Repairing Relationships
After you’ve made some progress in your own healing and are more stabilized in your flourishing/engaging mode, you can come back to your spouse with much better odds of progress in healing the relationship to whatever degree you choose. Just make sure you are also seriously evaluating how safe it is for you to do so.
It makes sense, right? If you are both in a control/force/defensive/survival state, it's just super unlikely that much healing will happen. Our culture talks all the time about “fighting to save the marriage,” right? But can you see where that gets you?
Marriage and family therapist, Vienna Pharon explains:
“When you’re hurt, the instinct is to protect yourself at all costs. You might go on the attack, avoid, shut down, or feel paralyzed. In *safe* relationships, the goal is to override the instinct, share the hurt and emotional experience to honor yourself and invite your partner to join you in the dance of healing and repair.
A safe relationship is required for this work. There is absolutely no overriding what it is we do to protect ourselves if we are in an unsafe dynamic. This work must happen in a safe relational container.
The key here is to have a partner who wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with you and take that invitation on. Be aware of those who don’t, who won’t, who make it all your fault, who can’t see their part.
Repair is relational. We need an equal participant in that space.”
She goes on to share the goals of learning to feel safe in a safe relationship (when it is safe to learn how to override our instincts to self-protect):
“Be present with yourself and notice yourself. Are you a fighter, a fleer, or a freezer? Where do you go to protect yourself? What do you do? What do you say? Where does your partner go? What do they do and say?
Our systems are so programmed to protect the self, so trying to expose the hurt can feel unfamiliar and scary. In a safe partnership, we want to work towards doing that anyway. We want to pause in that space and move our protective patterns off to the side, [to] bring our hurt forward to be honored and received. We also want to do the same for others.”
If you want to try the route of repairing the relationship with your spouse, I want to share two short videos with you.
Watch Thich Nhat Hanh talk about his advice on how to handle conflict in any relationship. I want you to watch it because I want you to feel it. You don’t have to use these words exactly, but imagine what could happen if you could hold these higher frequency, non-anxious, regulated approaches to conversations with your spouse?
In all my searching, this is the very best I’ve found to offer you.
I hope you feel it. I hope it offers you a path.
Some hard questions to ask yourself:
Is my spouse a safe enough partner to engage in this healing work with?
Am I a safe enough partner for my spouse to engage in this healing work with?
Imagine you were totally free to choose to stay in and repair your relationship or walk away from it—like you felt zero degree of “should” or “supposed to” or “have to”—what would you do?
Imagine your spouse, down the road a bit, pretty healed and flourishing. Do you want to be with that version of them? (Obviously there is no guarantee they’ll get there, but it can be clarifying to imagine. If you don’t want to be with them even as a healthier version of themselves, that’s a good thing to know.)
If my spouse isn’t a safe partner for me right now, what and how long would it take for me to believe s/he has become a safe partner for me? What do I need in order to feel safe in this relationship? (These are your boundaries. Keep in mind the Gottman research that most couples need at least 5 positive interactions to every one negative one.)
How could I best communicate my needs to my partner?
If my spouse isn’t a safe partner for me right now, who can be a safe person/people I can do this work with so I can do my part in growing and healing?
NEXT UP: