable Treatment’ column of the unwritten contract between you and that person. As such, it becomes much harder to shut down later.
If you don’t trust and act on what doesn’t feel good to you, when it’s small, that “doesn’t feel good” is only going to increase, until it gets so bad that you finally give yourself permission to act on it. Or not. Not acting on it is when you see your life slipping away after 10, 20, or 30 years because you’ve been tolerating this crappy treatment that became indifference that became, perhaps, even meanness, abuse, or the near-absolute using of you. That rut you’ve been living in, that rut that began the very time you felt it not feel good but allowed it, now years later, even decades later, becomes so much a part of your life that you cannot imagine your life without that rut. It’s downright scary, just as much so as it was back at the very beginning.
“That’s Dumb! Red Flags aren’t little things that don’t feel good. Red Flags are big things. This is a stupid argument.”
Plenty of folks believe that a Red Flag is a thing that is wrong with someone else that is coming out as an indicator of what’s to come, that is dumb to think of it as something as trivial as just a bad feeling you have inside yourself. Because, it goes against everything we’ve been taught to think Red Flags are. Further, thinking that it’s something going on inside me that I need to act on means that I have some measure of responsibility if that action becomes a big, bad thing, later. Or, if it has already gotten bad, it means I had some responsibility in not acting on it, years ago. And, if your intuition did pick up on it and you ignored that, or didn’t act on it, then you do not have responsibility for causing it, but for allowing it to perpetuate. That thought makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable.
In perpetuating this thinking they’re asserting the belief that it’s only a Red Flag when it’s a big thing (abuse, indifference, narcissism, neglect, gaslighting, avoidance, love-bombing, etc.). But, at that point of it being a big thing, you long ago blew off the Red Flags. Your car is already flying over the edge of the cliff and the crash is imminent. Your car is already in the lake filling quickly with water. The Red Flags were five miles back that said, “Speed Change Ahead,” “Bridge Out Ahead,” “Danger, Will Robinson!” and “STOP! TURN AROUND! GO BACK!”
The warning signs are the Red Flags. Red Flags are small and come before the immense bad thing ahead. Red Flags are not the big, bad thing, itself. Did the Department of Transportation (DoT) remove the bridge, creating danger for anyone going that direction? Yes. They created it, as decided by the government and funded by you, the taxpayer. But they also put up all warning signs and flashing lights that you chose to ignore. Should you survive, do you think you have a lawsuit against the DoT if you ignored all warning signs from the beginning and as the problem got bigger?
Nope. You have the responsibility to protect you, not just complain later when things that you allowed got worse and worse. Yes, they are still wrong for being a jerk or mean, after you started drawing it to their attention. But, if that problem or pattern persisted, even after you called it to their attention, then you are allowing it again and again, only reinforcing it more, conveying the very clear message, “This isn’t important enough to me to fight for it. It’s okay to treat me this way.” Granted, you shouldn’t have to go to extremes to get your needs met. I totally agree on that. But the truth is, you have to stand up for yourself and not back down. Or, you’re sending mixed messages: “Don’t treat me that way” and “Well, in the end, I guess it’s okay to treat me that way.”
Why do people ignore Red Flags when first felt, seen, or heard?
I had a client, several years ago, who was really struggling in her relationship with her very best friend, since high school. Her BFF was in an 8-month relationship with a guy that she was quite smitten with. The woman told me, “She keeps saying what a great guy he is, because “he doesn’t hit me, even when he’s mad.” But Sven, I know for real that he yells at her. I believe her that he doesn’t hit her, but what kind of relationship is it if someone is yelling at you when they don’t get their way? I mean, what the hell?!”
It's amazing what a person will tolerate or overlook when they’ve been conditioned to believe that something is normal.
This conversation of Red Flags is where we really begin to see the importance of parental conditioning and imprinting. Because, messages received in childhood and cemented over two decades of reinforcement become firmly established as the definition of normal, as that person moves from teenage years into young adulthood, which is when many life decisions are made.
If a child grew up in a home where the underlying messages being conveyed to the child/teen were:
- You’re not good enough
- The real you doesn’t matter, only the you that serves me and my needs
- You’re not wanted, and therefore not wantable
- You’re not important
- Your voice (and your feelings and wants/needs) don’t matter, so don’t trust your voice, because it can’t be trusted
- You’re alone in this world…because something is wrong with you
- You’re not loved, which means you’re not lovable
- Nobody truly cares about you
- It’s your fault that they aren’t giving you love
- You’re unworthy of love &/or don’t deserve love
Then that message became pressed into the wet cement of your soul and hardened. And, quite likely, you can’t even see it, down deep inside of you, and can’t see how it is infecting every decision and action you make.
This belief became the very core belief of your entire existence. Everything else filled out the belief system, thus reinforcing it and making it indistinguishable from your very identity. It created everything that came after it. Further, all of the actions toward you after that seemed to re-affirm that message (poor treatment from friends, teachers, boy/girl-friends, as well as bad luck, etc.) were nothing more than confirmation bias: random events that had other, equally likely or more likely, explanations that you ignored or outright rejected, because they would go against the very belief system you had been taught to believe about yourself.
That is to say, that core belief allowed for treatment toward you that became your very definition of normal. In short, terrible treatment became normalized, even unquestioned. You might have still felt it; and it might’ve still registered as feeling yucky or crappy. But, in the context of the normal you had embedded in you, it didn’t matter if it didn’t feel good, because that’s just life for you.
Also, as you were forced to tolerate more and more crummy treatment in your teen years and young adulthood, your toughness only grew, such that you could take it and take it. And, you saw that as a good thing, that ability, that ‘strength,’ as if feeling things and calling out poor treatment, especially when it’s small, is somehow a sign of weakness. As a result, you tend to downplay things that don’t feel good as ‘no big deal’ or even as badges of strength, indicating how tough you are, which enable you to falsely believe, “I’m sacrificing so much for my relationship” and that you’re a good partner, as if allowing that ‘normal’ is somehow a good thing.
In other words, if poor treatment, chaos, constant criticism, even yelling and physical mistreatment and neglect were normal in your childhood, you’re going to blow right past and blow off those things or anything alarming in any new relationship, as a teen or young adult, or even in full adulthood, because there are no alarms and you’re just happy to get kindness and love in any size dose. No, they’re not Red Flags, they’re normal in your belief system. They became the very definition of what love is. So, either they’re not noticed, or they’re noticed and ignored with phrases like:
- It’s no big deal
- I’m sure it’ll go away
- They don’t mean it
- It’ll get better with time
- I’ll heal that in them with time
- It’s not that bad
- That’s just part of love
- Gotta take the good with the bad
- He/She had a rough home
- I just gotta be grateful for the good parts
- I’ll never have someone this good again
- But they’re sooo good looking/smart/funny/successful/hot/nice
- They’re just going through a hard time
All of these become the very excuses that cause an individual to blow right past Red Flags, barreling toward that cliff, convinced that gravity doesn’t exist.
Red Flags are Catnip
I overheard the conversation of a 20-something family friend in our home wherein she said, “Red Flags are catnip for me. I like a guy who has a few things wrong. It’s spicy.”
I had to laugh when I heard this. I recall as a young guy, about the same age, finding neurotic women terribly intoxicating and exciting. Being a high-energy, loud, intense guy, myself made for some pretty volatile relationships in that first decade, or so, of adulthood. Interestingly, in retrospect, in each long-term relationship the woman was noticeably less neurotic, or less overtly so, at least. In hindsight, I can see that my appetite for headaches decreased, as I myself mellowed out and was less of a problem, too. Though, in honesty, in movies and literature I still find the high-strung, neurotic woman very attractive – great for fantasies, not for real life. Red Flags, it turns out, are not worth the headaches, at least not for me.
In a strange twist, for many people who grew up in homes where their existence was minimized or harmed in some way or where there was mistreatment, if some form of mistreatment is absent in an adult relationship, they either get bored because the relationship lacks the rollercoaster rush of rejection and reconciliation or they don’t trust the very person they’re in a relationship with, because they find themselves asking, “Why isn’t this person hurting me? Something is going on. They’re up to something or want something from me.” They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, forever convinced that the bad is coming. They cannot relax until the bad does come, because only then does it feel normal and thus safe. The lack of poor treatment by another person is so disorienting as to cause anxiety. Poor treatment brings relief.
Or, if the person is boringly just loving and not hurtful to them, it’s very scary because they know they have to open up and be vulnerable with this person. Nothing is more scary than that, because they’re convinced that once this normal, really nice and loving person sees who they really are they will leave them for sure. And, that would just be too painful. So, they run away or end the relationship pre-emptively themselves.
Of course, it’s those boring relationships, perhaps in college or in your 20s, that get wistfully remembered, longed for, and perhaps even retraced, decades later when the flying sh*tshow wrought by that old belief system has destroyed all sense of happiness, and you long for peace, love without pain, and just plain kindness.
When relationships and love, itself, get defined as including poor treatment or, sometimes worse, neglect, and they become the definition of normal, all manner of crappy treatment gets tolerated, for decades. Unfortunately, that’s what it often takes for a person entrenched in beliefs of deserving bad treatment to finally have the clarity, self-permission, and strength to break through it.
Change will not occur
‘til the pain gets bad enough.
Unfortunately, when we know nothing else or when we so fear consequences, or fear being alone with all of those messages inside from childhood that torture us (“See, I’m alone, proving I’m unlovable” or “I don’t matter and never will to anyone,” etc.), we tolerate the ‘security’ of a bad relationship, until it gets so bad over a long period of time that we finally have the courage to do it (cf. ‘The Screw-it Point’ in Love Cup). It’s true in relationships and nearly everything of life. We don’t break a pattern, until the pain, discomfort, loss, frustration, desperation or some other draining aspect becomes so bad as to no longer be tolerable or in any way justifiable.
The Difference between Happy and Unhappy People: Definitions of Strength
It’s a strange thing to consider, but one of the most distinct differences between happy people and unhappy people, between people who’ve done the healing and growth work and those who haven’t, between the free and the stuck is in how they define strength.
While it’s not an absolute, it’s been my experience that folks who are unhappy define strength as some version of “I can take it. I can take it. I can take it.” Strength for them is this never-ending taking on of more and more and more, eating more crap, tolerating more crummy mistreatment, allowing all manner of stuff that hurts or long ago stopped feeling even remotely good. Strength is about just taking on more and more and more.
The happy, on the other hand, define strength as basically, “No!” “No, I’m sick of taking it,” becomes the fundamental operating premise of their lives. They may shoulder the occasional burden, still, but they’re much more discriminating in what they allow and tolerate. They simply refuse to take it and take it, anymore. The line in the sand is finally not only drawn but enforced, rigidly, because they learned the hard way the price of not enforcing it. They have discovered that life begins at ‘No!’ Their strength and happiness derive from the reclaiming of their lives. And that one act, repeated over and over, along with the pursuit of those paths and purposes that feed their soul, become the very decisions that finally mend the hole in the Love Cup that had been draining the life out of them for decades.
How have you defined strength?
That definition, if it includes a constant ‘taking it,’ is going to likely lead to the overlooking of Red Flags, because it implies both a fear of saying ‘no’ and willingness to take on the bad of any new Red Flags. This, of course, is highly problematic both for the individual and the relationship.
It’s easy to see the interwoven nature of the healing and growth work and not tolerating Red Flags, because it is in the growth work that you finally find that ‘no’ rising up from within. That is precisely what’s required to call out those Red Flags and not back down.
Origins
All of this begs the obvious question, where do Red Flags come from? I’m happy to answer this question, because the answer is quite simple, especially having already discussed the origin of why people often overlook Red Flags, because they basically come from the same place.
However, the potential minefield of discussing the origins of a person exhibiting Red Flags is that you, when considering that other person’s Red Flags, might be inclined to excuse or even feel bad for that person and their actions because you can understand and sympathize with their situation. This can easily devolve into the minimizing of your own feelings and experience of that person, which is already likely what’s going on in you. So, while their behaviors do have origins and may even be logical or understandable, that doesn’t relieve them of culpability for their actions and treatment of you. Those are two separate things; one doesn’t excuse the other.
When a child or teen receives the explicit or, more often, implicit message(s) that they are unwanted/unwantable, unloved/unlovable/not good enough/undeserving of love, don’t matter/don’t have worth, they then begin to take on behaviors that reflect one of two behavior patterns (or inflections of both), that of the Extreme Taker or the Extreme Giver (cf. chapter on Narcissism). These messages are often reinforced into young adulthood and middle age, only further reinforcing the seeming truth of them, making their extraction all the more difficult. The better part of my bestselling book, There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, was devoted to explaining how these messages are imprinted into the wet cement of the child’s soul, becoming the virus infecting the operating system of their lives.
But, recognizing that the Red Flag bearer as well as the Red Flag seer or overlooker – i.e., both parties in the relationship – find the origins of their problems in childhood messaging, it’s not difficult to understand how, as discussed in Love Cup, unhealthy people come in twos. A healthy person will, by definition, never get into a relationship with an unhealthy person, nor long stay in a relationship with an unhealthy one, because the Red Flags and the pain and troubles that come with them transgress the boundaries the healthy person insists on maintaining in their own lives. For, they know all too well the price of not doing so.
How much more so the child?
Have you ever been in a love relationship, or even a friendship, where the other person was hectoring you, over time, with the same repeated message of what they are convinced is wrong with you?
- You’re lazy
- You’re a b*tch
- You’re such a narcissist
- You’re not a nice person
- Why are you always so self-centered
- You’re crazy
- You’re just dumb
- You’re no good in bed
- No wonder nobody likes you
- You’re fat
- You’re cold
- You don’t live up to your potential
- You’re a disappointment
- You’re not a good spouse
Whatever the message might be, they hammer you with it, seemingly at every turn. It can be done with explicit words or nothing more than a look, an exasperated exhale of air, or the refusal to give attention or be kind, or some other nonverbal way of communicating the message. The worst part of it is that it doesn’t take long before you not only start questioning yourself, but you really start to believe it! Don’t even ask me the number of people who’ve come into counseling with me needing help to figure out “Am I really crazy, like they say” or “Am I the narcissist?” This is not an uncommon experience. I’ve experienced it in adult relationships. I think most people have.
What’s crazy about it is that you can have a high functioning, highly logical and intelligent 40-year-old woman or 60 year-old man, perhaps quite successful in their career, even, an excellent parent, and a good citizen. But, because of the unrelenting message of this person close to them, they are ensnared in the throes of a belief, quite convinced of its truth, or at least very much struggling with it. Fully functioning adults!
So, if a high functioning, highly logical adult can be so easily swayed, or even convinced of messages that greatly undermine or destabilize their belief in themselves, how much more so a child?! If a child is, over 10 or 20 years, peppered with debilitating messages about their worth and/or specific things that are “wrong with” them, is it not reasonable that child will grow to believe those messages, especially when they come from a source they’ve been conditioned to love and whom they greatly want the approval and love from?
Is it not reasonable the child will fully believe that they are the problem in the situation, any situation, and that they will then carry that mentality into adulthood? If a person lives by a pattern of belief so deeply engrained for nearly two decades of the most formative years, is it at all reasonable to think they’ll just somehow magically ‘get over it’ on their 18th birthday? Or is it more likely that, just like that 60 year-old successful, logical man or woman, this young person will even more fully believe that they are the problem in any situation, fully blaming themselves, thus rendered utterly unable to see anything remotely resembling Red Flags, red flashing lights, or a warning of any kind. Bad in others often doesn’t exist; only in themselves. Further, they’re just so happy to have any kindness bestowed on them, because kindness feels like rain in the desert, that they’re willing to overlook anything that might detract from it or are willing to blame themselves.
This child/teen will often become an Extreme Giver, who, believing in their own deeply flawed nature, will give and give and give and give, because they see that as the only hope they have for getting love in return. That giving of love and overlooking the flaws of the other is a survival mechanism.
Do you see how this happens? Do you see how easily it can happen? And, can you see how profoundly it can impact a child well into adulthood
Interestingly, can you now bend your mind a bit to see how that exact same scenario of being told all that is wrong with the child, over years, either overtly or subtly, can create a child and young adult who likewise believes they’re deeply flawed, but who responds not by assuming fault in every situation, but by blaming others in every situation? See, this too is a survival mechanism. They survive by avoiding the pain of anything or anyone reminding them of the belief they already bear that something is wrong with them. So, they spend their lives blaming others; always calling out the faults of others; always pointing the finger at others; never taking responsibility.
Just like the previous child who trusted and believed the parent, hoping that if they were good enough the parent would give them love and be nice to them, this child also trusts and believes the parent, but survives not by becoming an Extreme Giver, but an Extreme Taker – taking advantage, taking love, taking the upper position, taking anything to keep themselves safe from being reminded of the belief they bear inside that so much is wrong with them, just like they were taught, growing up.
Just like the Extreme Giver, the Extreme Taker has a bone-dry Love Cup. But rather than begging for it by giving and giving and giving, the Extreme Taker simply takes it, or only gives enough to ensure the return on investment is always in their own favor. As such, the Extreme Taker becomes the very Red Flag so many people are afraid of, always looking out for themselves, only giving what is necessary to appear good, so that they can get you hooked and forever get their own needs met.
See, the Extreme Taker sees love as a shortage to be hoarded. They will take it from every person they possibly can – friends, parents, spouse, even their own children. Because they have a hole in the bottom of their love cup, no amount of love is enough. They always need more. Yet, they are also acutely aware of whom they cannot take love from, whom they are dependent upon and must honor – boss, customers, a parent who has power over them, a child/adult-child they fear not liking them, a friend they fear rejecting them. Whomever they fear, fear losing, fear being disliked by, or fear not getting love from they will not take love from. They will only take from those they don’t fear losing or those they don’t fear rising up and fighting the system they’ve put in place.
But, alas, the Extreme Taker is not the only bearer of Red Flags. The Extreme Giver bears a whole host of problems, as well. I mean, do you really want to be in a relationship with someone who always thinks they’re the problem, who takes on more fault than is right, who never holds you accountable, or who thinks so little of themselves that they see saying ‘no’ as being selfish (what sort of parent will they become, if they can’t say ‘no’?)?
The Extreme Giver, too, sees love as in great shortage. They have much to give but only need a tiny amount in return (see ‘Relationship Camel’ in Love Cup). Love is the proverbial ‘pearl of great price’ for which they will sell the farm to get some, even a small amount. A small amount of love from another person is worth giving up everything and all of oneself, because it is from another human being the confirmation of one’s worth, which is precisely what they’ve been lacking and, hence, seeking their entire life.
Nonetheless, as previously discussed, all of this is irrelevant if you do not possess the ability to feel the movements of your own intuition/soul. For, the actions of the Extreme Taker and the Extreme Giver can feel so lovely, so refreshing that you don’t see what is below the surface if you are only looking at the person and not feeling what is going on inside of you that you cannot see with your eyes or hear with your ears. The answers are inside you.
Are there Red Flag Dealbreakers?
It may seem a somewhat unnecessary question to be asking at this stage of the discussion, but are there Red Flags that are dealbreakers?
Well, this is where it helps to start with what most folks think of as Red Flags: things like verbal and physical abuse, gaslighting, breadcrumbing, love-bombing, etc. And, I’ll just give the quick, obvious answer, sure, yes, these are dealbreakers because they’re quite simply someone trying to manipulate a situation to their advantage by manipulating you. NOT a person you want to be in a relationship with, or certainly not one day longer.
But, again, at this point your car is flying over the cliff. These aren’t Red Flags. The Red Flags were miles ago, years ago.
The only thing you gotta remember is that if you do the actual work to heal your past, your distant past that has you believing, deep down, that you are flawed and therefore lucky to get love and must tolerate crummy treatment, you will be able to feeeel when something feels off or doesn’t feel good or loving. And that is the Red Flag. You’ll feel it long before you’re flying over the cliff or the car is filling with water, miles earlier.
The whole point is that when you’re in any sort of relationship and something doesn’t feel good, you speak up and you don’t back down, until the discussion is had, the person owns the pain they caused, and there is true reconciliation, and, of course, vice-versa.
The dealbreakers, thus, are those patterns of behavior in another person wherein they don’t own their sh*t. If you call them out and you don’t back down, but they refuse to own and atone for the pain they caused, and it occurs more than once on a particular subject without improvement, then that’s a dealbreaker, especially in the beginning of a relationship. Because, it’s someone else looking you in the face and saying, “I don’t care. Suck it! I’m going to protect my own sovereignty more than I’m going to work with you to do what is best for us. And, I certainly have no intention of ‘owning’ anything or changing, unless it’ll get me something better. So, yeah, suck it!”
Am I the Red Flag? Do I have them?
Now, at this point, any conscientious person would naturally be asking, Am I a Red Flag, if they’ve not asked it of themselves before; or perhaps, do I have Red Flags? And, the simple answer is this: Yes! If you hurt others and don’t acknowledge it, atone for it, apologize for it, you’re a living, breathing Red Flag for any sentient human or animal. Why? Because, you cause pain remorselessly. Your own dog will not like you, if that’s how you treat him.
However, you can still pull it off that you aren’t a walking alarm bell if you happen upon someone, such as an Extreme Giver, who like you believes they themselves suck. They’ll never see the blaze orange you’re wearing to go with the flashing lights you carry, the sirens attached to your back, and the giant neon sign over your head shining, “DANGER!” They’re so desperate, they’ll gobble up your petty little bag of tricks and consider themselves lucky. Extreme Giver, meet Extreme Taker; match made in hell.
Bottom line: you have Red Flags if you bring pain to another human and don’t own it and atone for it; and if you don’t do the work to drill down to the origins of why you hurt others, and subsequently heal this. We all hurt others. That’s fact. Living in relationship, be it with one or one million, invariably brings the bumping of elbows and the bruising of ribs. But is there atonement and the action of change in oneself, as well as the healing of origins of that pain? That’s the question.
Journaling Exercises
1. Are you doing the work to heal yourself of the areas where you either cause pain or overlook the pain being caused to you? If not, why?
2. What’s the fear driving the behavior?
3. What do you most fear looking at and feeling?
Please feel free to check out my free online moderated community, Badass Counseling Group, on Facebook. But, if you long for a closer community that’s more committed to next-level growth, direct access to me — Sven, and more excellent resources for transformation to greater ALIVENESS, go to www.badasscounseling.com and click on CMTY-PLUS! It’s what you’ve been waiting for!
Thanks for reading.
HAVE A KICKASS DAY!
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
