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?