*Photo credit Simone Anne
Some people expect that their romantic relationships will be purely a sanctuary of refuge, a conflict-free zone of safe, nurturing connection, unconditional acceptance, pleasurable fun and joy, and nourishing companionship.
Other people approach relationships as a competitive sport with the goalpost being purification, freedom from trauma, or enlightenment, glorifying the painful challenges of intimacy as a spiritual path, even if it means you never relax and enjoy each other.
Healthy, healing relationships offer both- safe refuge and transformational crucible, secure sanctuary and catalytic growth. But what can you do if one of you only wants the sanctuary of refuge and the other is up for the challenge of relational healing?
In my marriage to my daughter’s father, I was motivated to grow, learn, change, and allow our marriage to be a catalyst for personal and spiritual growth. I’d read books like Harville Hendrix’s Getting The Love You Want, Richard Schwartz’s You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For, and Robert Augustus Masters’ Transformation Through Intimacy, and I did everything I knew how to do to invite my husband to be my healing partner.
He was and still is a wonderful man and a terrific father. But when I asked him to do couple’s therapy with me, he said no. I invited him to relationship workshops with me, and he politely declined. I tried to get him to read books about relationships with me, and he said he’d rather not. I poked at him to try to work our relational issues out, just the two of us, but as soon as there was any emotional heat, he opted out. The idea of stepping willingly into anything that might feel like conflict was just not something he wanted to do.
Fair enough. We’re each entitled to our own journey. But when there are two of you, one person’s resistance can significantly impact both of you. It was a real conundrum for us that ultimately led to our divorce. ironically, that turned out to be the catalyst he needed to jump start his own healing journey- without me.
I’m telling this story not to suggest that I was in some way better than him because I was up for the challenge or that he was in some way inferior because he wasn’t ready. I’m telling it because I hear similar stories so commonly from clients of mine: one party is emotionally ready for the deeper dive into relational healing and the other simply isn’t ready yet. And then there’s a stalemate. One person can work on themselves and hope it helps the relationship, but if only one person is over-functioning and doing all the emotional labor for them both, it’s unlikely to go particularly well.
As Karen Drucker sings in her song Gentle With Myself, “I will only go as fast as the slowest part of me feels safe to go.” And honestly, that’s the fastest way, to avoid bullying our parts or letting anyone else bully us onto a healing path weren’t not yet ready for.
Healing With Your “Imago”
We tend to be most attracted to the people Harville Hendrix calls our ‘imago,” a Latin word for “image.” According to Hendrix, we all carry an internalized image of our primary caregivers, formed during early childhood. This imago shapes how we perceive and experience relationships, causing us to unconsciously seek partners who match this image, often to recreate the emotional environment of our upbringing—whether nurturing or neglectful—in an attempt to heal old wounds. This can lead to repeating patterns of conflict and misunderstanding in romantic relationships.
According to Hendrix, your perfect imago is a combination of the positive and negative qualities of your caregivers (but mostly the negative) mashed up with the exiled parts of yourself. In other words, if your mother was a control freak, and your father was a stoic conflict avoider, and if you admire extroverted performers, but you’re an introverted wallflower, you’re very likely to choose a partner who is a control freak with stoic conflict avoidant tendencies, who loves to sing on stage and host gorgeous dinner parties.
While this initially fuels attraction, it can later become a source of frustration when unmet needs resurface. The good news is that if your imago is willing to engage in healing work with you, you can actually leverage these tendencies to help you heal your childhood wounds in relationship while also expressing exiled qualities of yourself that your partner can help draw out of you. Romantic partnerships, in particular, are almost custom designed to needle our core wounds. If you’re a relationship with someone on board to alchemize that needling into deep healing, this can be an awesome opportunity. If you’re with someone who’s just going to needle your wounds- and you’re going to needle theirs- and neither of you are going to get help, that’s just a trauma bonded nightmare, not a healing relationship.
Your Relationship Will Discover Your Core Wounds
Even if two individuals in a relationship are both in individual therapy, it’s easy to skip the truly transformational aspects of healing trauma that can arise when two people heal together, rather than separately. But obviously, you can’t force someone else to be ready to touch their relational trauma if they’re not ready or willing to do so. Putting undue pressure on someone who isn’t ready is like banging on a closed door. You’re unlikely to get that door to budge, and you’ll probably hurt your hand.
Not every situation where two people are mismatched in the timing of their readiness to heal results in breakups. Some people are capable of prioritizing their own healing while being patient with a partner who’s not ready. Some relationships are sturdy enough and healthy enough to handle the mismatch, even if the other person never hits that readiness point.
People who aren’t ready to heal often have all kinds of protector parts lined up to make sure they don’t get anywhere close to the parts of them that were hurt by relationships in the past, especially if those hurts happened in their first significant relationships- with Mom or Dad. Our protective parts can double down on their fears of getting overwhelmed by parts that carry burdens of helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, powerlessness, shame, terror, and other emotions that might threaten to flood the system and take someone out.
But if we do our own individual healing work with trauma healing methods like Internal Family Systems (IFS), we can communicate on behalf of our more vulnerable or protective parts and elicit more compassion from those who care about us.
We’ll be talking about these kinds of relational mismatches- as well as how to find healing partners if you’re still single- in an upcoming Zoom weekend workshop with me and my partner Jeffrey Rediger called HEALING THROUGH RELATIONSHIP. It’s about intimacy as a path of transformation, or for some people, as a spiritual path. That intimacy can be with a romantic partner, a bestie, family members, or a community of practice.
If you and maybe also a partner are interested in joining us, we’d love to have you! We’ll discuss provocative questions and come together in community to discover collective answers. Like how do you balance opening your heart, trusting, and falling love with protecting yourself, being cautious, and keeping some distance so as not to get shattered? How can you change what you’re attracted to so that you’re not attracting people with the worst qualities of your parents? What do you do when the balance is off in every single relationship and you wind up always giving to someone who’s happy to take? How can you distinguish between people who are high on the narcissism spectrum from those who get flooded with empathy and behave in ways that feel unempathetic or narcissistic? Where do you draw the line between loving your partner for exactly who they are, unconditionally, and not over-accommodating or sacrificing yourself in order to make the relationship work?
We’ve developed the curriculum from the ten pages of questions that were asked at our last relationship workshop, so if you’ve attended one of our other relationship workshops, please come back! It’ll be all new content. We’ll attempt to answer some of these questions here on the blog, as well. So feel free to ask more questions we might try to answer!
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