Couples Corner: Rupture and Repair
There are two universal truths when it comes to relationships:
1. You will be hurt.
2. You will hurt others.
Most of the time, this happens unintentionally—we’re not monsters, after all. We may simply be distracted and miss a bid for connection. Our partner may misinterpret our meaning, or what we said triggered an old, painful story in their head.
As George Bernard Shaw so accurately put it, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
While we all have advanced degrees in Rupture, Repair is an art few of us master. And yet it is the soil and the fertilizer that helps us grow strong together.
For this article, I’m going to illustrate rupture and repair using concepts from Relational Life Therapy (RLT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS).
The Ways We Hurt Each Other: The Bad Fight
Like all growth, Repair doesn’t come without discomfort and pain. It’s challenging to hear how our actions may have impacted another. I, for one, have a dozen little parts that want to protect me from the guilt of having in/advertently hurt people. RLT identifies 5 losing strategies people commonly use for protection that ultimately lead to disconnection:
1. Being Right
This usually looks like correcting and/or editing your partner’s experience. “No, you came home at 6:45 not 6:30! That’s not true, I didn’t call you a b*!@h , I called you a c&*#t”. There are many couples who spend decades bickering about the details without ever getting to the heart of the matter. Yet, as Terry Real points out, “Objectivity has no place in relationships.” You can either be right or you can be partnered.
2. Control:
This losing strategy comes in two flavours! There is the overt control which looks like direct commands: “You will not wear that to the party. We will only wear pink on Wednesdays.” Then there is covert control (indirect manipulation, passive-aggressive behaviour, etc.): “Fine, go without me, even though I haven’t been out in ages. I’ll just stay home with the kids. Again.” This could also look like slamming doors when unhappy, emotional manipulation by crying, etc. Either way, it is an attempt to control your partner instead of connect with them. It is coercive and the exact opposite of intimacy.
3. Unbridled Self-expression
This has been called the barf bag method of communication in relationships, where one partner verbally dumps all their frustration and resentment on the other. “I asked you to take the garbage out and you forgot again, that’s so typical of you, you never listen, you don’t care about me or this family, I’ve been dealing with this crap for years and not only do you forget to take out the garbage but you never help with the kids and when was the last time you made a meal?” Clearly not a strategy that will entice someone to engage with us.
4. Retaliation
Think of season 2 of the White Lotus where the wife of a seemingly happy couple doesn’t get mad, she gets even: “He gets to go and party and sleep with a bunch of girls? Fine, I’ll find me a cute personal trainer that wouldn’t mind extra hours, etc.” The eternal tit for tat accumulates, burying the relationship in a mountain of unrepaired rupture from both sides.
5. Withdrawal
Shutting down, checking out (both physically and mentally), silent treatment, etc.: when your partner tries to talk to you after a fight, you refuse to talk to them. Or they’re talking to you and you zone out. As we’ll see below, withdrawal is the favourite strategies of love avoidants…
Check-in:
Take a moment to review the above strategies. When you get into a conflict with someone, what is your primary losing strategy? What is your secondary losing strategy?
Ask your partner if they agree and ask them to do the same exercise. Do you agree with their self-assessment?
Personally, when my adaptive children are triggered, I favour a heady combination of Being Right and Control. Ugh. That feels yucky to admit. You?
When we’re engaging in these behaviours, we are re-wounding each other. There’s a large, evidence-based argument to be made that how people survive traumatic experiences depends a lot on how they are held in the moments right after the traumatic event.
As Gabor Maté points out, trauma is the Greek word for wound:
“Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.”
It follows then that if our partner unintentionally causes us pain and then refuses to hear how they’ve hurt us, then that pain is doubled by having not been seen or heard. It exacerbates the initial offense and further disconnects us from our loved one. More wounding leads to being “less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.” And there you have the vicious cycle, folks:
I was given a visceral reminder of this when, while cleaning my inbox the other day, I came across an unsent letter to my ex. It definitely put the “vicious” in vicious cycle.
The letter was maybe 7 pages long. In it, I ripped apart everything he said to me in his last communication (including a sincere apology) and then some. I wrote with the precision of a samurai warrior wielding their sword, slicing through his words like they were the army of my mortal enemy, dissecting every wrong he had done me and eviscerating him as a father and a husband.
Double Ugh and double yuck.
My longing to be seen and heard by him gushed forth like a firehose, a torrential, scathing indictment of him as a human being. It is an excellent example of losing strategy #3: Unbridled Self-Expression.
I feel simultaneous embarrassment at being so unbridled, grief and regret that I did not know better at the time and also compassion for the hurt I was feeling.
Sigh.
In Terry Real’s language, I used 5 out of the 6 Losing Strategies in Relationships: Being right, being controlling, unbridled self-expression and retaliation. All that was missing was withdrawal, which I frequently exercised as well. I met his attempt at repair with all the defensive weapons in my arsenal.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn
In many ways, the losing strategies can be manifestations of stress responses. We’re in fight mode when we’re being right, controlling, and engaging in unbridled self-expression or retaliation. We are in Flight or Freeze (otherwise known as frozen flight) when we engage in forms of withdrawal.
Fawn is a covert way we control others— we try to placate our partner by agreeing with them, or making excuses for potentially abusive behaviour. Though it may work for a while, in the end it’s just as exhausting and unsustainable because we’re always focused on someone else’s reactions and responses instead of our own. And the more we neglect ourselves, the less boundaries and less sense of self do we possess. We become small, dried up husks of ourselves.
Our Adaptive Children
These losing strategies tend to be ones we adopted at an early age to keep us safe and connected to our attachment figures. At the time, they were brilliant, given our stage of development, but as Terry real says, “Adaptive then, maladaptive now.”
When we’re hurt, or feel dismissed or misunderstood, our inner children take the wheel our internal psyche and we are no longer in control.
As Internal Family Systems (IFS) show us, we have more than one inner child: we have many, of all different ages, all playing different roles in our system. They all learned to protect us through adaptive means, hence the beautiful match between Terry Real’s concept of the adaptive child and parts work.
For instance, if we had a mother that tended to smother us, we may have a strong dissociative part that allows us to escape the sensation of being suffocated. As an adult, this may show up as avoidant and stonewalling (Losing strategy #5: Withdrawal).
Or one of our young parts may have learned that when we yell, we tend to get what we want and so continue to use that strategy when we get dysregulated or anxious. While our inner children may have adapted brilliantly to their situation as children, their strategies do not apply very well to the adult world and are guaranteed to have the opposite effect to what they intended: instead of connection, they cause disconnection. Instead of protection, they cause isolation.
So. How can we break the fight cycles caused by adaptive children responses?
Healthy Conflict
Let’s be clear. We do not have relationships without some amount of conflict. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, though how we have learned to think about and engage in conflict tends to be.
Healthy conflict clarifies our boundaries and helps us understand the boundaries of others. It’s a visceral reminder that while we may love someone deeply, there are parts of them, ways they experience the world, that are so very different from our own.
To be able to not only face those differences, but accept and embrace them, is called unconditional love. Unconditional love is what allows us to wish the best for our loved ones, to be invested in their growth as human beings while remaining within our own boundaries. To engage in unconditional love, we need to do the work of accepting and embracing ourselves as beautifully imperfect, because the moment we accept our imperfections, we are better able to accept and embrace the imperfections of our partner. Enter our Wise Adult Selves.
Note: Accepting the imperfections of others does not mean accepting abusive behaviour of any kind. It simply means accepting that all you can control is yourself. In some cases that might mean using your agency to walk away.
Our Wise Adult or Self-Energy
I can’t remember if I ever sent the letter. I hope I had enough Wise Adult in me to stop myself before I made things worse, though I know for a fact that at the time, my adaptive children were driving the bus a lot and many letters of the same kind were sent. Alas, none of them achieved the result I so wished for.
I know, shocking.
Instead of having our adaptive children fight each other, wouldn’t it be better to meet each other as much as possible with our wise adult selves?
There are many ways to think about this: in IFS, it is called Self-energy, a state of being defined by the 8 Cs:
I like this list because it provides us with the necessary ingredients without which healthy conflict cannot occur. If you’re not able to muster a few of these qualities, then it may be best to take a break, regroup and come back later when you’re less riled up.
If some of the 8 Cs are present, then maybe we can play ball. The Wise adult can act as an internal parent to our internal children and take the reins. Terry Real likes to imagine his wise adult shielding his adaptive child after letting him know he’s got this, that he will keep him safe. And indeed, it is good practice to have a brief chat with your adaptive children before engaging with your partner. Let them know there is an adult in the room and they don’t have to take on burdens they were never supposed to take on in the first place.
The Ways We Heal Each Other: The Good Fight
Okay. We’ve enlisted our Wise Adult (which we know is present because of the 8Cs). Our adaptive children are safely tucked in and protected.
Though I never got the reconciliation I so longed for with my ex, we did make progress. Before he died we found ways to sit with each other. He did enough work on himself where he could be more real and vulnerable with me. I could detach myself from outcomes enough to try to meet him halfway. The last few times I saw him we were able to connect as human beings and even as a family. Repair was happening, though slowly.
What needed to happen?
First, we both needed to stop trying to be right or at least stop trying to shove our rightness down each other’s throat. I hated his choices and he hated my reaction to his choices. We were never going to get anywhere if we stayed at our respective podiums trying to debate each other out of our own experience. It bears repeating: the number one rule in relationships according to Terry Real:
Second, we needed to muster the courage, calmness and curiosity (3 of the 8Cs) to begin listening to understand.
For many years, he couldn’t hear my experience without risking a spiral into shame, which he would then defend himself against by dismissing me. In Terry Real’s Relationship grid below, he would fluctuate between a walled off & one down position to walled off & one up. In turn, I couldn’t hear his experience of feeling confused, frightened and suffocated because it felt like it invalidated my own experience of our marriage as solid and true. I fluctuated between a boundaryless & one down position of feeling desperate for his love to a boundaryless & one up position where I got angry and became controlling.
Check-In:
What stance do you take when you and your partner fight? Try to place yourself on the grid. Check in with your partner— do they agree with your assessment? Do you agree with how they placed themselves? Why or why not?
One day, my ex and I met by accident by the Ross Bay cemetery. We literally straddled the sea wall (so symbolic!) and talked. He let me know about his struggles with shame, how it was so hard to face how he left our family. I let him know how much I longed to forgive him if only he could give me an opening where I didn’t feel attacked.
I cherished that day because though we would never be married again, we reclaimed a part of our connection. It was delicate and fragile, but a solid step towards repair.
Third, compassion was key. We had to truly want to hear about the experience of the other, with the confidence that even if it was hard, our sense of self could withstand hearing how our actions had impacted each other. Being able to do this brought us the gift of clarity— the last few years had been so painful, yet this felt so… hopeful. We were on the right path.
Lastly, we asked each other where did we want to go from there? What was our next step? We began to co-create our new reality, one small step at a time. It was painfully slow, and was abruptly cut off too soon with his death, but we were finally speaking to each other through our wise adults.
Repair when they are gone
The end of the month will mark the 4th anniversary of his death and yet the repair continues. As time goes on I find some new ways to understand and thus to be accountable for my behaviour.
Important note: Real accountability only happens in a space of radical self-love, acceptance and compassion.
I find secret places where I can go and talk to him, where I see him in the swooping sparrows and the peeling bark of the arbutus. The other day a sparrow flew narrow circles around me while I ran and it felt like he was with me, if only for a fleeting moment.
When I worry about our daughters, I ask him to keep them safe. Sometimes I get angry at him, knowing that he’s in a place where he can finally hear it and can do what I always for: to hold me and let me know he loves me, that we will be okay. I ask him for forgiveness. He readily forgives me. I tell him that I’m working on forgiving him. That I am hopeful I will get there before I die.
Just because someone dies does not mean our relationship to them does. Repair will be a lifelong process for me, I think, I hope. It is the only way I can honour our time on this planet together. It is how I keep him alive in my heart.
Yet it is no substitute for repair with the living. If you can, summon your Wise Adult. Resource them with the skills they need to better regulate and communicate so that you can fully enjoy and appreciate the time you have together. Trust me, it is always shorter than we’d like.
There is No Conclusion
Of course, it isn’t so simple. It took my ex and me years to get to the point where a conversation between us would not re-wound each other. We had to change our stance to change the dance, in Terry Real’s language. We had to face ourselves, the roles we’ve played in families and what strategies we adapted as children to protect ourselves. Until we can regulate our inner adaptive children, we will continue to get triggered by our loved ones. The dance will continue until we consciously decide to stop it.
May we all make the courageous decision to change our stance and live a more harmonious, fulfilling dance with our loved ones.
Bibliography
Real, T. (2022). Us: Getting past you & me to build a more loving relationship. Rodale.
Schwartz, R. C., & Morissette, A. (2021). No bad parts: healing trauma & restoring wholeness with the internal family systems model. Sounds True.
