How To Spot Red AND Green Flags in Your Relationships with Helen Snape

Episode 084:
How To Spot Red AND Green Flags in Your Relationships with Helen Snape

Have you ever felt like you were wearing a mask, displaying a fake smile just to keep the peace? Helen Snape, an award-winning healthy relationship coach, joins us to unravel the complexities behind our emotional facades and guides us toward authenticity and self-love. Her transformative journey from a psychologically abusive marriage to helping others establish healthy, reciprocal relationships is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of self-awareness.

We tackle the tough questions around unmet needs, people-pleasing tendencies, and the necessity of setting boundaries. Helen introduces us to tools such as the "regulating resources sandwich," designed to help navigate the emotional landscape of difficult conversations. Whether you're single, navigating monogamy, or exploring polyamory, the skills discussed here are universal in creating fulfilling emotional connections.

We delve into the importance of recognizing 'red' and 'green' flags, highlighting how incremental sharing and vulnerability can deepen our bonds. Helen shares her story and insights in such a vulnerable way. 

Connect with Helen:
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This is Relationships Reimagined.

Join the conversation as we dive into a new paradigm of conscious, intentional and diverse relationships.
 
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Transcript

Helen Snape: 0:00

One of the things that we learned when I was training as a mediator was that at the heart of almost every conflict is an unmet need. So if you can identify what your unmet need is, then you're halfway there. The research shows that your health and your happiness isn't so much reliant on how much money you make or what job you have. It's your relationships with other people and your emotional connection with them. So I think we owe it to ourselves to learn how to have healthy and wholesome relationships.

Carrie Jeroslow: 0:42

Welcome to the Relationship Diversity podcast, where we celebrate, question and explore all aspects of relationship structure diversity, from solaramary to monogamy to polyamory and everything in between, because every relationship is as unique as you are. We'll bust through societal programming to break open and dissect everything we thought we knew about relationships, to ask the challenging but transformational questions who am I and what do I really want in my relationships? I'm your guide, kerry Jarislow, bestselling author, speaker, intuitive and coach. Join me as we reimagine all that our most intimate relationships can become. Today's episode is part of our conversation series. I'm just one voice in this relationship diversity movement and it's important to bring more unique perspectives into the conversation.

Carrie Jeroslow: 1:41

Today I'll be talking with Helen Snape, all about establishing healthy, reciprocal relationships. We also discussed the idea of not only identifying red flags but also acknowledging green flags, which can bring you awareness of relational health and fulfillment. But first a little about her. After burning out at work and losing herself in a long-term relationship, helen Snape realized that she had the disease to please, discovered the magic of boundaries and is now passionate about helping other overgivers do the same. Helen has combined what she has learned throughout her HR career her psychology degree and coaching qualifications and experience to become both an award-winning healthy relationship coach and speaker, having been interviewed on BBC Radio, the Women's Economic Forum, and has been featured in Happiful magazine. Her debut book, drop the Fake Smile, which came out in September 2023, is a recovering people-pleasers guide to self-love, boundaries and healthy relationships. Let's get into the conversation.

Carrie Jeroslow: 2:59

Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Relationship Diversity Podcast. I've got another great guest for you, but you know they're all great, they all have such expertise and Helen is no different. Helen Snape is with me today and we're going to talk all about healthy relationships and how to establish healthy reciprocal relationships. I love the topic of healthy relationships because we are never taught about relationships. We have to actually go out and get the information and learn, because we make our assumptions about what is healthy and what is not by what we see, what we're shown, what we grow up with, and a lot of times that is just coming from our belief systems and our programs. By educating ourselves and learning from experts and from people who have a lot of experience about what healthy relationships look like, we can then start to really look at what we think is that really healthy or not? And we start to redefine in a more healthy way. With that, I am so thankful, helen, for you to be here today. Thank you for being here, and I'd love for you to introduce yourself.

Helen Snape: 4:26

Thank you, kerry, for having me on. I'm really excited for our conversation because I love talking about healthy relationships For your listeners. I'm Helen Snape. I'm a healthy relationships coach, speaker and author. I live in the UK, in Surrey, and I just love talking all about healthy relationships and boundaries and all that good stuff.

Carrie Jeroslow: 4:48

What led you to being so excited about this? Because I always say there's a story behind everything and we usually create our passions from our life experience. Can you tell us a little bit about your story?

Helen Snape: 5:04

Sure, I grew up as a good girl, trying to make everyone happy, and I've always had a fascination for really what makes people tick and about what makes relationships work and what doesn't. I studied psychology at university and I worked for a long time in human resources and training and saw a lot about what makes relationships at work work. I'd always enjoyed more of that mentoring and training side of the role, and people had suggested to me about becoming a coach. Eventually, I listened, I took myself off and I trained in transformational coaching and then somatic coaching, thinking that I would be a career coach because that kind of made sense given my human resources background. But, as I'm sure we carry, when you go on this self-development journey you begin to understand actually what it is that you're really called to do.

Helen Snape: 6:07

I realised that for me, my passion was going to be helping women that have gone through similar experiences to me, and in particular for me, I was in a psychologically and emotionally abusive marriage for 18 years, which is a long time. Yet for most of that time I had no idea that was a problem like that was a bad environment. I knew that I was really unhappy, but I didn't recognise it for what it was that I was really the victim of coercive control at that time. When I came out of that and started learning about healthy relationships, I was like, oh my goodness, I wish that I had known some of this before. That's why I'm really passionate about helping other women who are either in that situation or have come out of that situation and have really lost touch with themselves, that perhaps they don't have boundaries, they don't know about healthy relationships, and just helping them to get started to establish what standards they want in their relationships, to understand what their rights and their responsibilities are, and to spot things like red flags and green flags in relationships going forwards.

Carrie Jeroslow: 7:33

Yeah, I love that we're going to get into red flags and green flags, but I wanted to ask you because when you were in it, you knew that you weren't happy, but you didn't know how unhealthy and abusive that relationship was. And I think that happens for many people when we're living something, an experience, and we don't know differently, we just try to make it work because we just think, well, that is the way, maybe that it is. So I'm curious with your experience, what was the thing that pulled you out and said maybe this isn't healthy, this isn't how it's supposed to be. Something is really wrong here.

Helen Snape: 8:19

Yeah Well, I knew that I wasn't coping very well within myself. I would cry a lot, I was tired most of the time and I knew that I was miserable. I think what began to happen was that that I think there's within all of us. There is a part of us that is whole and knows the truth, and I think that part of me was just beginning to appear, just for brief moments. For example, we went to a New Year's Eve party and my husband expected me to trail after him for the whole evening to make sure that I don't know that he got the drinks that he needed, and I didn't do that. I decided I wanted to go and chat to some other people and I went home a bit early and when he got back home he was really angry because he had got into a big argument with somebody at the party and he blamed me for not keeping him hydrated throughout the evening.

Helen Snape: 9:23

And I think that adult part of me that really knows the truth, that conscious part, kicked in. It was almost like me looking at my life from high up on a cloud and seeing us both and seeing how I was just soft and yielding and apologetic and he was angry and dominating and aggressive and blaming me for something that really was not my fault, and I could just see how ridiculous it was, but at that time I only had pockets of that awareness. What really, I think, woke me up and was my turning point was a phone call from my mother. Now I rarely spoke to my family because my husband had isolated me from my family, so to get a phone call from my parents was quite unusual, and she was ringing me to say that she had been diagnosed with myeloma, which is an incurable cancer. And that really was my wake-up call, because I realised life is short, life is precious. And what am I doing with mine? Maybe I deserve something better.

Carrie Jeroslow: 10:45

That's so powerful and, having just gone through a similar thing with my mom, I know how much of a wake-up call that can be in life to really start evaluating what is going on in your life and just taking such a deep look, almost being forced to do that Not forced, you know what I mean but just feeling like that idea that life is short and am I meant to live in a life that is unhappy and not the truth of who I am. And I loved what you said. I actually got chills when you said there is that part in you that knows that you're whole, even if it's small, that there is that part, and I feel that we all have that. It's about accessing that part of ourselves and it just gave me chills, so that was really powerful, thank you. Going on to healthy relationships, how would you define a healthy relationship?

Helen Snape: 11:50

For me, a healthy relationship is one where you're both allowed to be who you are, without expecting the other person to change, and, at the same time, that you're both given space to change and to grow, because we all do.

Carrie Jeroslow: 12:11

So that's very similar to how I define healthy relationship is, and what we talk about a lot in this podcast is being able to be truly who you are and how that shows up. And so if someone is in a relationship but they don't really know who they are, how would you help someone to get to the place where they could even tell you am I really being myself in this relationship?

Helen Snape: 12:41

What I come across a lot are people that are very focused on other people.

Helen Snape: 12:46

So I know you've explored the people-pleasing side of things in the podcast before, but it quite often is the case that we get so absorbed in our partners and what's going on with them and we lose sight of actually who we are. And so we can begin to come back to who we are by bringing that attention that we give to other people back to ourselves, and for some of us, that is something that we really have to practice, because it feels really unfamiliar, because we're just used to focusing on other people at the time, but when we can bring that focus back to ourselves and one thing that I found that helps with that is meditation. It's, then, about giving yourself the time and the space to learn about yourself apart from other people. So it's learning things like what is most important to you, what lights me up, what makes me me, what are my unique qualities, and just learning more about yourself so that you can define yourself, you can identify who you are, so that then, when you're interacting with your partner or partners, you're able to accurately represent yourself.

Carrie Jeroslow: 14:12

I think sometimes, when we start to go on this journey of knowing ourselves and trying to get to know ourselves and understanding who we are, we also face things about ourselves that we're very judgmental, that we find as problems or I'm putting problems in air quotes because I don't think there are problems there's parts of ourselves that we developed from survival, from adapting to what we're seeing, from protection of ourselves. I know specifically I'm a recovering people pleaser and when I started to look at myself, I found things that were hard to accept about myself. How do you help people, or what would you say to someone who starts this work and starts to learn more about themselves, but also starts to learn these darker parts that are hard to accept?

Helen Snape: 15:10

I love the way you put it actually, because the way I describe it is that the adult part of you is like the CEO of you, and then within you are all these different parts, and so some of them are parts that you might like Within all of us.

Helen Snape: 15:30

I say that we have an inner child and that's where you're fine and you're true, emotions and your spontaneity live. But then there are these parts of the ego that are unconscious and they're not always so pretty. That's where your inner critic lives, maybe where your people-pleasing part lives, or your codependent part or your really rageful part, but they're all parts of you and they're all trying to help you in their own weird and wonderful ways. So for me, I have a big people-pleasing part and that was me learning a strategy that worked for me at one point in my life, and so that's ingrained within me and it's trying to help me. It doesn't know that there are other tools and other ways of being in the world that actually are going to serve me better and are healthier for me and for the other people that I interact with.

Carrie Jeroslow: 16:34

Yeah, so there's almost an aspect of re-parenting yourself and giving the cuddles and the hugs to that part of you that maybe stopped developing and just started existing and surviving, maybe at 10 years old, 7 years old, 4 years old, and re-parenting that part of yourself and teaching yourself those tools to be in relationship in a different way.

Helen Snape: 17:02

Yes, yes, re-parenting is incredibly powerful. Yeah, because what I love is that your mind doesn't know whether you're talking to yourself in the present or in the past or the future, so you can go back and talk to that younger part of you, let them know. It's okay, I've got this. Now we can do things differently now.

Carrie Jeroslow: 17:28

Yeah, that can be some pretty incredible work For those of us who are people-pleasers or recovering people-pleasers. I think when we start to learn more about who we are, the next step is to express that to our partner partners. Communication is the cornerstone of relationships and you talk about expressing yourself and teaching people how to express themselves, recovering people-pleasers and people-pleasers to express themselves in relationships without fear or guilt. That is so much easier said than done. Specifically, the fear part. If I say something to my partner, that is really something that I'm feeling. Will my partner accept me? Will my partner yell at me? Will my partner leave the room? How do you help people do that express themselves without fear or guilt?

Helen Snape: 18:24

There are many parts to that. One is to know that that feeling of fear that's part of being human. Give yourself a break for feeling that. Partly it's remembering that you aren't responsible for how the other person feels, even though it can really feel like you are. It's not true?

Carrie Jeroslow: 18:49

Yes, as a people-pleaser for sure. That must be my fault.

Helen Snape: 18:54

I know it's also about having tools for the moment when you're going to have that conversation. One thing that I like to talk about is having a regulating resources sandwich.

Carrie Jeroslow: 19:10

Oh to explain.

Helen Snape: 19:14

So, both before and after you have this difficult conversation, find something that is going to help you feel grounded and present and either good or at least neutral. So it may be something as simple as holding a warm cup of tea or opening the window and listening to the birds sing, or going for a short walk and then afterwards knowing that you've got something that will help you regulate your nervous system, and that might be talking to a friend, or it might be going and sitting on a park bench. Yeah, it's having things that are going to just help you calm your nervous system, and obviously that's gonna be different for different people, but it helps you to manage that difficult moment.

Carrie Jeroslow: 20:12

Yeah, I love that and I have a very busy life. So finding those times and I think it's not finding them, it's creating them right, it's saying okay, if I'm gonna go talk to my partner about this kind of scary thing for me, I'm going to take five minutes and go in the bathroom that's usually where I get the most privacy with kids. It's a bathroom. I'm gonna go in the bathroom, I'm gonna breathe a little bit and just center myself and then also creating that time afterwards Because I do think those challenging especially when we're in our self-healing journey and self-inquisition, self-reflection journey that taking the time right afterwards to process what just happened can really catapult that experience for you to a place of like okay, this is what I've learned from that experience.

Carrie Jeroslow: 21:14

I've learned that I could say this in a different way that my partner is going to take the time and process on their own, that I was really scared but I also got through it and I'm okay. So really taking that time to process as much as possible I bet even five minutes would make a huge difference.

Helen Snape: 21:36

Oh yeah, yeah, it doesn't have to take long at all.

Carrie Jeroslow: 21:39

Okay, I'm gonna bring that into my practice. I love that you talk about red flags and green flags in a relationship. I'd love to talk more about that and what you mean by both of those things, because we hear a lot about red flags. We don't hear a lot about green flags, so can you go into those a little bit more?

Helen Snape: 22:00

Yeah, so red flags are warning signs, really. They're things to notice that might be occurring in your relationship. And they're just, they're signs that might be telling you that this person has some unhealthy relationship behaviors, or maybe even some really dangerous ones. And so they're just, they're things to notice, and then you get to choose what you do about it. For example, there's love bombing.

Carrie Jeroslow: 22:31

Can you explain that for anyone who doesn't know? I know it's very much in the relationship vocabulary right now, but there's might be some people that don't know what that is.

Helen Snape: 22:40

It's when somebody tries to make the relationship go faster than it naturally would. They give you a huge amount of affection, maybe shower you with gifts and really go overboard on bringing you closer together, like really quickly, and it's because they're trying to create this tight bond between you much sooner than would be natural, so they're trying to lure you in really quickly. Which is something that my ex-husband did, which I didn't know at the time.

Carrie Jeroslow: 23:23

Yeah, Right, because it sets you up to be in this. Oh, I'm being wooed and I feel special and they're really pulling you in, so that's really interesting. What are some other red flags so?

Helen Snape: 23:37

isolating you from friends or family, either them doing it explicitly do you tell them you can't go and see them or they just guilt trip you about going to see other people, so you just feel like it's just not worth it. That's a big one Monitoring your whereabouts or monitoring your, say, your social media usage or monitoring your phone calls. Another one would be humiliating you For example, you're telling you basically that you're worthless, or something like that happens or intimidating you, so either threatening you with physical violence or just slamming things around. Yeah, those are big ones, right.

Carrie Jeroslow: 24:24

Yeah, they all seem to be under the umbrella of I need to have power over you in order to feel good about myself, for whatever reason, then as long as you are disempowered, then the relationship works. It seems like for them that is under that umbrella of disempowerment.

Helen Snape: 24:47

Yeah, yeah, because they're basically wanting to control everything about the relationship. So, for example, in some cases they might restrict or not let you have access to, say, support services. Or in some cases they might restrict your access to your finances or they take over the finances completely, and so then you're really beholden to them.

Carrie Jeroslow: 25:12

Right, right, and so what would be? Some green flags.

Helen Snape: 25:18

Oh, green flags, yes. So these green flags are signs of healthy relationship behaviors, and so what's beautiful actually about well, both red flags and green flags is that they can apply to any kind of relationship. Green flags include feeling safe Like feeling safe physically, but also like emotionally and psychologically, so you feel like you're able to express yourself openly, without fear of retaliation or comeback. You feel good when you're with the other person. You don't have knots in your stomach or dread seeing them. So safety is a basic, fundamental. Second one is respect. We don't have to agree with each other on everything, but we don't force each other to agree with our own opinion. We don't blame each other. We don't judge each other.

Carrie Jeroslow: 26:18

What else? What are other green flags?

Helen Snape: 26:21

Respect for boundaries, oh boundaries. This is both. Obviously, this is both ways. So this is us respecting other people's boundaries but others respecting ours. That is a fundamental one. And then there is honest emotional communication, because too many times I meet people who they have a surface level relationship. They maybe talk about who's going to walk the dog or who's going to take out the rubbish, but they don't talk about how they're feeling or what is going on in the relationship, and they just sweep it under the carpet and hope that things will somehow improve. And they just don't have those conversations about actually how they're feeling, what they need addressing problems that have come up.

Carrie Jeroslow: 27:18

And that seems to go back to the first thing that you said, green Flag, which is feeling safe to be able to do that. I also think that there's a lot of surface conversation in the world and we aren't taught how to be vulnerable in our communication, and so, to me, vulnerability and communication and heart connection communication takes practice. It takes maybe dipping your toe in the water and just feeling what it feels like to say something that's maybe a little bit more revealing, a little bit more vulnerable. If I already have that safety that I feel with my partner and then doing it a little bit more, and then doing it a little bit more, I still feel scared sometimes to have those super vulnerable conversations, and when I do, I find that our relationships do expand so much more than I thought ever possible. There's just this expansion that we experience when we open our hearts and we look in each other's eyes and we say something that's scary. So that's big stuff. Any other Green Flags that you can lead us through or tell us about?

Helen Snape: 28:42

Being able to have time apart, because in some relationships there's this sort of a measurement that goes on and so it feels like you have to spend all of your time together, whereas actually that's not so healthy. We need time apart from each other to see our own friends, to do our own thing, to have time on our own, so that you're not just one big blob together. You actually can come back together as two whole people or more and enjoy each other even more.

Carrie Jeroslow: 29:18

for having had that time apart, I love that a lot because, I like to say, the best relationship is a whole person and a whole person coming together to make this beautiful, unique relationship. And you're right, that requires, I think, time on our own to develop our own hobbies and just understand the things that speak to us, that speak to our heart, and be able to explore and develop those aspects of ourselves because even if the partners that have so much in common, they're still not the same exact person.

Helen Snape: 30:04

Absolutely yeah, and other things. I don't know if these are necessarily green flags, but things that also help a relationship to work are things like being patient with each other, being flexible and also having a sense of humour. The number of times that my partner I've wanted to get mad with him and then he has just made a joke Not in a way to deflect from the conversation, but it just breaks the tension. It's super helpful.

Carrie Jeroslow: 30:42

I agree 100% and I know sometimes when my partner and I are having heavier conversations and if we are just able to bring in some sense of humour like an inside joke and it's tricky because sometimes that's like you're not listening to me but if we can come together in that moment of humour it really just lightens it up. And even talking about maybe more challenging topics like non-monogamy these are the things that are maybe a little challenging for anyone who is exploring new relationship structures that are not mono normativity and if there is just some humour that can bring some levity, it really can shift the experience. Because I think we do. We get really super heavy in all of our stuff and not to bypass of the stuff, because I think it's important to acknowledge it, but bringing that levity, ugh, I love that you brought that up.

Helen Snape: 31:49

Yeah, it shifts the energy. Yeah, and for me, what it does is it takes it out of that space of oh well, he's saying this and then I'm saying this, and the danger is we get defensive and start going against each other. It just completely shifts the energy. It makes us realise oh actually we're on the same side. But yes, we have an issue and a problem, but we're going to do that together.

Carrie Jeroslow: 32:16

Okay, I love that you said that, because that is a fundamental belief in programming is that when you are having an argument with your partner, someone who you love, you get on the other side of each other and to have the idea and the acknowledgement that, no, we are on the same team. We want the same things and most times I think arguments are all about wanting to be seen, wanting to be heard, wanting to be accepted and knowing that we really want that for each other. So let's get off of the other side of the net if you're looking at like a tennis court or something, but and get on the same side and work together and know that we're on the same team. Thank you for bringing that up.

Helen Snape: 33:05

One of the things that we learned when I was training as a mediator was that at the heart of almost every conflict is an unmet need. Yes, yeah, so if you can identify what your unmet need is, then you're halfway there. Yeah, a few minutes before the end of everyone's practice, everyone's first practice.

Carrie Jeroslow: 33:27

So when I was browse for a lot of time, you see all what events don't want to be decreased powerful and I find that even with my kids, if they're getting really upset there's something that they're not getting, that if we can identify that and when I have been able to identify that with them, with a partner, then we can move to resolution so much quicker, so much quicker. And my kids, who are younger, they'll move through the upset not by bypassing it, but by me really looking at what it is that they're really needing, not what's on the surface, which then ties into what you were talking about the importance of having deeper conversations to create that healthy emotional connection. Wow, all really good stuff, helen. This is wonderful. I want to move towards your book. You have just released a book called Drop the Fake Smile the Recovering People Pleasers Guide to Self-Love, boundaries and Healthy Relationships. That's a big one. Drop the fake smile. Tell us a little bit about the book.

Helen Snape: 34:46

So this is the book that I needed to read about eight years ago and it didn't exist. And so, as I've gone on my own journey of learning to break free of people, pleasing, learning how to do healthier relationships, I thought, well, if I needed to read that book, chances are there are other people that could do with reading that book too, and so I decided to write it. I wanted to make it practical, so I didn't want it just to be one of those books that you read and then you think, oh, that's nice, and then you forget about it. So what I've done is done a mixture of including little parts of my own story, ground it into reality, but then got people thinking about their own situation, and then included some exercises and some writing prompts at the end of each chapter so that people can help apply it into their own life.

Carrie Jeroslow: 35:53

So who would benefit the most from reading this book?

Helen Snape: 35:58

Anyone that identifies as a people pleaser, so basically somebody that's too nice for their own good, that feels like they give and give and give in their relationships and don't get back what the amount that they give. They say yes to things all the time and they feel like they would feel really guilty if they said no, and they probably are feeling exhausted most of the time and resentful for them.

Carrie Jeroslow: 36:31

So if that sounds like you run, Don't Walk to get this book. And where can people find the book, Helen?

Helen Snape: 36:40

It's available everywhere that good books are sold. So, yeah, it's available worldwide from. You can order it from your local bookstore or, of course, it is auto on Amazon.

Carrie Jeroslow: 36:51

And we'll have the links in the show notes so you can very easily go down to the notes. Click on it and it will lead you to the book. How else can people connect with you, to learn more about your work and to connect with you if they want to reach out and get some help from you?

Helen Snape: 37:09

The easiest place to find me is my website. So that's HelenSnapcom, that's Helen and then SNAPEcom.

Carrie Jeroslow: 37:18

Wonderful. You also have a free e-book for people. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Helen Snape: 37:25

Yeah. So the e-book is called Building Healthy Boundaries an overgivers guide on when to say yes and how to say no in relationships. Short but comprehensive guide to what poor boundaries look like, good boundaries, and then a step by step guide on how to begin to identify what your boundaries are and how to communicate them the steps that I followed when I first started my journey of learning to have healthier boundaries. You can download it for free from my website, so it's just HelenSnapcom forward slash free.

Carrie Jeroslow: 38:03

Wonderful. We'll have that in the show notes too. So if you are wanting to learn more about boundaries and how to have healthy boundaries, that would be a good book. I'm going to go over and get that myself right now. Helen, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us and spending this time with me. Anything else that you want to leave our listeners with?

Helen Snape: 38:28

The research shows that your health and your happiness isn't so much reliant on how much money you make or what job you have. It's your relationships with other people and your emotional connection with them. So I think we owe it to ourselves to learn how to have healthy and wholesome relationships.

Carrie Jeroslow: 38:54

Beautiful, and I think it's one of the most important skills that we could learn, because we are in relationship with everything and with ourselves, and if we can learn this skill, I think we could accomplish anything in life, and so I appreciate your work and thank you for that. Final thought Everyone, please go connect with Helen. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for listening to the Relationship Diversity podcast. Want to learn more about relationship diversity? I've got a free guide I'd love to send you. Go to wwwrelationshipdiversitypodcastcom to get your sent right to you. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast. You being here and participating in the conversation about relationship diversity is what helps us create a space of inclusivity and acceptance together. The more comfortable and normal it is to acknowledge the vast and varied relating we all do, the faster we'll shift to a paradigm of conscious, intentional and diverse relationships. New episodes are released every Thursday. Stay connected with me through my YouTube channel, where I'll give you even more free resources and information all about relationship diversity. I'm super excited to go deeper into YouTube because I'll be able to connect and have conversations directly with you. You'll find the link in the show notes. Stay curious.

Carrie Jeroslow: 40:30

Every relationship is as unique as you are. Are you wondering why you never seem to find lasting fulfillment in your relationships, or do you create the same kinds of relationship experiences over and over again? Can you never seem to find even one person who you want to explore a relationship with? Have you just given up hope all together? If this sounds like you, my recent book why Do they Always Break Up With Me is the perfect place to start. The foundation of any relationship, whether intimate or not, is the relationship we have with ourselves. In the book, I lead you through eight clear steps to start or continue your self-exploration journey. You'll learn about the importance of self-acceptance, gratitude, belief shifting and forgiveness, and given exercises to experience these life-changing concepts. This is the process I use to shift my relationships from continual heartbreak to what they are now fulfilling, soul-nourishing, compassionate and loving. It is possible for you. This book can set you on a path to get there, currently available through Amazon or through the link in the show notes.