This morning, I had a small conflict with a friend, who I’ll call Piper. Although I’m on a tight book deadline for a book that’s due February 1, she’s also on a tight deadline to write her essays for her grad school application, and she’d offered to pay me $200 to help her write those essays. I had planned to spend this morning working on the book, but I acquiesced to her request.
She’s a great writer and a beautiful storyteller, with a lot of personal insight and an admirable willingness to self-disclose. So for me, it was easy to help her edit what she’d already written. But it took a couple of hours out of my productivity time. Because my dog doesn’t get along with our housekeeper, who is cleaning the house, I asked her if I could sit outside her house with my dog in the sunshine and work on my book until the housekeeper leaves. She said “Sure.”
Then just as I was getting settled in her front yard, she came out and backtracked. No, she said, she’d changed her mind. She wanted me to go home and leave her and her teenage son alone so they could have some quality time together.
Couldn’t I just go somewhere they wouldn’t even see me- out in the yard beyond earshot or eyeshot, I asked? My dog goes ballistic when the vacuum cleaner scares her, and I’d have to find someplace else to go if I couldn’t stay there, I reasoned.
She said no. She didn’t want to be distracted from being present with her son, and knowing I was out there might put her attention elsewhere, she explained.
I felt this knot in my belly and sadness behind my eyes. I had given up my morning to do her a favor and what I was asking for was so small. I felt the emotions of a young wounded child part threatening to take me over, but I promised that part I’d come back and attend to her later. My pre-therapy self would have just kept quiet and licked my wounds privately. But Piper and I are close, and we’re both IFS people. So I risked speaking up.
I said “Ouch” and told her I felt sad and disappointed. It didn’t feel fair to my parts that I’d extended myself a lot at a time when I didn’t have a lot of bandwidth. In my mind, my request in return was such a small one, just a place to write without vacuum cleaners. I wasn’t needing any of her attention and I was happy to just go find a quiet corner to leave her and her son alone. Couldn’t I just stay?
I didn’t know until later that, in her mind, it was a huge ask because she felt her son needed alone time with Mama, without someone else lurking around. So she said no- in an abrupt, harsh way. So I took my stinging eyes and heart and walked away, starting to feel the emotions of that wounded part rising up again. Who was that part? She said she always puts everyone else’s needs first, and then when all she’s asking for is breadcrumbs in return, her needs don’t matter. She just felt sad and used.
That was about as far as I got before Piper came running after me, looking sad and confused. She said she didn’t know what to say. She wanted to prioritize this time with her son, and she wasn’t sure how to focus on him if I was in her yard. She worried that she’d feel split in her attention and that he might feel it. She also explained to me that she was getting ready to leave, but that her son wasn’t leaving at the same time, and she was afraid he’d feel awkward if I was in their yard, and he was home alone.
But she also didn’t want to let me down.
I told her I’d always respect her boundaries, but that sometimes her boundaries felt blunt and abrupt. I knew she’d struggled in the past to set boundaries, and I didn’t want to bully myself past her boundaries. But I told her I might sometimes have feelings about her boundaries. She said “That makes sense” and appreciated me for telling her the truth and also for respecting her limits.
“What if you come back in an hour?” she suggested, as a compromise. Could I find someplace else to write for an hour, and then when she and her son were leaving, it wouldn’t bother her at all if I sat in her yard. I accepted her compromise and thanked her for considering a way to meet my need to stay away from the vacuum cleaners.
She owned the fact that her boundary setting could sometimes be abrupt and feel unkind, since it’s a skill she’s still learning to develop after an abusive marriage to someone very narcissistic, who she enabled and let stomp all over her boundaries. I validated that her boundaries matter very much to me and that she’s doing a good job learning when to say no and how to take care of herself and her son’s needs. She said she felt confused after I left, and she didn’t know what to say or what to do. I told her she did it exactly perfectly, that “I’m confused right now and I don’t know what to say or do” is a perfectly valid response.
We hugged, I felt instantly better, I appreciated the trust-buliding moment, and now I’m in her front yard, writing this before I get back to writing the book.
Speaking On Behalf Of Parts As A Trust-Building Intimacy Practice
It made me reflect on how miserably unskillful so many people I know are at relational rupture and repair. This whole kerfuffle with me and Piper ruptured and repaired in 5 minutes. Nobody raised their voice. Nobody got defensive. Nobody attacked or assassinated the other’s character. Nobody blame-shifted. Nobody collapsed and engaged in people-pleasing behavior. Nobody did the conflict avoidant passive aggressive silencing. Nobody rebelled against the boundaries or bullied the other to override the boundaries. And a satisfactory compromise was met within minutes.
Once I left, I took the time to attend to the part who sometimes gives a lot and doesn’t feel adequately caregiven in return. This part feels unworthy, unloved, and unimportant when someone else doesn’t want to help her get even the smallest needs met. She’s had times when she’s breaking her back for people (not Piper), helping them do something hard, something that’s not at all her responsibility, and then they attack her for even asking for a glass of water, accusing her of treating them like servants. This part cringes with agony in her heart when such small requests get rejected after other parts have overextended themselves.
Once I had a chance to process how that part felt, I told Piper about that part, as a gesture of trust and intimacy. I know Piper cares about my parts, so that way, she can have some compassion for the part that got activated in me, in case it shows up in our dynamic again.
It’s not uncommon for that part to light up around Piper, but that’s not Piper’s fault. I sometimes feel like I love her more than she loves me, even though I know she cares. I have other friendships like that, where I’m almost always the one to go to her house, not the other way around. She almost always rejects my bids for connection when I’m the one to initiate, while, at least half the time she reaches out to me for a last minute connection, I make myself available to her, even if it’s not always convenient.
We’ve talked about that before, the “tiny murders” part that feels a sting of rejection each time I reach out and she says no. She’s so sweet to that part and doesn’t get defensive if I speak on behalf of that part. She doesn’t mean to hurt that part, she always explains. She wants our relationship to be balanced, and she loves me. But I simply have more free time than she does, especially now that I have an empty nest and she still has two teenagers in the house. I know she values me and enjoys the time we spend together. It just sometimes feels like I want her more than she wants me, and that activates my Daddy wounds.
I’m also sweet to the part of Piper who has a tendency to overcommit and overextend, who can say yes when she means no and then regret it and wind up pulling out later. I don’t want her to blend with that part in order to prevent my tiny murders part from feeling rejected. I’d hate it if she said yes when she was really a no and then felt resentful or burdened afterwards. But it’s inevitable that our parts will dance up against each other sometimes. Such is the dance of intimacy.
I came away from the dynamic feeling proud of Piper and I. I wish relational rupture and repair was as easy with all my relationships as it was with her, but then again, we don’t live with each other- and we’re not lovers. Not to be sexist, but I typically find it easier to repair with my female friends than with my male friends or partners. They get so much less defensive and seem to have such easier access to empathy when I feel an ouchie. I suspect it’s because so many male-identifying people get shut down
How Rare It Is To Have Quick, Easy Relational Repairs
With Piper’s consent and a few of her additions, I decided to write about this, since both Piper and I struggle in our relationships with romantic partners to repair this easily. I think we need more stories of good repairs. It made me think about a time when I was teaching a group of Covid doctors, nurses, and therapists for a month at Esalen. One the first day, the only male and the only Black queer female in the group had a conflict over privilege and marginalization. Their conflict created a lot of hurt feelings in the rest of the group. The next day, I gathered the group together and asked how many of them had relational rupture and repair modeled for them at home. I was shocked to be the only one there who raised my hand.
My family does rupture and repair really well, and I can’t imagine not having learned how to do that growing up. We even have a family member in jail for life, after he pled guilty to molesting all the little girls in the neighborhood, but the family still didn’t ostracize him. We don’t do estrangement. But then again, nobody in our family refuses to own their shadow and hold themselves accountable, the way so many abusers do.
This is part of why I’ve created a new continuity program LOVE SCHOOL, where we’re going to be teaching healthy relational skills, like how to do a good repair, how to set and uphold boundaries, how to give a good apology, when to forgive (and when not to), what to do when there’s a trust breach in a relationship, how to discern whether someone should be trusted, red flags of antagonistic relationships and how to spot them early and keep your distance, and other things we should have learned by high school, ideally.
Learn more & join LOVE SCHOOL here.
I feel like relational skills like how to have a good repair should be mandatory STEM classes especially for those with relational trauma in childhood. Trauma inhibits our ability to get what we most need when we have been traumatized—healthy relationships. It damages our ability to trust that other humans are safe for connection, co-regulation, compassion, nurture, and comfort. This can lead to the epidemic of chronic loneliness our society now faces, along with the health risks that accompany chronic loneliness.
Relational trauma in childhood makes it impossible to learn crucial relational skills. With few role models demonstrating equal relationships, and with few if any classes in public schools about how to develop, discern, and participate equally in healthy relationships, many kids, especially male-identifying people, grow up not having a clue how to be in a relationship. If many masculine-identifying persons are socialized to suppress their emotional and physical needs and be sadistic, and if female-identifying persons are raised to be masochistic, throwing themselves under the bus to prioritize the needs of men, children, and everyone else, it’s also true that traumatized, conditioned adults are still doing the teaching. They are passing on to children what has been done to them, perpetuating patriarchal norms and generational trauma. Until we stop betraying our girls by stripping them of their anger, assertiveness, and healthy boundaries, until we stop betraying our boys and requiring emotional and somatic disconnection from them, we’re never going to heal as a culture.
There’s No Need To Feel Shame If You Never Got Tennis Lessons
If it was tennis people who have experienced relational trauma weren’t good at, having received no tennis lessons, they might not berate themselves or loathe themselves for not knowing how to play tennis. But there’s something so foundational about being good at relating that not knowing how can create waves of shame, unworthiness, and inadequacy in survivors of relational trauma. If you didn’t know how to play tennis because nobody had ever taught you, you wouldn’t feel like a complete failure as a human being. But if you don’t know how to relate in healthy, balanced, equal ways, it can make you feel broken, defective, unlovable.
Especially when society tends to label, demonize, pathologize, medicate, hospitalize, imprison, and lack empathy for the adaptations trauma survivors develop as work-arounds to compensate for their lack of relational skills, even talking about this issue can draw up floods of emotions for those who don’t already have alexithymia, the inability to feel emotions.
There’s something about not being good at relationships that cuts to the core of our very being and impacts our self-esteem. But we have to think of relational skills as no different than tennis lessons. If you didn’t learn it, and how could you if your caregivers sucked at it and nobody ever gave you lessons, you can’t be expected to know how to be in an equal relationship. But it is your responsibility to take tennis lessons now. It’s also your responsibility to hold yourself and others accountable if tennis lessons are what’s needed in order to participate in equal relationships.
If this resonates with you- or if you know anyone else who needs help with relational skills, we’re going to try to make it as fun as tennis lessons! We’ll be previewing some of the content from the new book my partner Jeffrey Rediger and I are co-writing, which won’t come out until Spring 2026 but which we’ll be teaching students in Love School how to practice. Anyone is welcome to join, but you’ll find it especially helpful if you’re in a mixed neurotype relationship, if one person is severely traumatized and the other has a lighter trauma burden, if one of you is able-bodied and the other is disabled, if you identify as being in a codependent relationship with someone high on the narcissism spectrum, or if you’re in recovery from a painful breakup and trying to figure out what happened before trying to love again. We’ll be practicing Internal Family Systems together, learning relational tools and trauma healing practices, writing, dancing, and wrestling with good questions in safe, brave community- together.
Learn more and join LOVE SCHOOL here.
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