The Race to The Bottom in Relationships

The race where everyone loses

Tully O’Connor has been a sought after relationship and connection coach for the last 9 years. Through one on one clients, global group programs, live speaking gigs and more, he’s worked with thousands of couples though navigating relationships into a place of thriving and connection rather than mediocracy and discomfort.

This publication is designed to be accessible to many who want to explore what it means to exist within thriving relationships in the modern world.

This publication is primarily free.

This is a space to hear from others, explore yourself, your partner and create space for more thriving in your life for yourselves and your families.

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I’m quite a competitive person.

And, even though it might not be as obvious, so is my wife.

If we were to have a competition about who is most competitive, I’d say she’d probably win, but not by much.

In so many areas of life I believe a healthy competitive drive is extremely beneficial. In our relationships, it is NOT.

Yet this is where so many people find themselves, especially in that early parenthood season.

Competing with each other.

When we enter the parenthood season, resources that were once in abundance become scarce. Really fast.

Time to ourselves, energy, sleep, the ability to take a shit without being interrupted. All these things we once had in abundance become valuable resources we must earn priority.

Couple this with the fact that we’re often under more physical, mental and emotional stress and you have a recipe for competition and conflict.

When we’re stressed/dysregulated the part of our brain that defaults to black and white thinking, us vs them thinking, becomes more active.

In a stressed state, we move from “we” consciousness to “me” consciousness without even realising it and all of a sudden our beloved, the person we’ve chosen to do life with and build a family with, can become a source of competition and threat.

“More for them” feels like “less for me.”

And so, naturally, the “Race to the Bottom” begins.

This is a race to see who wins the prize for “who has it the hardest.”

It’s the race to see who has less of these scarce resources.

The thing about this race is that nobody wins. If we win, our partner loses and the relationship loses. If the relationship loses, then we don’t actually win even though temporarily it may feel that way.

There’s two main reasons we want to claim this “prize”.

The first is that unconsciously we feel like whoever has less, therefor whoever claims the award for ‘person who has it the hardest’, should rightly get access to more of these scarce resources. It’s an unconscious and ineffective way to get our needs met.

Most people, due to various aspects of conditioning, are NOT very good at being aware of what they need/desire AND asking for it in effective ways. Especially before it gets to a point of feeling so deprived that it needs to be fought for.

So we learn other ways to attempt to get needs met.

We plead our case for how hard we have it and try to win the race to the bottom.

“I’ve been with the kids all day”

“Work is so stressful”

“I haven’t done anything for myself in months”

“At least you get a break at work”

The tricky part is that the only way to win the race to the bottom, is to minimise or somewhat invalidate the challenges our partner is facing. Which only fuels their attempts to justify their case more and the merry-go-round of misery continues.

Now, before I move on to the second reason we Race to the Bottom in relationships, I want to be clear that, not for a second, am I trying to discount how hard things are. I’ve got an almost five year old boy and an eighteen month old boy. I’ve been in it and am still “in it” to a large extent. It’s the most challenging (and also the most beautiful) time of my life.
AND, whenever Kat and I fell into this dynamic of racing to the bottom, things only got worse.

There is a way to acknowledge the challenges we’re facing without dropping into this resentment building dynamic.

Which leads me to the second reason for the Race to the Bottom…

This is our (very natural) deep need for the acknowledgement and validation of our experience, especially if it’s a painful or challenging one.

One way to receive this validation is to make it incredibly clear just how much of a hard time we’re having. This can result in us being so ‘self challenge focused’, we cannot fully see and empathise with the hard time our partner is having - especially if it’s hard for different reasons.

There’s this myth that gets circulated in the self-help industry that we need to “validate ourselves” and we shouldn’t need to rely on any validation from others.

I think that’s ridiculous, to a large extent.

And I’m one of those “take radical responsibility for yourself and your life” type people.

Sure, we need to learn to self-source some acknowledgement and validation. We need to heal the parts of us that don’t feel good enough. We need to get to the root cause of our pain and our reactive patterns. We need to do the inner child work and reparent ourselves so our partner doesn’t have to do it for us. I’ve been doing and supporting other people with this work for years. It’s vitally important.

AND, if 100% of our validation is coming from ourselves then we’d be a special blend of sociopathic and narcissistic.

We are social creatures and our biology reflects that. We are designed to exist within relationship to other humans and the feedback from those other humans is important to us.

The challenge doesn’t stem from needing/desiring acknowledgement from others, it comes from the fact that we often place our sense of worth in the hands of one person. Our partner. We get so isolated in our relationships and our partner is expected to be our everything. Before you have kids, you can almost make this work. After having kids, it’s impossible.

When we’re stuck in the Race to the Bottom dynamic and our partner loses their capacity to really see and acknowledge our experience, it hurts. Resentment and frustration starts to build. We resort to our reactive patterns of either shutting down and withdrawing our making things louder and engaging in more conflict.

All of this is an (understandable but ineffective) attempt to have our experience acknowledged and have our needs/desires met.

So what’s the solution?

As with all complex multifactorial problems, the solution is also multifactorial.

Here’s a few things that will help.

• Create Correct Context
  Have you heard the story of the old wise fish and the young fish? It’s a short and powerful analogy. The old fish swims up to the young fish and says “How’s the water today!?”. The young fish responds with “What’s water?”
  
  So many of us don’t have front of mind awareness of the “water that we’re swimming in” aka “The environment” that our relationship is existing in.
  
  Having a young family within general western culture means having a family in these isolated nuclear family units, Where we are trying to do it all on our own.

  In the current economic climate, this is HARD. So many parents are attempting to carry a load (providing financially, physically and emotionally, being a present parent, running a household, maintaining a relationship, maintaining some sense of physical and mental health etc etc) that we were not necessarily designed to carry in this way.
  
  “It’s not he load that breaks us down, it’s the way in which we carry it.”
  
  This load is supposed to be shared. The village is supposed to support a young family. One parent isn’t supposed to be away from the family for 40-60 hours a week. This “village” concept is an entire article in itself but I needed to reference it here because without context of the larger factors at play it’s so much easier to fall into the “me vs you” dynamic of The Race to The Bottom.
  
  When we can acknowledge the wider factors impacting us we can shift back to “we” consciousness with our partner and remember that we are on the same team. This gives us the capacity to start to co-create an environment that is more supportive for our relationship and family unit. This is a vital part of the long term solution.
  

• Expand Awareness

  
  ”We cannot intervene in a world we cannot see”

  
  We can’t do anything about the Race to the Bottom unless we recognise that we are, in fact, in the race.
  
  Part of this is understanding that this is a dynamic we can move in and out of depending on the state that we’re in. A high stress state means a much higher likelihood of being in this dynamic.

  For some of us, our lives are high stress and it’s become our new normal. For others it comes and goes.
  
  Reading this and understanding it at an intellectual level won’t prevent you from ever falling into it.
  
  We need to get good at recognising when we’re in it, not judging the fact that we’re in it and knowing how to shift our state and come out of it.
  

• Learn to Regulate

  
  It’s hard to think our way out of a poor thought pattern.
  
  The more effective approach is to learn to recognise when we’re in it and to shift our state. Learn how to use our breath and body to change our state from stress/dysregulation to more regulation and openness.
  
  When we change our state, it’s much easier to change our story. You can think of The Race to The Bottom as a psychological state that we get stuck in that’s linked to survival.

  “There’s not enough and I need to fight for what’s mine”.
  
  The fastest way out of that is learning somatic tools and practices to invite more relaxation and a felt sense of safety into the body. Once we do this then we can remind ourselves and our partner that we are on the same team.
  

• Expand Empathy
  Our capacity to “feel into” and empathise with another experience is a skill. It’s a skill that comes more naturally to some people, but it’s a learnable skill.
  
  It’s our responsibility to develop the relational intelligence required to hold space for our partners experience without abandoning ourselves.
  
  Usually it’s one or the other.
  
  Take on board their experience fully (and usually try to be the hero and fix it)
  OR
  Be overly attached to our experience and disconnected from theirs.
  
  The pendulum can swing between the two. If we self abandon for long enough we eventually get so frustrated and resentful that we start to set harsh boundaries and over-identify with our own story.
  
  Expanding our capacity for empathy requires that we expand our capacity to hold both. The duality of our experience AND their experience.

There’s more to it, and to be honest I could probably write a whole book on it, but these four steps should get you started and heading in the right direction.

The Race to The Bottom is real. When you understand how our brains work and look at the environment we’re in - it makes sense.

Consistently and persistently recognising when we fall into it again (because we will) and becoming more effective and graceful with how we pull ourselves out of it is an endeavour worthy of the effort that is required.

This one thing will contribute to more relational harmony than pretty much anything else.

Let me know how this lands for you and if you’ve found it useful. I’d love to be in some conversation around this topic with you.

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As always if you have any specific questions about anything I’ve shared here please let me know in the comments below.

If you’re new here, or someone has just shared this with you,

I’m Tully O’Connor. I’ve been working with couples in their romantic relationships for the last nine years, and before that I worked with all walks of life through their emotional wellbeing, and before that I was a physiotherapist who saw the gaps of physical health, relational health and emotional health.

I have worked with thousands of couples in various capacities and this substack newsletter is my most accessible offering - and it’s free.

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In your corner,

Tully