Episode 8 - Full Transcript - Teddy & Faye and Toxic Conflict

Louise Rumball: Hi guys. & welcome back to another episode of OPEN(HEART) on the OPENHOUSE podcast. I have the amazing Dr. Tari Mack back with me again. Hi. Hi. So happy to have you. Can't wait to do this episode with you. We have so much to talk about. So for everyone listening, we're going to do a quick recap of what we're talking about today.

So if you were in the UK two nights ago, we had a very, very, very hot and heavy episode on Love Island, UK. I'm going to give you a little bit of background of what happened. So if you're already familiar with the situation, you can just kind of skip forward the next 60 seconds or so here is what happened in this episode.

So Teddy and Faye were both coupled up in the Love Island Villa. They were firm fan favorites. Both of them had gone through a lot in their previous relationships, especially Faye and it was kind of a very much of a big deal for them to let their guard down. She was very visibly nervous and defensive about doing this. And as it started to come down, we all started to kind of fall in love with them. However, halfway through the show, the bit that everyone is always waiting for the boys had over to Casa Amore where they were introduced to a whole new bunch of girls. At this point, this is when things started to go downhill, Teddy and Faye chose each other, which means that when they came back to the Villa, they re-coupled.

But what Teddy didn't tell Faye was that he had a slightly compromising, uh, discussion with another girl in Casa Amore. This came out later in a video challenge where the boys were shown videos of the girls and vice versa and Faye got to watch Teddy having this discussion with a girl called Clarisse. He felt sexually attracted to her. I think his words were precise. What came next was a total meltdown. Faye absolutely lost her head. She was shouting and shouting, not only at Teddy but anyone that tried to intervene, a guy called Dale, tried to talk to her. She was abusive towards him - she shouted at a guy called Matt and interestingly, none of the girls stepped in to calm her down.

So the situation became more and more increasingly stressful. Before, at the end of the episode, we saw everyone go to bed. Faye had calmed down, we saw her crying and the final point is as the episode ended, everyone was in bed and we saw Faye getting out of bed at this point, obviously the hopeless romantics among us hope that she is getting out of bed to go and say to Teddy, I am so sorry. And in fact, she went up to the dressing room where she had left her cuddly toy that she needed to sleep with.

So we have not had an episode since this and it has been what everyone has been talking about. Was it abusive? Was she gaslighting him? Why does she react that way? Was he in the wrong? Was she in the wrong, ETC ETC.

Dr Tari: Oh my gosh. Yes. Oh, this is so important.

Louise Rumball: Yes! And I think it's also a really interesting situation with what has happened on the previous series of Love Island, and you know, a number of very, very sad suicides relating to the show from contestants. It feels like there's been a lot of discussion about the increased duty of care towards the participants. But in this situation, once again, it seems like the TV moment was potentially more important than someone pulling Faye or Teddy out of that. So, I just want to preface this with obviously that, that I think the situation could have been dealt with differently, but as it wasn't, we are going to dive into what happened. And I guess, shall we start, Dr. Tari, with - goodness - like what happened here? Like what, what was going on?

Dr Tari: Yeah. Well, the one piece that you didn't talk about was that Faye had like a flirtation with another guy, right. And she was open with Teddy about that.

Louise Rumball: Ah, yes. That was a big part of it. She connected with a guy called Sam. It was not really anything, but they did share a bed together. And she felt that she had been 100% honest to Teddy. But when Teddy came back and said to her, you know, I didn't have a connection with anyone. I didn't do anything with anyone. Actually when the video came out, later on, she felt like you were not 100% honest with me. And actually, that was a very interesting moment where he said, “but did I lie to you? Did I lie to you though?” And I was thinking, oh, you didn't lie to her, but you were not honest -  because you maybe did not tell her anything at all. So that's an interesting line, isn't it? Between like actively lying and holding information.

Dr Tari: Yeah, it's manipulation. We'll get to that, but so you asked what happened, so yeah. When Faye saw that video and found out that he had not been completely honest, she got triggered. And what does it mean when we get triggered?

It means we go from like zero to a hundred emotionally in a second. And, you know, we get flooded with feeling whether it's anger.

[00:06:00] Fayear, sadness, whatever that is. We, you know, we're overwhelmed with feeling and we're not rational. We're not in a place where we can communicate with / from our adult self. We can't hear and listen to anybody else.

And so that is a time when we when we get triggered, we should not be trying to engage with anybody, especially the person who has triggered us. And so obviously Faye was triggered and I know that a lot of us don't yet have this awareness about what triggers us, what our particular specific triggers are because there's usually like a handful.

Hers? Obviously, one of them is like this betrayal or being lied to. And so then she goes off, right? She's angry. And underneath that anger is probably like deep disappointment, deep hurt, a sense of betrayal. And you see what happens

[00:07:00] after that? Nothing good happens when we try to communicate when we're overwhelmed with feelings and when we're triggered, we lose all of our credibility. Nobody hears us. Nobody respects us.
 

Louise Rumball: Yeah, that is so true. I feel like I already have so much to say on this, like one of the things that I’ve learned more recently about the nervous system is that when we are regulated and the nervous system is kind of functioning as it is supposed to, we sit in a balanced state where we can communicate.

However, when our nervous system gets dysregulated, you know, we can either go into fight or flight or we can go into freeze. I think it's fair to say right in this situation, uh, Faye went into FIGHT. But one of the, one of the most interesting things for me about that was, as someone who has historically had a very bad temper, definitely since going to therapy, I would say like, I am calmer than I've ever been, and just so much better at being able to regulate myself and communicate and avoid these kinds of situations. And actually, interestingly, I would say that my relationship with my family, particularly my brother has got so much better since I've better learnt to regulate my emotions and navigate these situations.

But there is one thing I want to say on her behalf, which is that I believe that, that this is correct, that when you go into this like fight or flight, especially this anger, like this conflict mode, I believe that the body and it's probably the brain releases things like adrenaline and Norepinephrine and I think there's also something to do with the dopamine at that moment. And I think that for anyone that has been there at some point in their life, you know, when you are raging, and you don't want to stop, you want to just keep going and you're going at it rather than like trying to run away from it. Well, I think it's good to understand that, you know, she almost was like on a biological rollercoaster as well as a psychological roller coaster.

And for me, one of the two most sensitive moments of the episode was when she had calmed down and her nervous system had calmed down and re0regulated. We saw her crying and it was sad. Like it made me feel sad for her, despite what she had just done and said. I think it is good to understand the biology, as well as the psychology that we can get on a roller coaster that we are going to ride until the argument, is done - and so sometimes being able to understand the psychology and biology of those situations will enable us to not even get on the rollercoaster at all

Dr Tari: Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. I'm loving that. Glad you made that point because yeah, those chemicals feel good. [00:10:00] Right? So we lean into that. But the problem is if you see what's happening on social media after this episode. Faye has just been vilified, right? Because she was the loud one. She was the angry one.

And I mean, the truth is her feelings are valid. 

First of all, Teddy did withhold information. He wasn't completely honest. That's what her reaction is about, but because her reaction is so big and ugly and childlike, I feel like that's what's getting the attention and so that's what I always want people to understand is when we're acting crazy, when we're yelling, when we're out of control, when we're out of our own power because you know, we're not regulated, we lose credibility.

Louise Rumball: I love the reference of adult vs. child there. I'd love to just go into that a little bit further in case people don't understand what that means. Do you want to just give a little bit of an overview of what that means to either be like communicating as an adult in your regulated nervous system or what it means to go into that more like childlike state?

Dr Tari: Oh my gosh, absolutely. So as children, we learn from our families’ rules about emotions. We learn models of emotional expression, and we take on certain roles in the family and all of this is typically unspoken. Sometimes it's spoken, like don't cry, suck it up. But usually, it's like, everybody has a different role in the family.

And then as children, we learn how to cope when we feel hurt. When we feel powerless, when we feel scared, when we feel angry and we learn specific ways of coping, because, you know, as children are very perceptive and we learn how to feel two things: 1) safe and 2) loved, and basically how to survive our families.

It's kind of a dramatic word, but we learn how to, you know, survive even the most loving families. Right? So those are the coping strategies that we learned. And then we carry those into our adult relationships and they're usually pretty dysfunctional as adults. They don't work as well. Like for instance, if we're disappointed, sad, or scared, if we went and shut ourselves in our room and didn't talk to anyone or didn't share feelings because we knew that wouldn't do any good in our family.

If we do that as an adult, that's not going to work in your relationship. If you lash out if you scream and cry and get loud. If you do that in your adult relationships, like we saw Faye doing - it doesn't get you what you want either. As adults, what we want is connection. [00:13:00] She was feeling so hurt and betrayed but she pushed away connection. She pushed away love as opposed to asking for nurturing or, you know, coming from that more regulated place that where she'd be able to say I'm really hurt. I'm really angry. And I don't know what to do.

Louise Rumball: Oh, okay. So two things from my side here. So first of all, I love kind of the explanatory point around, you know, we learn these responses in childhood. I think that there's obviously a sliding spectrum and scale of this but from my experience, it seems like you either (to generalize hugely) like to engage in conflict or you don't. , and so, you know, I came from a family where, yeah, we sure as shit vocalized, whatever was going on.

So I [00:14:00] grew up into an adult that very much vocalized how I felt and, I can openly admit, you know, pre-therapy that was not vocalizing it in a regulated state. So I think it's really interesting for us to think. You know, she probably learned this at some point in her childhood. Then also what I think is interesting, like, as we go through relationships in life, often when we're younger, I feel like they - I don't want to say enable, but if you don't have someone that's going to break the cycle and basically say to you, like, “you cannot function this way”.

(And this is what my ex-boyfriend did to me. “Like, you cannot function in this way. Like if you were going to do this to me, I am not going to engage in a conversation with you.”) and that's kind of when the flashlight turned on, like, oh, okay, this actually isn't normal but I truly think that she thinks that her reaction is justified because he betrayed her and he really hurt her.

And on top of that, he has mugged her off, which is UK slang for embarrassing her, you know, on public television that everyone's watching. So yeah, I love the point around learning and childhood. 

The next question that you also mentioned is self-sabotage. So there's quite a lot of talk out there. In the Twitter-sphere, Instagram, sphere people are saying that this was a piece of self-sabotage from Faye. Now I don't think I actually agree with this. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

[00:16:00] Dr Tari: No. I agree with you. I mean, I'm not saying she doesn't self-sabotage her relationships. I honestly don't know enough about her relationship history, but in this particular episode, what I saw in that conflict was actually Teddy was denying the reality of what she was upset about and he kept trying to twist it and he did not once take ownership of the facts.

Her problem was that he didn't tell her that there were any conversations, like the one that she saw, and instead of him taking ownership of that and saying, “you know what, you're right. I should have told you” - he completely denied it and kept twisting it.

So she was the crazy one. She was the one that was the problem. And it's so interesting also because some people on social media are saying that Faye was gaslighting Teddy. So I watched these, you know, I watched all of it or interactions and the truth is Teddy was gaslighting Faye. He was the one denying what happened. He was not taking ownership.

Louise Rumball: Wow. Yeah, I've got a lot to say there because we've stored up a couple of tweets on this, which I'm just going to read now because I think they give some good context of what the British public is kind of saying right now.

One is that“Faye has committed reality TV, suicide, Teddy move on brudda”. So once again, they're just like, you know, not looking at both sides of the story and then we have some others, like.

“If Teddy was screaming, shouting, and swearing you better believe it would have been viewed in a completely different way. And they would have called in security”. And “if Faye was a man, we'd be calling the police for domestic abuse, not asking for her to see a therapist”.

So there's obviously a lot of gender stereotypes and issues and complex challenges that we're not going to go into in today's episode. But I think our key takeaway from a lot of the feedback is that yes, she has been vilified and she has been so noisy that it's actually overshadowed, lovely, quiet, calm Teddy, who because he has been well put together.

You know, she actually said, I think at one point “I don't want to speak to you because I don't want to scream at you”, and he said, “exactly, Faye, I just want to speak with you”. He seemed to be the good guy in this situation. Until I spoke with you about that I didn't even notice or understand that actually, he was gaslighting her by basically denying the reality of what happened.

So I don't know. I don't think I even really understood what gaslighting was. I thought it meant saying things basically like pouring gas on the fire to make it worse. So maybe you could just give everyone a little overview of what gaslighting actually is and explain how Teddy maybe was gaslighting and no one has picked it up.

Dr Tari: Yeah. So gaslighting actually comes from this movie, this old movie where a robber, I think marries a woman, moves into her house to steal her money. So every night he turns down the level of light in her gas lamp and then when she says like, “it's getting darker in here”, he's like, no, you're crazy. What are you talking about? It's not darker in here. So that's where the term comes from. Gaslighting is denying reality, denying someone else's reality to make them doubt themselves, to make them feel like they're crazy to make them doubt their own perceptions. 

She was saying, you never told me this. I had to find out by watching this video. And he never once said, you're right. [00:20:00] I'm sorry. He just kept saying, when did I lie to you? He kept denying it. He knew full well what she was upset about. And that's the point I want to make is often times when we are being gaslighted or when someone is not hearing us we get louder. It's like we get louder. We want to be heard. We want to explain, we want somebody to understand us, but getting louder and crazier is not gonna help any, I don't understand you because if he wanted to understand, he would have understood, but he just didn't want to take ownership. So that's why it's so important for everybody, watching and listening to this. When you are trying to be heard, when you are having these huge feelings, what you need to do is take a break and go regulate yourself so that when you come back and communicate, you are more credible. You know that you are coming from a place [00:21:00] of, you know, being rational, you can still be angry, but you're being rational. You are regulated and nobody can complain at you and say, “God, you're crazy”.

Louise Rumball: I also think that having that understanding of your triggers is huge here because I think when I look back, I can see the sliding scale of the situation that happened, and she then moved into the response, and the response actually escalated and escalated and escalated.

As he walked off, he said to her, “you’re a prick” again in the UK a derogatory term. And she said, which I thought was really, really interesting. “Yes. I am a prick for believing anything that came out of your mouth”. It came back full circle back to her trigger. The situation affirmed her own trigger - i.e. yes, if I trust someone, they all going to hurt me, they are going to abandon me. They are going to betray me.

I think she also said, “you know, you wanted to be my boyfriend” and he said, yeah, I did. And she said to him, “this is exactly why I don't want anyone to be my boyfriend because this is what happens. Like this is what boyfriends do” - obviously a massive generalization, but yeah

Dr Tari: But in her experience, that's what boyfriends do.

Louise Rumball: Right, because she’s gone through this before and it's happened again, the cycle has repeated and unfortunately hasn't been broken in this relationship and if anything, it's been affirmed, so yeah, I just thought it was interesting how it came back to that trigger and like, perhaps she needed to come back into that situation, if she could do it again, with a regulated, nervous system with with the timeout and the communication, but also being aware of her own trigger.

That's why I'm obsessed with therapy because like you sometimes don't know what they are until you go into it. So how can you ever change the way that your conflict is happening, if you're subconsciously unconsciously living these cycles, right? You can't

Dr Tari: Right. And I just want to make a point before we talk more about this. I think actually Faye made the right decision. I would not want her to stay with him because of what he did. By, you know, not telling the truth, that would have been one thing, but if he would have owned up to it at any point, if he would've said at any point,”you're right, I'm sorry I get why you're so upset” then I would have said “uh, okay. He's a healthy, mature, conscious partner.” But he doesn't, he's not an emotionally safe partner because he's gaslighting her. He is not owning up

Louise Rumball: WOW... I just got goosebumps whilst you were talking there and you know, that we call goosebumps truth bumps. And so, yeah, that for me is major because I felt like I wouldn't have thought that. And I just love that input. And I also think that there's a really, really interesting comparison here.

So there's another couple in the Villa called Liam and Millie. Liam was unfaithful in Casa Amore. He kissed another girl. The way that Millie dealt with the situation was vastly different to how Faye did. Here’s a tweet:

“Look at the way that Millie handled her situation. When Liam was unfaithful, she dealt with it very maturely, and it just shows that Faye is actually not emotionally mature at all.”

And I think that that's also just an interesting comparison because he came back and I guess for the most part, like. Yeah. He admitted to, you know, what he'd done. Millie was upset. She cried, but she didn't scream. She didn't shout. She took herself away. She took a good couple of days away from him, which in the villa is like weeks, and then as they started to rebuild, it was very slow, very gentle, very communicative. He was very respectful. Like, you know, he wouldn't even kiss her on the lips because she was like, I'm not ready to do this. So it's just interesting to view them as comparisons. And I guess also going back to our earlier point. Yeah. Would be interesting to know what Faye’s family life and, you know, like, uh, upbringing was versus Millie's. How did their parents, you know, how did they deal with conflict in their own childhoods because these were vastly different situations. So, yeah, so that was interesting as well.

Dr Tari: Exactly. I think, you know, everybody's just looking at Faye - they see Faye as the villain, Teddy is the angel. The reality is like every dynamic is co-created by both people. So does Faye have work to do, hell yeah, she does. She has to work to figure out how to calm herself down and regulate when she gets triggered. Many of us have that work to do but also she's wise in that she knows he's not an emotionally safe partner. I don't care how. Two people are when things are good. The telltale sign of a healthy relationship that is a safe container is what happens when there's conflict. And the fact Teddy's part in this is that again, he didn't own his part and he's never going to own his part. This is how you see people and how safe they are.

Louise Rumball: I love this because this is not, you know, guys, we did not discuss this part before we came on this episode. So I did not know that we were going to go down this avenue and I feel like I'm loving this because the general public is just vilifying Faye. I love this therapist's mind you’re bringing to the table.

Dr Tari: Yeah. I mean that essentially, like in any relationship, you need to have a safe container and emotionally safe relationship with two emotionally safe people. So Faye has worked to do so she doesn't act out like this, like a child when she has big feelings, but Teddy has work to do if he wants to do it, in terms of like owning his shit, owning when he screws up and not manipulating the situation when you can just because she's acting crazy.

I’m just so passionate about this because so many people are not talking about what emotional safety is because many of us grow up in families where there wasn’t emotional safety. Not because our parents are bad people, but because they were never taught what emotional safety is and emotional safety means you can have and feel all of your feelings.

You need the other person to hold space for you and to hear you. Conflict should bring you closer, as opposed to damaging the relationship but if both people aren't willing to own their part, then it can't grow.

Louise Rumball: Oh, I love that. And also, I just want to say, so you mentioned the word passionate and I've got two things that I want to bring up here.

The first one is that I think that Faye will be like me in some regards, which is that in my twenties, I would blame my temper on being a passionate, fiery person. Like I would always be like, “I'm a fire sign. I'm a Sagittarius. I'm not scared of conflict”. You know, I think it's become one of her personality traits is like being the like bolshy b*tch - but like that's become one of her personality traits that I think again is where therapy is amazing because like - “NO! These are not just who you are. Like these are learned traits, you know, there may be some element of temperament, genetics, whatever, but for the most part, this is learned.”

And the other thing I wanted to pick up on, on the word passionate, which is that this is how a lot of couples communicate. I'd love for you just to go into that a little bit deeper, and then I will maybe give you a bit of personal insight. It seems like I have personal insight for everything which is concerning, hahaha!

Dr Tari: No, that’s what I love about you. You're just so open and willing to share and, and, you know, that's how we learn from each other. But so yeah,, this way of fighting it, it's not good for a relationship. The huge blow-up, the makeup sex, or, you know, however it comes together, it, it creates damage, but some couples, you know, have this like extreme highs, extreme lows, which is often a toxic relationship because it means things are great when there's not an issue. But when there is an issue, you know, shit hits the fan and a lot of damage can be done. Oftentimes these couples just don't know how to connect when there isn't conflict. So they actually use conflict as a way to connect. The only way they know how to express feelings is through conflict. The problem is like every time you have a fight like that, where you're yelling and screaming and accusing and blaming, you're creating damage in the relationship.

And, you know, John Gottman, who is a relationship researcher and psychologist has done tons of research and he talks about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, which are basically like the four things that show up in your conflicts that predict divorce or breakups. And they are:

1) Defensiveness, -which Teddy displayed, which is like,” I didn't do that”, when you did. Like “when did I lie to you?” You know, it’s like a denial.

2) Contempt - which is like sarcasm, eye rolling.

3) Criticism - which is like you always blame/accuse; then

4) Stonewalling - which is just when one person shuts down withdraws, disengages, etc

Louise Rumball: Whilst you were going through those like it was bringing back a lot of memories about my own personal relationships. And I feel like the two notable points here are that I was in one relationship with a very angry man, for a very, very long time, (again, another episode as to why I stayed for that long) but yeah, very, very angry. Who we were was like this passionate rollercoaster of everything that comes with fighting on the makeup and like, oh God, it was awful. Looking back, it's actually very sad

And then I was also in the other, in my last relationship, like he was so good at dissociating because of what he'd gone through. And then I would get louder because he disengaged so much. So then I got even louder and then the whole thing was just like a fucking nightmare, So that is, yeah, that is fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing them. I feel like we should go into them in more detail in another workshop soon.

OK - so before we wrap up, I just want to ask you one final question. Two final questions. We saw Faye basically saying like “walk away, you know, keep walking, like don't talk to me, et cetera, et cetera”. So she was, to some extent, trying to set a boundary there, I think, but also, you know - is it Teddy's responsibility to walk away there, her responsibility or is it on both of them to walk away?

What are your thoughts on the boundary that she kind of tried to weirdly unsuccessfully set?

Dr Tari: Well, she was trying to set a boundary, but again, she was like dysregulated and not rational. So it's hard to take that seriously. So ultimately it's both of their responsibility, but because she was the one who was triggered, it would have been best for her to leave.

On the other hand, she was telling him, essentially, she said like walk away. I don't want to scream at you. So she was telling him I'm upset, I'm going to be yelling. And it was up to him to choose, but in reality, the takeaway is - it is always our responsibility to recognize when we are triggered and not to try to communicate or engage, then nothing good will ever come from it. You will create damage in your relationship. So she held the ultimate responsibility at that moment to calm down. He held the responsibility for doing something that wasn't okay if I’m honest.

Louise Rumball: Yeah. Super, super interesting. Because also, you know, I've been in her situation before, like it's easier said than done to be able to walk away when you can feel it rising up, like through your body and you just want to explode. So I totally get that. I also think we can give her a little bit of benefit of the doubt, which is that we don't know what the producers were doing. You know, they might have been saying like, are you going to let him mug you off on, you know, National TV so we don't know what happened there, but I also thought it was interesting how, interestingly, none of the girls came to her help or stepped in.

I would like to think in that situation - i.e. they're all very, very close. I would like to think I would take her to the side and be like, I love you. I totally understand that you are so upset right now. Should we go and have a timeout because nothing good is going to come of this. And I will tell him not to come anywhere near you. You know, for the next, whatever long, right? No, no one did that. No one did anything. And I just, I don't know. Do you think that people were scared of her?

Actually, maybe we can wrap up here - in terms of if we're in a situation like this, whether it's our partner, our friend, anyone. What are the key takeaways from this episode around what we can learn from this so we hopefully don't end up in a Teddy and Faye, Love Island situation?

Dr Tari: Yeah. So I would say, you know, if it's you and you've been wronged or you're triggered by some that you're having a big feeling about something, whether it's hurt betrayal, anger, sadness, fear, whatever it is, recognize it. And then take a break. As you said, it's hard. It is so hard to do that but when you understand that you will be more credible, you will earn more respect and, and you'll get your point across better if you're coming from a regulated place than if you go crazy because it's really easy for somebody to discount you and your message when you're not regulated. So if it's you - go calm yourself down and it might take five minutes. It might take an hour. It might take a couple of days but only come back to communicate when you are centered and you can communicate from that conscious place. If you're seeing a friend go through this, the loving thing to do would be to tell them - “I agree with you. Your feelings are real, but this isn't the way to go about it. So let's calm down and talk through it so we can figure out how you want to address it. “

Louise Rumball: Mm. Yeah, I love that. And I think my final point here is that, you know, I've kind of given some insight into the fact that I definitely have a temper, or historically was pro conflict, but actually, in my last relationship, you know, once we moved past the stonewalling from his side, and actually once I started to understand where he was coming from about regulating the conflict, I was then able to just say “I need to go to the other room” when I could feel the temper rising. So I would physically leave. It would always help a hundred percent. The second that you're on your own - the roller coaster stops. It's like the emergency stop button.

The other thing that I found is that I historically, you know, it's like when you get into like text arguments, you know, you're arguing on text and there's like loads of memes all over the internet about how girls will like hammer the keyboard and they'll keep hammering it and hammering it.

And if you are a partner that engages in that and provokes that cycle of conflict, it's impossible to get out of. It can just go and go and go. But because my ex-boyfriend would not do that - and the first few times it happened, he would say “ I think we need to take some time out. We will pick this up again in X, Y, Z minutes, days, hours, whatever.”

I definitely didn't like it, but actually, over time, I started to learn to be able to communicate in that way too. So I'd say, you know, we're not going to get anywhere on text. Let's take some time out. So yeah, despite these kinds of stumbling blocks at the beginning of the relationship, I think that actually, we learned, you know, really well to break our own cycles of conflict. I think that it is hard to put them into practice, but it's just so critical to have a healthy relationship.

Dr Tari: Yes, critical. And I think what you just said speaks to the power of healing that can happen in relationships. And the one, the last point that I want to make is, you know, and maybe we'll do a workshop on this, but just like the essential qualities that you need to have in a partner, in a relationship - and one of them that I talk about is like someone who can be kind to you, even in conflict, even when they're at their angriest for their saddest, or they're most scared, but you need to be able to do that as well. You can't expect anything in a partner that you are not and so learning how to regulate yourself, calm yourself down when the shit hits the fan. Massively is so important, so important, and I hope they, you know, get some therapy and, and grow in that way - because Faye will then be a healthier partner and she will attract a healthier partner.

Louise Rumball: Yeah. And my final point is that if she ends up in a relationship with someone where they're in these toxic conflict cycles, it won’t just impact her. It's the reason that I ended up breaking up with the very angry boyfriend I mentioned earlier because, after three and a half years, I realized do I want this to be the father of my children? Do I want children to grow up in this environment? And that was basically the main reason that I was finally able to break that cycle -- so I think that to anyone listening and who is in a relationship that maybe thinks that it's just a passionate relationship, or this is just, you know, how it is - it’s good to know that it's not because of all the things we've spoken about today. At the very least, it’s always good to think ahead, particularly if there is a potential family in your future because the environment that you bring these children into is going to teach them everything they know about how they are going to engage with their partner. So unless you have anything else to add Tari?

Tari: No, I think that's it!
 

Louise Rumball: haha, great. MIC DROP. I’m actually not going to drop the mic cause it's too expensive to break. So we'll just leave it there. Haha. Thank you again. Absolute pleasure. I love, I love,  love doing this with you. I just think there's so much that we learn and discover. We never know where they're going to go and just truly some of my favorite hours that are with you. So thank you so much.

Dr Tari: I'll see you soon! 

Louise Rumball: Yay. Bye!

You can access the podcast on Apple Music here or Spotify here.

Connect with Louise on social:
 @iamlouiserumball

Connect with OPENHOUSE:
 @openhouselife

Connect with Dr Tari Mack:
 @drtarimack

Sign up to join the OPENHOUSE mailing list to receive first access to all workshops: www.thisisopenhouse.com

Reach out to Dr Tari directly: www.drtarimack.com

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Music Sources
Vibe With Me by Joakim Karud http://soundcloud.com/joakimkarud
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/-7YDBIGCXsY