As I dutifully set my clock ahead this morning, I started thinking about the precious time it takes to work on a destructive relationship. When we change our clocks forward at daylight savings, we give up a little time knowing that we’ll get that hour back later. As we explore the pros and cons of giving a destructive partner time to change we need to remember that whatever time we give, we’re not getting it back later.

There can sometimes be advantages to giving your partner time to change.

*You might use the time to construct a plan of exiting as safely as possible, with as many sound emotional and financial resources as possible—this is especially important if your partner is violent or threatening, or has indicated that he will get financial revenge on you if you leave him.

*With a dangerous partner, you might use the time to hope that he is the one he loses interest in you so that he is the one to leave you, which can be safer.

Giving your partner your time…

… might give you the space to become very clear about what is happening; going through repeated patterns can give you the opportunity to identify them, prepare yourself emotionally for them, and see the range of his abilities.

…can allow you to manage major life transitions, such as caring for infants or very small children, or dealing with a relative’s sickness and death, with fewer disruptions than leaving might entail.

…can allow you to articulate for yourself what exactly your “deal breakers” are so that you are more prepared to insist upon change, and to reinstate for yourself your standards and your clarity.

…when safety is not an issue, can allow you to detach yourself from the intense care and responsibility for him, and reestablish yourself as a priority, even while in the relationship.

…can assuage the voices in you that say, “What if…” or “I have to…” These voices can’t be heard and these expectations met until you can meet them squarely and feel confident in your conclusions.

… if things are noticeably improving, can connect you to the love, hope, and expansive feelings you felt when you first met.

… if things are noticeably improving, can afford you some of the acknowledgment and healing that you desire and deserve.

…can help you feel certain of yourself as a person who has tried everything, who is committed to relationships, who believes in giving people a chance.

… can give your children a chance to be in an intact family. (Of course, the costs can quickly turn too high for you, and for your children also, so be alert to when the costs start to outweigh the benefits.)

…can spare you the pressures of having to go through finding a new partner and building a new life.

Let’s look at the costs of standing by a destructive partner.

*Your natural sense of hope and resilience may be wounded. Giving so much loving attention to your partner without much return is like a slow leak in your energy reserve tank; hope for a life filled with love can fade, to be replaced by a desperate longing for love and connection.

*You might lose sight of your own set of standards in the relationship, compromising even your basic emotional needs because you are so busy sorting through and managing your partner’s dramatic ups and downs, with only short periods of rest in between. With all that work at hand, you have been pulled away from addressing what you actually want in your relationship. The standard becomes “He’s not as bad as he was,” or perhaps even, “It doesn’t devastate me the way it used to.”

*You might lose your sense of joy and creativity, for all the reasons we have just been describing. Expressing your vision is the core of creativity. You must have an audience that is receptive in some way, even if it is an inner audience. When you have internalized the destructive audience, you become bound up by a sense of rejection. You feel stopped before you even start.

*You may miss opportunities for yourself, and lose out on necessary personal changes because you are no longer attuned to your inner signals regarding your own needs and desires, as you have become so outwardly focused.

*You might have a confused sense of what the real signals of change are, since you have been promised changes for such a long period and they never materialize. His promises might be honest and heartfelt, but he lacks any real grasp of what it takes to overcome the profound issues and wounds that he faces. It’s easy to misinterpret these honest pledges as being changes themselves. And your confusion can be compounded if he keeps making changes but they rapidly fade way each time, or he makes small changes, but they aren’t nearly enough.

*You might have an inaccurate sense of who you are, because your partner so often responds to you in ways that don’t at all fit with what you are actually giving, saying, or doing. Being in a relationship with someone whose perceptions are so distorted can start to throw your own vision out of whack. It’s like looking too long into a funhouse mirror. You can’t have an accurate reflection of yourself back.

*You might have a growing fear of being ‘alone’ from him telling you that you are unlovable, unworthy and inadequate. The prospect of bring without a partner takes on a new meaning when you are in a destructive relationship, because you are already longing for intimacy, and may already be isolated as well. From inside the relationship, it seems that life without him would be even more painful than the situation you are in. (In reality, once the traumatic bond dissolves significantly and your life is filled with other loving connections, including to yourself, being alone can be filled with joy and renewal. You could rediscover who you are as loving, worthy and invaluable. Your possibilities for partnership could open.)

*You might not be the friend you want to be to others, because you have so little time to devote to your friendships.

*You may have a sense of frustration and impatience in your dealings with people, because you feel not known and not seen, and feel that your generous sharing of your life and time is not being acknowledged for what it is worth. You might be irritable and short from having been attacked over such a long period of time that you no longer have a place of rest from which you navigate the sometimes frustrating world. You might become intolerant of people disagreeing with your opinions because you’ve had to live with so much devaluing of your thinking that your value as a person seems like it is at stake.

*If your partner is self-destructive, giving him your time might increase your sense of obligation to him. If his style is to be less self-destructive for certain periods by channeling his unhealthy energy toward harming you, you may feel that you have to sacrifice yourself. Sacrificing yourself may seem less painful in the short term when you can ward off, temporarily, the self-destruction of someone you love. The longer you are with the partner, the longer you have the sense that you are keeping him going. But the reality is that you are both actually sinking; he may be sinking more slowly than he would without you, but you are both sinking nonetheless.

*The longer you stay, the harder it may be to find support from people around you when the time comes that you do feel ready to talk to other people about how this relationship is dragging you down. You may have had many reasons not reveal what was happening: you were afraid of how he would react if he found out what you said; you wanted to figure out more yourself first because you don’t know what it all means and where it is going; you didn’t feel that you could open up about the hours of arguments or the scary threats. It’s tempting to just say you are ‘fine’ and move as best as you can throughout your day with incredible (and unnoticed) strength.

Your New Year’s resolutions regarding health and fitness may have waned, but it is still the season to invest in promises and hope for your relationship. If you are involved with a partner who has  repeatedly harmed you, whether through addiction, disrespecting you, cheating or being  outright abusive, much of the relationship advice you will hear during this romantic holiday will actually make your relationship worse. Let’s take a look at the commonly accepted wisdom that you want to avoid if you want your relationship to have a chance at becoming one worth saving:

*”Both partners have equal responsibility for making the relationship work.”

Well, no. The person who has behaved destructively has a much greater responsibility, and the relationship can’t become a healthy one unless he’s prepared to take that on.

*”Each relationship partner has to focus on evaluating his or her own faults, and stay out of judging the other person’s.”

Not at all–the person who has lived with the destructive behavior needs a break from stewing about her own faults, which her partner has most likely already harped on for years. Moreover, she will probably have to be calling her partner on his issues, because he has already shown that he won’t face them unless he is repeatedly confronted.

*”Issues from the past need to be left in the past.”

Wrong again. Don’t forget the wise saying “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” Healing can’t happen unless we address the past.

*”Don’t shame your partner about what he has done–you’ll just make him feel bad about himself and so much of what he’s done comes from his shame.”

We don’t want to continue the centuries-long mistake of encouraging women to be silent. We want to see men who are tearing lives apart challenged clearly and directly about what they are doing. The kind of toxic shame they many destructive people already feel does need to be healed, yet it does not excuse them from their responsibility. Toxic shame is fundamentally different from the appropriate sense of conscience  a person ought to feel for creating such harm.

Once one partner becomes chronically cruel or demeaning to the other, once a power imbalance is established in a relationship, once profound lies start to be told, the regular rules for dealing with predictable, healthy relationship conflict have to be tossed out the window and a whole new plan put in place.

If your partner is destructive and has admitted that he has a serious problem and is agreeing to take steps to turn himself around, then remember these guidelines for going forward:

The Past Matters.

Don’t accept the following statements:

“We’re putting the past behind us,”

“None of what happened matters anymore,”

“We’re making a fresh start.”

We borrow the caution from AA, “Don’t forget where you came from.” While it is true that you don’t want to live in the past, you also want to avoid getting too distant from it. When destructive people forget what they have done, it increases the chances that they will harm you again. Therefore, you and your partner will have to do a kind of balancing act. On the one hand, you can’t be endlessly rehashing the past as if it were the present. On the other hand, during these early periods of change, you have to keep the past beside you, give it a kind of presence in the room at all times. It is important to name what his behaviors were like, and what the harmful impact of his actions were on you and your children. This is sobering and helpful for the truly recovering destructive partner, and may be deeply relieving for you. You will know when you don’t need to hear it and talk about it any longer. You will also know whether your partner truly is changing, by whether or not he accepts this phase of the work willingly.

Another part of the past that matters significantly is the facts. Often the opposite is argued–that in a relationship, it only matters what each person feels about what took place, and that you each have your “own reality”. I’m not sure how wise this thinking is for any relationship, but it is most definitely misguided when it is applied to a relationship where one partner has caused great harm. The blurring of the facts allows the hurtful partner to escape accountability for his actions, minimize the impact those actions have had, and avoid learning the necessary lessons.

If you and your partner cannot reach at least a reasonably close agreement as to what took place during critical events in the history of your relationship, you cannot safely trust him to not to repeat those kinds of behaviors in the future. Therefore, one of the rules for saving the savable relationship is that if your partner can’t get to a clearer memory of his actions, he needs to at least be prepared to wholeheartedly take your word for it regarding how he behaved, and stop saying (or implying) that you are making things up or exaggerating them.

If you are reading this and thinking, “No way! He’ll NEVER do that!” than you can avoid Valentine’s Day’s mistaken hopes. He’s not really changing at all unless these first few rules for going forward are something you can both live by.

Destructive relationships cause so much pain and can be so confusing. The pain is compounded by the embarrassment of becoming the irritating person who is calling up  friends about the same old relationship story yet one more time. We can sense our friends hesitate to pick up when it is us; we can feel the emotional eye-rolling going on when they are quietly listening to us perseverate about our relationship.

Yet women who are in destructive relationships can have great friendships. I think of a woman I have worked with named Rachel, who, while navigating her way through a couple of consuming relationships, has been able to successfully keep a circle of supportive confidantes by adopting guidelines that she has shared with them:

TIME LIMITS

Rachel will call a friend and say, with humor, “I’d like twenty minutes to go on and on about my thing. I know I’ve said it all before, but I need to do it again. Can you do twenty minutes?” And then Rachel, against every intense pull to the contrary, will stick to the twenty-minute limit.

RECIPROCITY

Rachel will call the friend back the next day and devote her attention entirely to the friend’s cares and concerns, and not mention the relationship issues with which she is still obviously struggling. This way, Rachel is able to take advantage of a wide network of friends who do not get burned out by the intensity and circular nature of sorting through the relationship issues.

REGULATING EMOTIONS

By naming what she is going through and what she needs specifically from her friends, Rachel is managing the often intense pressure and ongoing urgency she feels to figure out this painful situation. Rachel is:

Observing her emotions

Naming them, and

Accepting them with humor and love

Rachel is doing this rather than being swallowed up or consumed by her emotions. Her approach goes a long way toward preserving her friendships because her friends have a sense that Rachel exists outside the relationship struggle, and is connected to them in other areas of their lives. Perhaps more importantly, so does Rachel.

Try  one of Rachel’s approaches—give yourself room for “going on about your thing.” Then follow up by giving yourself room to be yourself outside of “your relationship thing.”