Why Partner and Family Dynamics Got Worse After I Started Working on It
The experience of things getting worse when you start working on the pattern is common, understandable, and usually temporary. It also has a specific explanation.
Awareness Before Capacity
The first effect of beginning to work with a relational pattern is increased awareness. You start noticing every instance of the pattern activating — every accommodation, every avoidance, every moment the pattern runs automatically.
Before this work, most of these instances were below conscious awareness. Now they’re visible.
This increased awareness creates the experience of the pattern being worse — because more of it is being perceived. The frequency hasn’t actually increased. The perception of the frequency has.
The Relational System’s Response
A second phenomenon: as you begin to change your responses, the relational system adjusts. Partners and family members who have organized their expectations around your accommodating responses encounter something different and may escalate their demands, become more insistent, or become confused and reactive.
This can feel like the dynamics are getting worse, when what’s actually happening is that the system is showing its current structure more clearly as it responds to your changing responses.
The Grace Period
Both of these dynamics — increased awareness and relational system adjustment — tend to be most intense in the early phases of the work and gradually reduce as new baselines establish. The pattern doesn’t get permanently worse when you work on it. It gets temporarily more visible.
The important response is to stay with the practice during this phase rather than interpreting the increased visibility as evidence that the work isn’t working.
The daily practice is designed to maintain consistency through the early phase when things feel more intense.
The Abundance GPS Skool community normalizes the “it got worse before it got better” experience.
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