What is Really Going On in Your Relationships - Why We Get in Bed with Our Unfinshed Business!!

Relationships are never easy, but with this knowledge you can choose “curiosity” and find balance and real intamacy.

What makes relationships so hard. You met the love of your life, you are off to great things, right? Why then do you feel like your partner is ready to poke a hot dagger in your eye sometimes. There is truth at the heart of long-term partnership that nobody tells you when you commit, first have sex, or on your wedding day: the person you commit to or marry is uniquely positioned to call out the parts of you that haven't healed yet. Not because they want to. Because intimacy itself does that work. The closer you let someone get, the more your old wiring starts firing, and what comes up has to either grow or fracture.

Two books explain this with unusual clarity: David Richo's When the Past Is Present and Terrence Real's Us. Read together, they describe the same phenomenon from different angles, and the picture they paint is both humbling and freeing. It has certainly helped my marriage.

The wounded child and the adaptive child show up to dinner

Terrence Real's central theme in his great book, Us, is that each of us carries an adaptive child, the part of us that learned, in childhood, how to survive whatever family we were born into. The adaptive child is hypervigilant, defensive, expresses anger and hatred, and deeply rehearsed in strategies that worked when we were eight and have nothing to do with adult intimacy. Underneath the adaptive child, often, sits a wounded child, the version of us who didn't get something essential and is still, quietly, waiting for it.

Unlucky for us, but these parts don't disappear when you fall in love or even just because of age. They show up because you fell in love, because that person makes you feel safe. Two sides of the same coin: Postive and negative transference. Your partner gets close enough to your nervous system that it stops bothering with your adult disguise. The adaptive child grabs the wheel. The wounded child starts crying in the back seat. And suddenly you're having a fight that feels like it's about the dishes but is actually about something that happened in 1994.

The last part of Real’s book that I truly love, because we have all felt it, is when he discusses “Normal Marital Hatred”. It is validating for us to understand that this type of hatred is real, but can be laughed about, because it is the adaptive child coming out. Just as if you are back at 16 years old and telling our parents we “hate” them. So, it is ok if you have felt it in your intimate relationship. If you have not, perhaps you did your work before marriage. :)

This is transference, including the part that brought you together

David Richo names the engine underneath all of this: transference. We lay old emotional templates over new people. What's uncomfortable to admit is that this doesn't only happen during the hard moments. It happens during the falling-in-love part, too.

The pull you felt toward your partner in those first weeks wasn't only about them. It was also about how their nervous system fit a shape you'd been organizing yourself around your whole life. They felt safe because they were quiet and undemanding like your father. They felt magnetic because they were assertive and certain like your mother. The familiarity registered as chemistry. We follow the patterns we know — even the ones that hurt us — because the body confuses familiar with safe.

That is positive transference and negative transference doing the same quiet job: sorting people into "this one I recognize." The recognition is real. It's just not the same thing as compatibility, and it's certainly not the same thing as healing.

Secure attachment is built, not found

Here's the part most people get wrong. We talk about secure attachment as if it were a personality trait or something you either arrived with or didn't. But the deeper truth, in both Richo and Real, is that secure attachment is largely grown, and it's grown inside a relationship. In fact, I believe in the concert of a intimate relationship is on of the few places we can unlearn our attachement style, heal attachment injury and find secure attachment. You can't think your way to secure attachement. The wounded parts that need to heal can only heal in the presence of another person who keeps choosing to stay, who acts as a withness to your life and still chooses to turn toward you and love you.

That's why marriage or any deeply committed partnership are such powerful crucibles. Every time your adaptive child throws a punch and your partner doesn't leave. Or, every time you notice your partner's adaptive child and choose curiosity over retaliation. These moments lay down a tiny piece of new wiring. This is the opportunity in a deeply commited relationship. Over years, this is how two anxiously or avoidantly attached people become, slowly, more secure. Not by accident. By repetition. Inside the safety of a relationship that holds.

Turning toward, not away

John Gottman's research gives us another practical mechanism to understand the small habits that lead to lasting love and secure attachement. He observed that couples constantly make small "bids" for connection (e.g. a sigh, a comment about the weather, a hand reached across the couch) and that partners respond in one of three ways: turning toward, turning away, or turning against. In his longitudinal studies, couples who stayed together turned toward each other roughly 86% of the time. Couples who divorced, about 33%.

As Gottman put it: "Trust is built in very small moments."

That line holds the secret to the real “glue” of true lasting partnership. Grand gestures don't build secure attachment. The Tuesday-night decision to look up from your phone when your partner walks in does. The choice, mid-trigger, to take a breath and ask what your adaptive child is trying to protect. The small, repeated, unsexy turning-toward is the entire technology of healing inside a relationship.

Your partner can't fix your wounded child. But they can be the safe presence in which that child finally exhales. And you can be that for them. That's the work. That's also the gift.

More To Learn From Terry Real

For more on what it actually takes to build the kind of partnership where this growth becomes possible, this conversation with Terrence Real is worth your time:

Mel Robbins and Terry Real : Married, Dating, or Single: The Best Relationship Advice You Will Ever Receive