4 Keys to Building a Happy Relationship

How to Build a Healthy Relationship

A happy relationship is one that supports life, infusing it with a sense of adventure while also providing refuge and safety. It’s an invitation to engage in a creative process, one that both challenges and comforts you. There is no perfect relationship but there is a way to be in communion that is nourishing and reveals greater truths to you and your partner. The following four keys to a happy relationship are meant to serve as maps to guide you on your journey of deepening and expanding your intimate relationships. I believe true intimacy is a place–a field–where you and your partner meet to discover the sacred and meaningful that make life worth living.  

1. Be in a loving relationship with Your Self

Many of my clients come to me after years of talk therapy having an acute awareness of all that plagues them. As it turns out, awareness is not enough. They may know what they want, need, or desire. They may know what it feels like to be in their mind and body. They may know their traumas, their patterns, what keeps them up at night, why they wake up in the morning. They may know what makes them come alive and burst into bloom. Yet they still feel depleted, dissociated, dull, and disconnected from themselves and others. 

These inner experiences do not exist in a vacuum. Everything exists in relationship. The most foundational relationship you have is the relationship you have with yourself. And the relationship you have with yourself largely depends on how you were held, mirrored, and witnessed as a child. Were you held with a sense of reverence by a cherishing and adoring presence? Were your wants, needs, desires reflected back to you? Was your experience of reality validated, honored, and guided by a wise, compassionate other?

If this was lacking and you were met with psychological abuse, interpersonal violations, and a degradation and invalidation of your inner experience, then it can become hard to know where you end and the other begins. Or where the other ends and you begin. You can feel like there is no YOU there without those defining lines that outline a shape, a self, an identity worthy of love and adoration. This is the primal wound of non-being. Boundary setting becomes a baffling, bewildering, or daunting exercise when there is no sense of coherent self. Unresolved trauma makes it impossible to have an embodied sense of what is okay and what is not okay. What is tolerable, acceptable, fulfilling, or meaningful to you–or not. Doubting or gaslighting yourself becomes all too easy while relationships devolve into combative, power struggles. 

The solution is to be in a loving relationship with yourself. Not to just know yourself. You turn insight into action by taking the knowledge and awareness you have acquired and becoming curious. Below are some questions that can help you discover the quality of your relationship to your own woundedness. After all, the relationship you have with your own woundedness determines the quality of your life after all.  

Questions for exploration 

• What is your relationship to your own inner experience? How do you feel toward all that resides within you? How do you feel toward those “fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts” of yourself as poet Julia Fehrenbacher writes. How do you feel toward those parts that should have been held, mirrored, and witnessed? 

• What is your relationship with the parts of you that have to fight for what should have been received willingly with love? How do you feel toward the parts of you that carry the wants, the needs, the dreams, the nightmares, the drives of your inner world? 

2. Embrace the paradox of security versus freedom 

A fundamental polarity exists within us and within society at large that reflects an existential complexity we’re faced with as human beings. We want safety, security, stability, and commitment while also wanting freedom, spontaneity, adventure, and autonomy. Some parts of you may have made it their mission to get you to a stable, secure place. Their ultimate goal is finding and loving a safe, trustworthy other to experience true intimacy and commitment with. Some parts of you may have made it their mission to free you up for the adventure of your lifetime. Their ultimate goal is to experience the passion, thrill, and adventure of being in relationship (or not being in relationship).

If you have unresolved trauma, there is a tension between the two poles that can lead to more fragmentation, disorientation, and confusion. The result of existential internal conflicts is paralysis, dullness, a drainage of joy and life force–a stalemate with our own Being. Your relationship suffers from a loss of desire, a stuckness in old patterns, boredom, restlessness, and a sense of being trapped on a merry go round of familiar conflicts and hurts. You may not know what’s yours and what’s theirs, where is up and where is down, you may not know when to stay or when to go. 

If we dive deeper and take a closer look getting to know these parts of us straddling the divide between security and freedom, we come to realize there is no divide. What appears as a polarity or conflict on the surface is actually a complementary relationship. Try this exercise by Barry Johnson…Breathe in and hold your breath for as long as you can. The oxygen that once felt so nourishing begins to become suffocating as carbon dioxide builds up. Your body is forced to exhale. There is a great sense of relief for a bit before the need for fresh oxygen arises yet again. The inhale and exhale are complementary. One cannot exist without the other. Both are necessary for the health of the body and to avoid suffocation. 

You cannot venture out freely if there is no safety, no trust. True passion requires a merging, an intimacy that reveals and makes manifest our innermost desires. Commitment in long-term relationships leads to adventure because of time. Time becomes a vehicle for exploring and transcending preconceived notions of the self or other. The relationship becomes a living organism that must evolve, get rid of waste, and absorb nutrients for renewal as time progresses. How will the relationship unfold and what will it become is a mystery. It’s embracing this mystery that can lead to a sense of aliveness and meaning within the relationship and beyond.

Questions for exploration 

• Notice which you feel most drawn to–security or freedom? Intimacy or passion? Are you geared more toward commitment or adventure? Which of the two feels more familiar in your present relationship or historically in previous relationships? Which feels more applicable to this season of your life? 

• What are you hoping to achieve or avoid through a sense of security? 

• What are you hoping to be free from or free to do as a result of freedom? 

• Is it possible that security and freedom can coexist and play complementary roles in your relationship and life? What would that look like and feel like to you? 

3. Recognize Your Redeemer Narrative 

When you are living with unresolved trauma, you play out a role (or multiple roles) you were forced into by others. This role becomes unbearable because it was never yours to begin with. Chances are you had to contort yourself into all kinds of shapes to fit into a preconceived mold. Parts of you are driven by the need to break free from this role, this mold. Unfortunately, these parts often look outward for a person–a partner in crime–to help free you from this imprisonment and get the redemption you are seeking. Someone to finally see you, know you, love you the way you are so you can be free to be you, find peace, and experience joy and aliveness at last. We may yearn for someone strong enough to bear our woundedness and remain unfazed by our rough edges. We put them on a pedestal because the more superior, whole, and powerful they appear to us, the more capable they are of withstanding our inferiority, brokenness, and powerlessness. 

The problem with this plan is that the drive for redemption leads to reenactment. In an attempt to recruit a redeemer or rescuer, you are placing an immense burden on the other–forcing them into a preconceived role. You are imprisoned and your partner also becomes imprisoned. They become stuck–if they act beyond the confines of their role or contradict the given terms they risk losing you or the relationship. They are robbed of their freedom to be authentically themselves. The problem gets more complicated because chances are that your partner is returning the favor by doing the exact same thing to you. You are both each other's prisoners. Recruiting each other to be rescuers or redeemers lands you both into the heart of the abyss. Sooner or later one or both of you will present the other with the four horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling as described by Dr. John and Julie Gottman, founders of The Gottman Institute. You may attempt to: (1) radically change yourself so your partner doesn’t leave you, (2) radically change your partner so they can be who you need them to be, or (3) give up by abandoning the relationship physically, emotionally, or spiritually. 

I’m inviting you to recognize the possibility that the woundedness or vulnerability inside you that has contorted itself, been locked away, and now seeks redemption is your responsibility. As IFS Founder, Dick Schwartz, Phd writes, “You are the one you’ve been waiting for.” The only way to free yourself is to become aware of the multitudes within you. You are the prisoner, the prison guard, and the rescuer. You hold the lock and the key. Using the key to unlock your cell can look like getting curious about who you could be if you let go of the role that was forced upon you? Who could your partner be if they could let go of the roles forced upon them? 

When you shine a light on these dynamics and see the wounded parts of yourself and your partner, it becomes much easier to hold space. As poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.” When you try to rescue or force the other to play the role of redeemer, you are tearing down the boundaries that make you you and your partner them. Without any boundaries there is chaos. When you guard each other’s solitude, you honor the divine order and sacred space that resides within each of you.

There is an essence inside us all. You are much more than meets the eye. You have a Self, a core Self, that cannot be contorted to fit any mold. It remains undamaged and unbroken. It cannot be imprisoned, only hidden from view like the sun on a cloudy day. Perhaps the aim of any relationship is to guard, cherish, and witness the sacred space that resides within us so that we can each embody more of our essence and become more of who we were meant to be.

Questions for exploration

• What are the roles you were given to play as a child? Here are some options: lost child, golden child, parentified child, scapegoat, truth-teller, mascot, caretaker. How do you play out these roles in the relationship? Are parts of you that try to do the opposite of these roles? 

• In your ultimate fantasy, what role would you give up and what role would your partner play? What are some expectations you have for your partner that may make them feel limited, trapped, confined, or suffocated? What are some expectations your partner may have that make you feel limited, trapped, confined, or suffocated? 

• What would it look like or feel like in your relationship if both partners were responsible for their own inner woundedness? How would that free you or them up? What would it look like or feel like if your partner guarded your solitude and you theirs?

4. Create a contract based on communion 

When you are in a relationship you are tacitly agreeing to a contract. Most of these contracts are unspoken, unseen, or unknown. The more invisible these contracts are the more chaotic and  confusing the relationship may be. If you have unresolved complex trauma, you are likely to find yourself stuck in a relationship that is not only not nourishing but also an extension of past trauma. Your love life becomes a merry go round of various iterations of the same wound, the same pain. The stuckness represents a greater stuckness rooted in learned helplessness. 

Chances are there is a part of you that feels powerless or believes you don’t have a choice when it comes to the relationship you want to have. You should accept the crumbs you are given. You should not trust your perception of the relationship–it’s not as bad as you think. Or you may believe it’s too good to be true, not trusting any relationship that does not resemble chaos itself. Perhaps you sabotage what good there is to feel more in control–it’s not safe to get attached, some inner voice says.

Without a conscious contract, your unresolved trauma creates the terms of the relationship. You build the foundation of your relationship on sand instead of rock. The wounded parts of you that are looking to be redeemed or freed are in the driver’s seat and in charge of the negotiations. The relationship becomes a reaction to the past instead of a proactive, creative activity manifesting the future. When you engage in a relationship, you are in the midst of a creative process. You are co-creating a life worthy of living together.

Unfortunately, in today’s world the function of the relationship has been stripped of meaning. Instead of co-creators, our society has turned us into reactors, enablers, and consumers who experience relationships on the basis of transaction as opposed to communion. The relationship becomes a means to an end without having any inherent value in and of itself. To be in relationship–to be in communion–is to be awake together to the nature of reality, truth, and love. What comes to mind is sitting under a night sky staring up at the stars in awe and experiencing a beauty that cannot be articulated into words. I invite you to grab a seat under the stars, see yourself and your partner as co-creators, recognize the sand in the foundation, and identify what rocks you can use to rebuild. 

Questions for exploration

• What is the nature of a relationship to you? How do you define the ideal or highest order of goodness in a relationship? 

• How can you each advocate for the best iteration of the relationship? Do your ideals map onto one another? Where do they overlap? Where do they diverge from one another? How can you learn from your differences?

• What if you were to stop sweeping things under the rug and make the invisible agreements visible? The unspoken spoken? What are the conflicts that shake up the relationship and how can they become tools to better understand the other and create a contract based on communion?

• How would it feel to share this with your partner? What concerns arise? What hopes arise? 

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Ready to heal from trauma and find your aliveness?

How to Get Clarity with Almost Anything

How to Gain Clarity In Your Life

The number one reason we lack clarity is because we don’t trust our own judgment or our capacity to discern—to separate the wheat from the chaff. We don’t trust ourselves enough to be able to see clearly what is. We don’t trust ourselves to handle or withstand what we see when we open our eyes, that is—the truth. We may believe we don’t deserve the truth or we may think. if we reveal our truth to others, we will be undeserving of love and rejected. A part of us may believe it’s better to seek false refuge in the lie (as short-term as it may be) than to face the real, bewildering pain of a shattered self-concept or worldview. In our post-modern world, we may even believe there is no truth or objective reality—for example, all truth is subjective and, therefore, permissible and malleable to the whims of the moment or the eye of the beholder.

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves,” writes world-renowned trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk Greatest in his book, “The Body Keeps the Score.” Lying to ourselves is a survival strategy a part of us took on to shield us from pain and suffering. One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we can move away from the inner pain the way we draw back our finger from a hot stove. The biology and physics of the outer world do not apply to our inner world. We recoil at emotional pain thinking we’re protecting ourselves. But what we are actually doing is recoiling from the truth, leaving ourselves vulnerable to the real dangers or threats that may be lurking in the dark. We have blindfolded ourselves and, in the process, blocked our innate clarity as conscious, spiritual Beings from shining through. We are effectively retraumatizing our own selves without even realizing it.

If you’ve experienced childhood complex trauma especially in the forms of psychological and/or narcissistic abuse, a part of you may have taken on the role of gaslighting your own self into adulthood. This was a noble attempt to adapt to extreme abuse and survive. Your disconnection from the truth and lack of clarity may show up as a deep and profound confusion, dissociation, a sense of boundary-less-ness, a feeling of being lost, untethered, and groundless. You may feel at times that you don’t know who you are at your core. You may feel like there is no core—that under the hood of your Being is pure nothingness or emptiness.

The way out is to PIVOT, or move toward the source of the pain. It may sound counterintuitive but the more you can hold space for and be with the inner wound, the easier it will be to reconnect to your truth and restore your sense of clarity. We PIVOT to turn back toward ourselves, toward the truth when our natural inclination is to move away or against our own vulnerability. You can practice PIVOT in the following 5 ways: (1) Pause for perspective, (2) Invite in what is, (3) Value your Self, (4) Open up to Life, (5) Trust the truth. It is my hope that PIVOT will act as a tool to help you map a greater sense of meaning, aliveness, and wholeness onto your experiences. As you will see, it is challenging, if not impossible, to live with clarity when there is no connection to a deeper meaning and existential foundation of Being. We will be looking at how to get clarity through the lens of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.

5 WAYS TO GET CLARITY

1. Pause for Perspective

When you get triggered, activated, or overwhelmed, pause and note there is something coming to the surface. Words like “triggers,” “activation,” or “overwhelm” come from parts of us that have labeled what has arisen in our conscious experience as something negative. This makes sense because historically when we’ve been triggered or activated, the effect or outcome is negative, oftentimes leading to a downward spiral of increased pain and suffering. What we are offering here is another possibility. Another way to respond or be in the moment, that is to say to live. After all life arises in our consciousness as a series of unfolding moments.

In nature when something comes to the surface it does so because it needs to. A whale needs to come to the surface for air. A seedling must push through the surface of the soil to receive nutrients from the sun and air. What has come to the surface, even (or especially) in the most challenging of moments, is in need of nourishment. Something is arising from a dark depth or deep darkness, from our personal Underworld or Shadow world. It is emerging from the unknown, unseen world and towards the known, seen world, where the light of consciousness can shine on it. The question then becomes, how will you greet what has arisen? How will you meet this new arrival, this unexpected guest, as described by the the Sufi poet Rumi? Is it okay for this new arrival or unexpected guest to be here?

Affirmation

I pause for perspective, notice what is coming to the surface, and recognize its need to be seen, known, and nourished just like the whale surfacing for air or the seedling pushing through the topsoil.

2. Invite In What Is

You have a choice. You can stand in the light, see the unseen, and know the dragon. Or you can stumble around in the darkness, bumping up against a tail or wing when you least expect it and becoming terrorized all over again. If you can voluntarily choose to know the dragon, you can do something about it. I don’t mean doing something in the traditional sense. We often talk about slaying the dragon, overcoming our demons, or confronting {fill in the blank}. What if instead of confronting “it,” you voluntarily invited it in? Invite it to be here, stand in the light, and take a break from the dungeons of the psychic Underworld.

You may have concerns like can you handle being with this? What if you get pulled into the psychic Underworld along with it? What if you get overwhelmed and flooded by its grief, rage, despair, or shame? These are concerned parts of you surfacing. They are more arrivals, unexpected guests. Can you also welcome them to stand in the light with you? You can stay with those concerned parts and allow them to share their worries or fears. This is new territory and it takes time to become acquainted with the unfamiliar.

This is the paradox of healing that offers a profound paradigm shift. The more we invite in the pain, the less pain and more at peace we feel. The more we invite in the fear, the less fear and more courage we feel. The more we invite in the shame, the less shame and more confident in our worth we feel. When we have access to our inner light and can stand firmly in it, we can experience the benefits of not only accepting but also embracing the paradox.

We begin to discover that the triggered or activated parts of us are not what they appear. Just like Dorothy we can go all the way to Oz to discover that the all-powerful wizard is a little old man hiding behind a curtain. We discover that an inner critic is a young, bullied child who had to be harsh to keep you in line so real bullies stopped targeting you. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love,” writes poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

As we invite in more of these new arrivals, we learn overtime that the psychic Underworld is also not what it appears to be. Through the lens of our true Self we do not see our personal Underworld as something to fear. We see it as a womb, where gestation of our hidden, unseen potential lives. We see it as home to an unlocked vitality that is waiting to be brought into the light, that is to say, healed and loved. We begin to see the obstacles or tor-mentors of our lives as midwives beckoning forth from the womb that hidden potential. Even “the inner wound can be seen as the womb,” Michael Meade writes. The question then becomes can you give birth to yourself—the you that is yet unborn? The you you are meant to be? Can you be reborn on a moment-to-moment basis as the inevitable tragedy strikes and the world initiates you into a more transcendent state of Being?

Affirmation

I invite in what is here knowing that it is a guest bearing gifts, the inner wound is a womb carrying unlocked potential, and the world is initiating me to overcome past limitations and live with more aliveness, wholeness, and transcendence.

3. Value Your Self

If each wound can be seen as a womb, then what you once wanted to get rid of, you can begin to value, even treasure. You can invite in the parts of you that live in the recesses of your psyche and treat them as guests until their true nature and potential is revealed to you. You can treat each guest with honor because of its inherent value.

The question then may arise, if there is inherent value in our experiences and the parts of us who carry these experience, then where does this value come from? For that matter, where does your inner light come from? Where do you and I come from? I believe we cannot heal our traumas or recover from our pasts without grappling with the existential questions that have followed us since time immemorial.

Does our value come form God, a Higher Power, the Universe, Nature, Love? Is it a spirit guide, a Divine Mother, an angel, a wise ancestor, or pure consciousness? Whatever you choose to believe, just as your parts are connected to you, your Self—Your Self is also connected to something greater accessible to each and every one of us. Like spokes on a wheel if we each travel far enough into our inner landscapes we discover the center, the Source, within our collective unconscious. Everything and everyone emanates from a singular place. You are made up of the very specks of energy that were once confined to a single point before the Big Bang explosion. You come from and are comprised of that same potential capable of creating billions of galaxies. How could you be insignificant? How can your experience not matter? You are worthy just for existing. After all, you are a human Being, coming down from a lineage of ancestors who have survived the unspeakable and unknowable.

This may come as a surprise to parts of us that feel the need to strive, to achieve, to perform, to become someone worth mattering in the world. These parts of us may even refute these claims. And that’s okay. Can you get curious about where that comes from? That message that you have to prove you’re worthy or do something to become enough? You can become much more effective in the world and in carrying out your responsibilities when your actions are fueled by an inner knowing and recognition of your worth. We can only go so far acting out from a place of misalignment and disconnection from our inherent value. When we value who we are at our core, baggage and all, we choose to live in alignment with honor and in service of the highest good as it manifests through us. Striving, achieving, and performing are still tasks we undertake—but they become lighter, less effortful, and sacred processes without the burdens of shame and worthlessness weighing us down.

Affirmation

I see the inherent value in myself and others, my innate connection to the divine (however I define it), and, as a result, I live in alignment with the highest good as it manifests through me.

4. Open Up to Life

When we begin to consider the possibility of our inherent value, we are able to experience more confidence, freedom, and openness to life and its offerings. The renowned Italian filmmaker Federiko Fellini shared, “You have to live spherically – in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm – and things will come your way.” Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:2-4). Zen Buddhists speak of Shoshin, beginner’s mind, which is to look at every situation you’re placed in as if it’s the first time you are seeing it, like a child. Practicing a beginner’s mind or becoming like a child gives us a chance to connect to our innate clarity. We can see the unseen and know the unknown of any ordinary or extraordinary situation, from the most mundane to the most mystical.

The veil is lifted, the mists part, the spell is lifted, and we are open to possibility and limitless potentials that reside within the kingdom of heaven. We can experience the pull upward to ascend to our Psychic Heavens. We can envision through the power of our imagination a better future, one reflective of the highest good. We can access and exercise our free will and agency over our lives with grace. We have the power to transform ourselves, give birth to our unborn selves, and renew our Being without the constraints of our past burdens which have obstructed our view of the truth.

Affirmation

I am open to awakening and seeing the ocean of possibility before me and within me, and with childlike wonder I choose to live spherically, giving myself permission to take up space and expand in many directions.

5. Trust in Truth

Being open to possibility and to life does not mean being completely care-free and bumbling about in bliss. We cannot disconnect from that which grounds us, from that which beckons us downward to face the harsh hand life may deal us. We need solid ground to land on. We need a foundation to build upon and use as a launching pad for upward ascent into healing, growth, and transformation. That solid ground is truth. That foundation is truth.

No matter how far out there you are, regardless of how lost you may be, your truth is always there. Your truth is an inner north star guiding you out of the forest if you only look. Looking can feel like a daunting task. Parts of us may feel we aren’t worthy of the truth or that ignorance truly is bliss. Parts of us may hope that postponing the inevitable may actually prevent the inevitable from happening. But more often than not parts of us feel we can’t handle the truth. Seeing it will blind us. It will lead to total collapse. We can honor those parts that have felt the need up until now to shield us from the truth. We can gently reassure them and witness what it has been like for them to protect us in this way. Perhaps we can update them that preventing us from seeing the truth or moving away from what is has only made us more vulnerable and exposed to getting hurt. It will take time to build that trust in the truth and trust in our capacity to not only withstand it but also be set free by it.

Yes, the truth will set you free. This is not an overstatement or exaggeration. Seeing, accepting, and speaking the truth, especially to our own selves is the greatest act of love. We may need to sacrifice short-term comfort to grapple with it but we also get to truly know ourselves, who we are, and what we are made of. “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell,” writes Carl Jung. Looking for truth leads us down a path that may feel like Hell but, now we know, that even (or especially) in our unique personal Underworld, rebirth is possible (if not essential). Perhaps we are being guided and rooted down so we can grow to heaven. So we can gain access to our Psychic Heavens, “a sacred space where we can find ourselves again and again,” as Joseph Campbell says. Perhaps then we will know what it feels like to be at home in our minds, bodies, relationships, and the world at large.

Affirmation:

I trust I can move towards my inner wounds, and see the truth that sets me free, reconnecting me to the sacred within and beyond my Being.

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Ready to heal from trauma and find your aliveness?