Why Being Good At Relationships Is Like Tennis (& Why There’s No Shame At Being Unskilled In Relationships)

It’s not your fault if nobody ever taught you how to be in a healthy relationship. If you grew up in a house with at least one selfabsorbed narcissistic parent who didn’t model a healthy, balanced relationship for you. Or even worse, if one of your caregivers was a sadistic sociopath who actually got off on hurting you, how could you possibly know how to be a good partner, parent, or friend?

I’m now leading a twicemonthly IFS community of practice on Zoom LOVE SCHOOL about relationship skill building for survivors of severe trauma and those who are trying to love them. We’re teaching both single people and couples how to set and enforce healthy boundaries, how to fight right rather than practice conflict avoidance, how to negotiate agreements rather than reflexively complying or rebelling, how to do a good repair when disconnection happens, how to use a talking stick and practice nonviolent communication (NVC), how to practice compassionate accountability, how to stop spiritual bypassing and deal with your pain instead, how to develop interoception so you can tell if you’re in ventral vagal, sympathetic, or dorsal vagal nervous system states, how to change states once you’re in sympathetic or dorsal vagal stress responses, how to spot the red flags of malignant narcissism and sociopathy when you’re dating or meeting new people, how to spot the green flags of securely attached healthier people, etc. 

We’re bringing in great guests too, like my partner and Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger, NIA founder Debbie Rosas, NeuroAffecive Relational Model Larry Heller, and soon to be more luminaries in the couples therapy and trauma therapy world. I even brought my daughter Mira in as a guest teacher once to talk about how we did motherdaughter IFS therapy together before she flew the nest.

You Can’t Be Expected To Play “Tennis” If You Didn’t Learn How

One of the metaphors we use in LOVE SCHOOL is the idea of “tennis lessons.” If you’re in a relationship with someone who grew up at the country club and started taking tennis lessons at the age of 5, and if you’ve never taken a tennis lesson in your life or even picked up a racket, you wouldn’t feel ashamed of your inability to play tennis. You wouldn’t think the person who grew up playing tennis at the club was somehow superior to you. You’d understand that some kids learn tennis (or skiing or ballroom dancing or piano) and some kids don’t. And if you wanted to get good at tennis or skiing or dancing or piano, you’d have to put in the work to learn a new skill.

Sure, you might be jealous that someone else can play tennis in their sleep. And sure, you might never become a tennis star if you start late in life. But you wouldn’t blame yourself or see yourself as somehow defective if you weren’t a stellar tennis player. You’d be humble about your lack of skill and you’d be willing to suck at it while learning a new skill if you wanted to play tennis with your partner.

If you grew up with a high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) score, or if you have a lot of developmental trauma, which you can screen for here, you might not have learned much about how to be healthy in a relationship. How could you have, if you had no role models and grew up around narcissistic bullies, controlling helicopter parents, codependent doormats, or flying monkey enablers who didn’t protect you?

But somehow, there’s something so foundational about relationships that it cuts to the quick when kids don’t learn relationship skill building in childhood and wind up thrown to the wolves as adults without adequate role modeling or education about healthy relationships. If we’re unskilled at relationships, it impairs our sense of worthiness, belonging, lovability, and identity. So much of what society considers “success” rests upon having a happy marriage, good relationships with our kids, a network of friends who have our back, and a community that sees us as a respected member of society.

So if you can’t seem to make a romantic relationship work, or you keep attracting friends who exploit you, or you don’t even know how to make friends with people who give and take reciprocally, or you isolate and don’t trust being around people in your community, or you’ve taken on workaholism as a way to compensate for the lack of nourishing relationships in your life, it can feel the way Jeff felt as a kindergartener shameful, embarrassing, not good enough, like something is fundamentally wrong with you. 

It’s much easier to admit that we suck at tennis than that we suck at relationships. But if we’re not willing to admit what we never learned, it’s impossible to get good at something new.

Need Help Learning Relationship Skill Building? 

In LOVE SCHOOL, our students have helped us realize that there’s something so fundamentally crushing about not being good at relationships that we carry loads of shame if we just don’t know how to do relationships. While we might not feel utterly devastated if we grow up not knowing how to play tennis, not knowing how to do relationships makes us feel unlovable, confused, worthless, helpless, fucked up, like a loser, as if everyone else knows the rules and we somehow missed the boat.

How could someone be expected to know their rights, to know their boundaries, to feel safe enough to hold their boundaries if someone crosses them, to feel entitled (in a healthy way) to have needs, express their needs, receive caregiving, and engage in reciprocal relationships with people who give and receive in fairly equal measure? How could they know how to negotiate agreements rather than just comply or rebel? How could they know how to repair relational ruptures? How could they know how to spot the red flags of dangerous people and how to discern who to trust and who to guard against?  How could they know what’s reasonable to expect versus what’s too much entitlement?

Just because we turn eighteen and leave home doesn’t mean we’ve now magically graduated from tennis lessons. Instead, kids who grew up without relationship lessons usually struggle in adult relationships. We blow through one romance after another, or we give up, too heartbroken to keep trying, and avoid them altogether. Or we wind up in a lock and key trauma bond with someone we either control or get controlled by. Or we play out the dynamics of our parents all over again or do just the opposite of what they did.

Unfortunately, spontaneous remissions of a severe trauma history are pretty much unheard of. Relational trauma doesn’t just go away without treatment, and relational skills have to be learned, just like tennis.

The Kid Who Didn’t Know The Alphabet

My partner Jeffrey Rediger, a Harvard psychiatrist whose ACE score is 8/10 and who endured every possible type of developmental trauma, tells the story of how, at 5 years old, when he went to kindergarten, he didn’t understand why all the other kids seemed to know the alphabet already. They’d either been to preschool, or their parents had taught them, or they’d learned it on Sesame Street, but somehow, they all knew their ABC’s.

But not Jeff. His parents never invested in educating him. They didn’t read him books or help him learn basics like the alphabet. They considered him not worth spending money on for preschool. His father grew up Amish, so they didn’t have a television or other modern conveniences that might have taught him the alphabet. He’d never even heard of the ABC’s. But he didn’t realize this would mean he was weird or different or not fitting in. As a child, he was already a shy wallflower who had been made to feel ashamed for even existing, so not knowing what all the other kids seemed to know made him blush bright red with embarrassment and shame. He felt less than, not good enough, unlovable, stupid. But he showed them. By third grade, he was winning spelling bees, making straight A’s, and outsmarting even the smartest girl in school. Later, he went to Princeton and then Harvard.

But even the most impressive academic achievement doesn’t teach someone relationship skills. In fact, as our friends who are IFS couples therapists for Ivy League couples can validate, Ivy League graduates are often the least skilled relationally. All that academic achievement is often a compensation for not having learned “tennis” growing up.

A LOVE SCHOOL Primer On Relationships

As the mother of a daughter who just graduated from high school, I tried really hard to make sure she had the relational tools, psychoeducation, and appropriate warnings installed before she left home. I’m sure I missed some things that will become apparent, and she has her own stuff from her parents that she’ll be plagued by as she grows up, but I at least tried to make sure she learned some key things. For example, I took it on as my responsibility to teach her a whole host of tennis lessons, which we’re tackling in LOVE SCHOOL, for those who didn’t have parents who taught them things like this.

• How to practice Internal Family Systems, so you can get to know your own parts, take responsibility for Selfleading them, educating those you love about your parts and their needs, speaking on behalf of your parts rather than “blending,” using IFS to do your “shadow work” as gently as possible, and committing to doing the Selfhealing work for the rest of your life
• How to know your human rights and what to do if they’re violated (the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a good place to start)
• How to communicate what you need and want without unhealthy entitlement or unreasonable demands
• How to protest mistreatment in a clear, healthy, and unwavering way, without letting someone squirm off the hook, without shaming and blaming someone else, and without making yourself responsible when it’s not your fault
• How to date from Self energy and get to know the parts that arise in response to new people you’re meeting
• How to negotiate agreements and boundaries, sharing power together, rather than blindly complying, reflexively rebelling, overpowering, or being overpowered
• How to test for compatibility issues before getting swept up in attachments or commitments with someone who doesn’t want the same kind of life you do
• How to understand your attachment style, learn to discern other people’s attachment styles, and be sensitive to your own attachment needs and those of others
• How to let people down gently but firmly when need be
• How to make sure your friendships go both ways (and how to avoid fair weather friends or exploitative people who don’t know how to love, or rebalance those relationships if they get too out of balance)
• How to spot the difference between a cult and a healthy club or community
• The red flags of narcissism (and what to do to protect yourself)
• The green flags of healthy relationships (and what’s realistic to expect in a good enough relationship)
• What boundaries you are and are not entitled to (and how to set and enforce consequences and distance yourself if someone won’t respect your boundaries)
• Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent around touch and sex, through an IFSlens, so you can figure out when you’re in consent and when you’re not, as well as how to make sure you always give someone else a choice about whether or not they’re consenting
• What you’re entitled to sexually and what you’re not
• The four steps of an authentic apology
• How to repair relational rupture when disconnection inevitably happens
• How to fight right (and why conflict avoidance never lasts)
• How to take responsibility for your own resentment (and own when you’re crossing your own boundaries and feeling tempted to blame someone else)
• How to practice compassionate accountability, for yourself and others 
• How to make sure your moral compass is pointing due north and not towards some authoritarian leader’s distorted ideas about morality (or lack thereof)
• How to spot spiritual bypassing and why it’s not a long term strategy for healing
• How to discern wisdom from indoctrinating dogmas
• How to develop interoception, so you can tell the difference between a ventral vagal “tend and befriend” parasympathetic nervous system state and a dorsal vagal parasympathetic or sympathetic stress responses
• How to recognize if your safety/danger compass gets compromised and you start feeling attracted to dangerous people and scared of safe people, so you can get help reorienting towards reasonable safety
• How to be empathic and kind to others, while also protecting your empathy with good boundaries (and how to know what is and is not your responsibility when you sense someone else’s suffering)
• The definition of coercive control and what to do if you think you’re ever a victim of it
• How to take responsibility for your parts when you blend with them, and how not to take responsibility for someone else’s
• Understanding the science of attraction, Harville Hendrix’s “imago” work, why we’re attracted to people who are bound to hurt us just like our parents did, and how it might not be the best idea to go after the person we think is the hottest person in the room
• How perfectionism is the killer of happiness and how it’s okay to make mistakes and practice compassionate accountability and self forgiveness when you mess up

If you were raised in a cult or joined one later in life, if you were indoctrinated into a religious or political belief system that makes healthy, equal relationships challenging, or if you’re still steeped in patriarchy and don’t even realize it, the first step will be to deconstruct those belief systems, so you don’t experience undue resistance to these kinds of “tennis lessons,” which might fly in the face of certain indoctrinated belief systems intended to keep people oppressed. We’re not looking to challenge any sacred cows, but we do want to help keep trauma survivors relationally safe enough so we can all get the healthy coregulation, support, touch, and love we need.

If you, someone you love, or clients of yours need these kinds of skillbuilding lessons, we welcome you to join us or refer people to LOVE SCHOOL. We’ll do our best to nurture and educate folks, help us all get in our bodies and feel our emotions, to learn the psychoeducation and skillsbuilding we all need to master in order to be in “good enough” relationships, not just for our romantic relationships and friendships, but for our kids and family relationships.

Learn more & join us for LOVE SCHOOL