The Uncover YOU podcast
Guiding you to shift reactive patterns so you can experience the YOU underneath conditioning and finally feel secure and connected in relationships. Your host is Eva Beronius - Love Coach, transformational teacher and founder of Embodied Self Mastery.
The Uncover YOU podcast
Ep 198: Why Attractive People Feel Like a Threat in Relationships
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If attractive people around your partner instantly trigger insecurity, comparison, or anxiety, this episode is for you.
We'll explore why this happens, what your "scanner part" is actually trying to protect, and how old wounds can make attractiveness feel threatening long after the original pain is over.
Most importantly, we'll look at how to stop making beauty a competition and start reclaiming a deeper sense of security, self-worth, and connection.
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Hey, welcome back. What do you say that today we break down one of the most painful patterns that happens in relationships and look at the deeper layers? This pattern that I'm talking about is that you get triggered, that it feels very uncomfortable, very unsafe when there are attractive people in the room and you have your date, your partner, your husband or wife with you. Because part of you is scanning and looking for and projecting what does my partner think about these people? Are they more desirable than me?
When Attraction Triggers Insecurity
Are they wishing I would look like them? Do they wish they they were with them instead of me? So what happens? You know, to some of you, it might, this might sound trivial, but it actually, you know, creates this debilitating experience. Being around other people, going to social events, or just being out for a drive or a walk with your partner can turn into this very draining, highly activating experience that brings up your deepest pain. And for some of the people that are experiencing this, they might also have evidence or proof. They're like, yes, my partner was unfaithful. They cheated on me. Um something happened that was out of line. So I also do have proof that this is like a real threat. And for some of you, that threat might have been there before, but maybe not in this relationship. Here, this current partner, current person you're dating, are not showing any big out-of-line behavior around this, but you are still feeling it inside of you as it's happening. And you might be asking, well, isn't this just jealousy? There is jealousy in here, but as you will discover, there are a lot more layers to it. And there's several underlying roots that we're going to look at. So when I talk about jealousy, it's usually the sense that, hey, you are stepping out of the agreed-upon container for this relationship, meaning you're putting your attention somewhere, or someone is putting attention on you in a way that is kind of exclusive to us. And as I've covered in other episodes, jealousy is a really beautiful wisdom when we know how to work with it. And of course, jealousy could have been flagged as unsafe in our system. So the moment we feel jealousy, we go into a reactive pattern. We go into a protection mechanism, a survival response. And we start blaming or we shut down or try, you know, people please, whatever it might be. So go check out some of those episodes on jealousy. I can link them below. But what I want to talk about in this episode is specifically around beliefs that you have formed around other people being more attractive than you, and therefore being around other attractive people feels like a threat. So the reason I'm bringing this up right now is that there have been questions around this coming in in the community. And one of our members reached out in one of the programs and said, Hey, I'm going to this family event, and it just feels like torture because I know we're going to be around a lot of attractive, beautifully dressed up people. And my parts will just be suffering the whole weekend from this. Because I have one part of me that starts scanning the room. Where are they? Where are these attractive people that my partner will be looking at? So she called this part of her a scanner part, someone who was on the lookout for attractive people all the time. And as soon as she saw an attractive person that she found attractive, there was an intense feeling in her stomach. And next, a sense of shutdown and even like a turning away from her partner. So, like, don't touch me, don't be close to me, because I know what kind of you're up to. There was a sense of betrayal, um, even though nothing had happened. But all
The Scanner Part Takes Over
of this was going on inside of her mind, and her partner had several times told her that it's not just about who's attractive or not. You have so many qualities that I'm in love with, and I'm choosing you, and I want to be with you. It doesn't matter if someone has smoother skin or longer hair or whatever it might be that floats your boats when it comes to physical attraction. And this is exactly one of the pieces that we're gonna talk about. When early on, our minds and our belief systems have mistaken physical attraction for emotional connection and love. This is one piece to this puzzle if you want to undo a pattern like this, a painful experience like this. So the reason I'm bringing it up because, yeah, there have been questions coming in around it, and we've been working through this in our coaching sessions in the Embodied Relationship Academy era. And another reason I'm bringing it up is because I'm very, very somatically familiar
When Attraction Gets Mistaken For Love
with this pattern. This used to be a big piece for me that I worked through. And I found so many more layers than I would have suspected. And that's why I want to share it with you. What was the roadmap I found or I followed to dissolve this pattern so that I could feel at ease, so that I could enjoy social gatherings without having a part that was like constantly on the lookout for beautiful, attractive people that were somehow more than me, more successful than me, more desirable than me. And the first thing that tends to happen when we become aware of a pattern like this is that we start to try and fix it, right? The scanner part shouldn't be here. This judgmental part inside of me shouldn't be here. It's costing me so much pain. Why does it keep doing that? We need to change it. And this is exactly what will keep it stuck, right? So the first piece I want to offer around this pattern is that to look at the protectors and the wounded parts, right? So you will have protector parts that is like a scanner or a judgmental part that says, look out for this, and you're not as pretty as them, and your your husband, your wife, your partner, they're thinking about them. They rather want them. So you have this internal dialogue. These are all built up of like from protector parts. And it might sound very strange that you have protector parts that are trying to protect you by being mean and beating you down. But when you sink through the layers and get to know them, their strategy, but also
Stop Fixing Your Protectors
more importantly, the intention behind their strategy, you will see that in a backwards way, they're trying to have you loved. But they're coming from a false belief. They're coming from a lie that got instilled somewhere along the way. So I often suggest, you know, in alchemy and in the embodied relationship academy that you make a mind map. Like, what are the parts you can discover that are involved? Who are the ones talking? You can even give them a little name, right? So you make a list or you make a mind map with circles and you just outline them and like, hey, here are the ones talking. We have one that's constantly scanning the room, we have one that is comparing me against these people and telling a story about why I'm not measuring up or what my partner is thinking about them and me. So these are your protectors. And then underneath all that noise and everything that's going on on the surface, and kind of pointing over there in the room, and pointing at your partner, pointing at you, there is something else. There is often something that is painful, that feels like grief and sadness or hopelessness, or something that's like sitting deeper down. That is a wound, right? That is something that might have happened that made you feel this way to begin with. So we can call this the time traveling experience, right? When this is happening now, when you go to that social event, it is pointing you back in time to an experience that's been unresolved. Okay. We talk about this in almost all these episodes, right? But you're time traveling back to an experience that is sitting in you unprocessed. And what makes something unprocessed? You haven't felt all the emotions around them in a way that felt safe. The emotions felt so overwhelming when you were five or 15 or 25. So you kind of kept them in there. They're sitting there, or you kept drowning in them, and especially drowning
Time Traveling To The Original Wound
in the stories, the beliefs that got instilled at the same time with this overwhelming experience. So you haven't been able to just like, huh, feel all that thing, feel all of it all the way through without believing the story. So it keeps feeling unsafe to have this experience. It keeps feeling like you're gonna be, you're gonna die or be alone forever if this were to be true. But whew, dropping in and doing embodied feeling on this is what will process it through. So what kind of emotional experience is it that's sitting in the air, kind of stuck? What are the emotions that you're so afraid of feeling? And another piece to this time traveling, to this past experience, is the belief that you started putting your faith in at that moment. Maybe that was I'm not loved unless I look like this. Beauty is how I will be loved. Beauty is how I will get attention, handsomeness is what will bring me the attention from the girls, you know, that I always wanted. So looking at what beliefs, I call them little seeds that you've planted in your emotional soil, in the soil of your inner garden, right? What got planted in that moment? What did your mind, what assumptions did your mind make? What conclusion did it draw? And then it started to root and sprout in there, and it grew a whole experience that's now alive in you. I'm not loved unless I'm this pretty. Or someone's always gonna choose, my partner's always gonna choose someone else over me if they look like this. So looking at what got created in that past experience, both when it comes to unresolved emotions, protector parts, and beliefs that you've lived by. And your grown-up mind might still say, like, I know I'm worthy, I know they're gonna love me, and I know, I know, I know. It doesn't matter if you have a part in you that's a lot younger that that believes that, that feels like they're ugly, that feel like a boy, a girl is always gonna choose someone prettier, more handsome than me. So this is important. This is not for you to override with your logical mind. It's like, no, you can still believe and understand. It's like, yeah, we're grown-ups now, of course. People are choosing to be with the ones that they love, and it doesn't just come down to physical attraction, but a part of you is sitting in there and believing that you're more than one part, you're more than one belief. There's a lot of like paradoxes inside of you. And if you want to shift a pattern like this, you need to start to open up and acknowledge the inner conflict, the divided will. It's like, yeah, I do believe this, but I also have a part that believes this. I do know that I'm valued, that I'm worthy, of course I am, but I do also have a part that feels like they don't have a lot of value. That they're not pretty enough, not attractive enough, not fit enough, don't have, you know, those big beautiful eyes, or that little slim nose, or you know, whatever it is according to the beauty standards. So this is what needs to be acknowledged and worked through, meaning met with with love. Your protectors, the belief they're carrying, your wounded parts, the belief they are carrying, and this is all done through the four pillars of embodied self-mastery work, right? You use them to turn towards these parts with love and understanding. So when we were doing this process with this client inside of ERA, the Embodied Relationship Academy, she came in and she said, Well, I've been trying to meet with this protector part, but something feels kind of rigid or automated about it. I'm going in there and I'm meeting with it, and I'm kind of following the protocol, but it feels surface level. It feels like it knows I'm showing up just to kind of get rid of it. So when I guided
Real Listening Changes Everything
her to go in and meet this part, what we discovered had been missing was the really deep understanding of why this part was doing what it's doing. And understanding does not come from you projecting understanding on a part. You're like, yeah, I know why it's doing that. Imagine you raising a child, and they might be teenagers or something else, and they might have their whole inner world kind of exploding in all kinds of new directions, and you're like, yay, I know what's going on with them. But after a while, you start to realize that, oh, they feel completely misunderstood by you. And you here you were thinking that you knew exactly what they were thinking and feeling, and you were totally on their side. But they're like, I hate you. You don't understand anything that's going on for me. And this often happens because we're not listening, we're not letting them express in their own words, instead of thinking, we know what they're thinking, we know what's going on inside of them, and we put our words onto their experience. So this is what needs to happen with your protector parts and your wounded parts to be a grown-up in the room, that grown-up that we often missed, that we didn't have there. And to put that loving attention on them and say, tell me more. Why does this feel so important to you to keep doing this? What would happen if you didn't do it? So this isn't a surface level exercise. This isn't an intellectual exercise. It's an embodied exercise where you actually go in and energetically connect with that part and really listen. You become really present. So there might be some skills you need to practice to be able to do that, and you know, some muscles to exercise. And that's exactly what I take you through inside of alchemy and air. So when we went in there, this part started to have a new experience. It started to feel understood, it started to feel heard, and now we dropped in a lot deeper than she had been able to go on her own. But the beauty in that is now she's had that experience of like, how do I connect with it? How do I get in there? Oh, there it is. This is the piece that was missing. So now when you have that experience, you it's easier for you to find it on your own. It's been modeled to you. That's why it's so helpful to have this kind of support and this kind of guidance in a community so that you're like, There it is. I formed that neural pathway once, now I can repeat it. So as we dropped in into this process with her painful experience and with her protector parts that was constantly scanning the room or even scanning the billboards when they went for a drive. And now we got to drop in to another layer that had been underneath all the time, to a part that had experienced something painful where this actually kind of became true in a previous relationship. And in that moment, you know, there was a lot of things going on in her life, and she needed to be very strong and kind of just push them away and get on with their life and just like, hey, we're gonna live through this, we're gonna power through this. But what hadn't
Betrayal Shock And Self Blame
then been fully processed because A wasn't time for it, we have other things we need to focus on. B, it feels too overwhelming to go there and really drop in. And this is often how things go. It's not that you did it wrong, it just has different seasons to process things. It can be that a year later or five year five years later, it's like now it's time to process that grief, that loss, that disappointment, that sadness, because you have a better container around you, more structure, more safety. And you're like, uh, there it is. Now that room can open up inside of me. So it's not that you did it wrong. It's just that, okay, now in this season, we have more capacity to process it. So she found that she hadn't really processed the shock of this and the sadness, and a part that was sitting in there, and how could they do this to me? What is wrong with me? And then she had other parts that were like, There's nothing wrong with us, how could you do this? That was like they were angry. But this part was also here. What's wrong with us? Something must be wrong with us. Otherwise, they wouldn't have done this. Someone that put all the responsibility on their shoulders and said, It's me. I'm to blame somehow. I'm at fault. I'm not pretty enough, or else this wouldn't have happened. That is like those lies that I'm talking about. That belief that got planted in the soil and then started to grow. And sometimes we're like, don't want to look at that part of our garden. We're like, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'm beautiful, I'm pretty, I'm successful, I'm valuable. But it's growing in there in the dark, and it will come up in those most painful moments or those most vulnerable moments, and then we feel like so ashamed of that happening. Like, who is this? Who am I reacting in this way when I should know better? Mm-hmm. So this is kind of the time traveling piece. This is where you need to go back and follow that thread in your protectors, your wounded parts, and the beliefs that were put into place. And once I had done this on my own journey, things got a lot easier. I could see it, I could understand it. But this experience, in a sense, kept happening. Not as strongly, but I still had it. It's like it's still there. What the heck is going on? Even though I met with these parts, even though I processed this emotion. Well, this is where we go even deeper into the alchemical work. Because when we have a strong, impactful, painful experience, it's almost like it creates a rift in our psyche, in our inner world. Parts are highly prioritized or put to the forefront. And for some of us, it's like this pain, this pain is at the forefront. And for some of us, it's like, no, no, no, I don't have any pain. We're in denial, or our protector parts are out there in the forefront. So, what often happens when a belief like this gets instilled? I'm not pretty, I'm ugly, I need to be pretty to be loved.
Befriending Ugly And Reclaiming Beauty
That's how I get attention from other people, that's how people choose me. Well, then what happens inside of us? In my world, we are everything. We are one drop of the ocean, which means you are one piece of a reflection of God. And in that little prism, like it contains all aspects of God or of life itself, you know. So you carry everything, meaning you carry ugliness, you carry beauty, you carry attractiveness, you carry unattractiveness, you carry all of it. And we can put our faith more in one of them and say the other isn't welcome. And the funny piece is that you would think that, okay, we're going to lean towards the beauty, right? And the ugly isn't welcome. But what happens is often the other way around because that got in through that painful experience and that emotional overwhelm. We're like, I'm ugly, they are pretty. People will choose them over me. And therefore, what do you believe about yourself? What is the aspect of you that gets put to the forefront? It's I'm ugly. Your ugliness gets to take up a lot of space inside of you. A disproportionate amount of attention is given to the sense of ugliness inside of yourself. And I'm not even talking about beauty standards or what is beautiful or what is ugly. It's just the sense that it exists inside of you. Because again, we all carry everything there is, but what do you put your attention on? What do you put your faith in? So ugliness put to the forefront, or it's grown inside of you. I'm ugly, like that aspect of you. And then maybe you tried to cover that up, okay, by being extra smart or accomplished, or by doing a lot of surgery, plastic surgery, who knows? Or just really trying to not show that ugly part of yourself, or maybe you completely embodied the sense of ugliness inside of you. So you dressed accordingly, you move accordingly, you speak accordingly to this belief. I am ugly. So, no matter if you covered it up or tried to kind of compensate for it in other ways, or it was really like out there to the forefront. And if you look around, just take a walk in a city, you will see this in people. What do they believe about themselves? Do they believe themselves to be ugly, unworthy? Do they believe themselves to be beautiful expressions of life? And I'm not even talking about, again, oh, I'm so beautiful, look at me. It's just, do I inhabit beauty? Does beauty live inside of me? Is my expression of life, is there beauty in it? Because even if you look at someone and and and they might fit into the category of whatever beauty standards are common today, you might still see that they are carrying a sense of I'm ugly inside of themselves. Or, like I mentioned, trying to compensate for feeling ugly by looking beautiful according to the standards. So ugly is big inside of you, ugliness has become alive and like just growing in there. And if ugly becomes big, what happened to I'm beautiful? A sense of beauty inside of you. It has gotten shadowed because of this painful experience and the belief that got planted in that emotionally overwhelming experience, your beauty, your sense of beauty got shadowed. It doesn't mean that you don't have beauty, that you can't embody beauty. It just means it got pushed away. So picking this back up and like, can I both acknowledge my ugliness? Can I fall in love with my ugliness? Can I not be at war with my ugliness? Because we all have it inside of us. Can ugly be loved? Or will ugly kept being hated inside of you? Oh, I'm ugly. I hate that about me. I'll never be loved, I'll never be appreciated, I'll never be accepted. Can ugly become something that can be loved inside of you? And once it's loved and once you make friends with ugly, you can also start to access and reclaim beauty. Can beauty exist inside of you? What is the expression of beauty in you? How do you celebrate yourself as a beautiful expression of life? How are you speaking or walking into a room when you know that there's so much beauty in you? This changes your whole embodiment. This changes how you look, this changes how you walk. When beauty is shadowed and it can't like radiate out through you, through your eyes, through how you move, yeah, then what's coming out is a sense of I'm ugly. But when you reclaim beauty inside of you, the sense of beauty, ah, that's something that belongs to me too, just like all humans, just like all living beings. Ah, beauty exists in me. Can that come through as well? I sometimes have shown this picture of me when I'm, I think I'm around 25, and then a picture of like 10 years later, when I'm around 35. And in the picture when I'm 25, you can clearly see that sense of ugliness in me. You can see it through my eyes, you can see it how I carry myself, you can see it in what I'm wearing, how I'm showing up in the world. And then from the picture of 35, like I'm 10 years older, but you can just see this different sense of love, of beauty, of just radiating through me. It wasn't about a diet. It wasn't no the same face, the same nose, the same eyes, all of it, no plastic surgery, no whatever this snail, beauty, cream. It was the belief that changed. And it was the reclamation of my own sense of beauty. That beauty is something innate in all of us. So this is what we can call shadow work or integrating the fragmented parts of you. And and bringing alignment and congruence and truth back into your inner world. Because part of why this is hurting so much is because you're believing lies. You're believing that you're ugly when that is just one piece. Like, yeah, I do look ugly. I have ugliness inside of me. And I have beauty, I have fierce beauty, I have soft beauty, I have all of it. So when we start to be truthful with ourselves, we start to rediscover all aspects of ourselves. We're not this or that. We're all of it. We all are. There's ugliness, there's beauty. There's good, there's bad. There's dark, there's light. It's and everything in between. This gives an immense sense of freedom when you're no longer afraid of being ugly. But you're also not denying that you're beautiful. There's a wholeness, a fullness, a richness that starts radiating out from you. People can feel that. You're owning all of you. That is very attractive. Very. Which kind of bridges us into a final piece around this, which is that I mentioned it in the beginning, but there's this confusion around what love is, or how I'm loved, or how people choose me, which is that we think is about physical attraction. So in a way, we're very immature when we look into a room and say, oh, they're pretty. Someone's going to choose them over me. And yes, people might do that, okay, but it's coming from an immature version. It's coming from an earlier developmental phase where we haven't yet grown the capacity to form emotional connections. So for many of us that maybe have an attachment wound or didn't form like that sense of secure attachment growing up, this is common. We confuse other things, physical
Emotional Connection Versus Physical Attraction
attraction or success or whatever it is. We're like, that's how we're gonna get love attention, because we haven't fully felt and experienced that emotional secure attachment, which is like you exist, I feel you, I love you, I'm connected with you. So that's where when we tend to then overemphasize other things. I need to be very pretty for them to choose me, I need to be super successful, I need to be rich, I need to be accomplished, I need to be best at doing this or fastest or strongest. Like that's how I gonna get it because we haven't yet fully felt what it feels like when someone is emotionally connected with us. An emotional connection is how love between people happens. That's how we choose each other in a more secure, mature way. That's the richness of choosing someone, and it doesn't matter if they're having a bad day or you know they are sick and puffy or have the measles or whatever it is. It's like I'm connected with you. I care deeply about you and what you're feeling. So even if you have heard this and intellectually can understand it, if this was an experience in you growing up, it makes sense that you think that choosing someone or being in love with someone has to do with these other things. Because your little child inside of you didn't have that experience to begin with. But that is where this work, like the embodied self-mastery work, becomes so helpful because what I want to do is connect you with the sense of love that is already inside of you. This doesn't need to happen from another person. This sense of love, of connection, can happen inside of you, and when you start to feel it inside of you, huh? It will rewire this belief that I need to be pretty, I need to be successful, strong. That's how I get chosen. No. Connecting with you and your full expression and like who you are and where your heart wants to take you. When you do that, you will start to trust that whatever is meant for you will come to you. It will reach you. And when you start to move that way, you don't need to pursue or push or overexplain or you know, make sure that someone really gets how much you care about them so that you can shake them out of their shell so that they can fully see you. Like, no, you you start to relax and let go. And if someone is attracted by someone else or find them beautiful, that doesn't feel like a threat anymore because that's not the same thing as loving someone or having an emotional connection with someone. This is secure attachment and secure love. This is being mature in love. This is, I'm choosing this because of this feeling, and it doesn't mean that it's all hunky dory all the time. No, you will still be met with your deepest shadows and everything in the reflection of the other. And there'll be work, but the choosing of each other is happening from a very different foundation. And you don't have to prove yourself to them, and there's less anxiety around, oh my god, what do they feel about me? What do they think about me? And will they choose someone else? And I have to prove myself, and I look at me. Look at me, how good I am. Exhausting. No wonder relationship feels exhausting for you. But when you start to trust this, that what's meant for me, that life wants what's good for me, and if something leaves, it means it wasn't meant for me, or it was part of a chapter or a learning. You don't cling to it in the same way. You let it go. But you're also not running from things because they hurt, because they're frustrating or confusing. It's like, no, you can stay through it. I'm just gonna be here. Ask life, ass relationship is happening, and I'm gonna let it process through me. I'm gonna feel through it. So, to summarize, if you're someone who's having that experience of like attractiveness equals danger, it brings up so much insecurity in me, and I hate that. It's fine when I'm by myself, but when I'm with my partner, someone I'm dating, uh, it feels highly dangerous. Then, first the time traveling piece, the experience that brought up protection, that created a wound, and that had beliefs planted in that soil of who you are, what you need to prove, how people choose others
A New Way To See Beauty
in relationships. And then the more like shadow integration or or coming to wholeness, meaning inhabiting all aspects of yourself and of life, falling in love with the sense of ugliness inside of you, befriending it. It's okay to be ugly. Yeah, I'm gonna be super ugly today, and I'm holding that by the hand, and I'm just ugly, ugly, ugly. And I love the ugliness about me. It's not a threat, it's not an enemy. And my beauty reclaiming it. Of course I'm beautiful, of course I have beauty in me. How is that allowed to be expressed? So fully inhabit all of yourself, and then looking at this piece of hmm, did insecure attachment or my attachment wound put a blinder on the fact that people choose each other from emotional connection, and that emotional connection is different from physical attraction. It's not the same thing, and therefore, people can be attracted all they want, and maybe you can start enjoying that you're actually the one seeing a lot of attractive people, and maybe you want to enjoy it instead of like projecting onto others. You're like, oh, they're so pretty. Oh my god, look at that shape, look at this, look at that. Oh, beauty, just seeing beauty everywhere, and you enjoying it instead of making it mean something about your partner. So these are some very helpful, tangible pieces that will completely shift this experience for you so that you don't have to feel exhausted, and that it's so painful to be around other people when you're in a relationship. Maybe you've even been avoiding being in a relationship because of this. And I want all of that for you. I want you to be able to have the relationships you want and feel good. Feel all of you. So I hope this was helpful. And if you want any help and guidance around this, please step into the Embodied Relationship Academy. You'll have so many opportunities every month to practice this with others, to get coached by me. You're so welcome in there.