Believing in myths is not the only way you poison your relationship.  There's an even more insidious technique that you use to harm the very thing that's most important to you.  That's when you approach your relationship with what I call your "bad spirit."

Every one of us has an irrational and destructive emotional side to our personalities.  There is a part of each of us that is immature, selfish, controlling and power seeking.  Just as you can send your relationship down a dead-end road by falling for myths that are misleading and unimportant, you will send your relationship right over the cliff if you start letting your bad spirit - your ark side - sabotage your attempts at intimacy and peace.

If you are being honest with yourself, about yourself, you know, of course, exactly what I am talking about.  Unfortunately, it's during relationship interactions - the most emotionally charged part of your life, the place where you have the greatest personal stake - when your bad spirit can leap out of you.  In effect, through your own negative attitudes you are unconsciously bringing about everything you most wanted to eliminate.  Even the most normal, intelligent people can resort to the most spiteful behavior when dealing with those they claim to love.  There can be astonishing hostility and cruelty, childlike defensiveness, pathetically immature reasoning, accusations and counteraccusations, blaming and shaming, exaggerations and denials.  When your bad spirit comes roaring out, you are the most disconnected from your core of consciousness that you can get.  You have totally moved away from feelings of worth and dignity and cast yourself as a victim.

You have a stockpile of denials to justify and explain away your terrible behavior.  You like to think instead of how you are when things are going well in your relationship and you act mature, giving, flexible and democratic.  But your bad spirit is always there, always lurking, and it's during those times when the waters get rough - when you get frustrated, threatened, and hurt - that you give in to your dark side.  Allowing this ugly side of who you are to take control can cause your relationship to fail - not some of the time, but all of the time.  Regardless of what else may be right with the relationship, your bad spirit, if left unattended, will poison every fiber of your relationship and seal its fate.

While some of you have a flair for dramatic self-destruction that can sink a relationship overnight, others self-destruct with a style that is more like a slow leak.  That slow leak surely and relentlessly drains the life from your relationship.  As time passes, you will become more and more controlled by your internal negative attitude.  In effect, you will unconsciously bring about everything you most wanted to eliminate - and most likely you won't have a clue as to what's happening.

Because this aspect of yourself can be so devastating, you can't afford to be defensive about it or pretend that it doesn't exist in hopes that it will go away.

I can't change whatever happened to you as a child that may have influenced the way you are now behaving - and you can't change it either.  The important thing to realize is that you are not a child anymore.  You are now an adult, and you have the chance to choose what you think, feel and do.  The only thing worse than having terrible things happen to you in one phase of your life is mentally and emotionally carrying those terrible events and feelings into the next phase of your life.  You cannot hide behind it or use it as an excuse to justify your dark side.  If you do keep hiding, you'll just keep the suffering alive by transplanting it into your current life.

You must be willing to meet your bad spirit face-to-face, recognize how it manifests itself in your behavior, and then quickly get yourself out of that mind-set before it does even greater damage.  I don't want you to run from your bad spirit;  I want you to know this self-defeating nature so intimately that if it even tries to stick so much as a little toe into your life, you'll be able to spot it and stop it.  I want you to be able to say, "I will not allow those characteristics to come into my life and relationship and sabotage my happiness.  It is not going to come between me and my partner."

Going through the next section of this chapter will not be fun, because we are going to look at the most typical ways that this bad spirit shows up in a life and a relationship.  But remember, you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.  Have the courage to get real about this dark side, and you can take control.

"Click on each of the following numbers to read the characteristics in detail."

[  1.]    You're a Scorekeeper
[  2.]    You're a Fault Finder
[  3.]    You Think it's Your Way or the Highway
[  4.]    You Turn into an Attack Dog
[  5.]    You Are a Passive Warmonger
[  6.]    You Resort to Smoke and Mirrors
[  7.]    You Will Not Forgive
[  8.]    You Are the Bottomless Pit
[  9.]    You're Too Comfortable
[10.]    You've Given Up