Healing in relationships | #46

Rewriting old narratives through the experience of relating to others

I have always thought that I was not the type of person to be afraid of relationships - friends, family and having a romantic partner.

People close to me would say I am so extroverted, gregarious and bubbly, someone who is so energising to be around so I always thought that I couldn’t be afraid of the very thing that gives me energy.

In recent times I have come to realise how much fear I have being in relationships. While it still holds true that I am extroverted, there is a big difference with being a social animal and someone who can sustain long-term relationships. Being an extrovert does not automatically mean being able to accept the flaws, disappointments and natural ebbs and flows of being a human and relating to other humans.

The clues were always there if I look back and reflect on them. I struggled to sustain a long term romantic relationship throughout my twenties. My longest one lasted around a year. My friendship landscape was also turbulent as I was cancelling friends when they did not live up to my expectations and I saw many coming in and out of my life.

I spent many years exploring myself in therapy and through coaching especially on the topic of relationships. I felt that I was becoming a ‘better’ and ‘better’ version of myself and I did see myself expanding into greater forgiveness and acceptance. While the work in therapy was healing and invited a greater sense of self-awareness, what I came to realise was that true healing happens when we bring what we learn from therapy into the wild and into the way we relate to our family, friends and romantic partners. Right before I got to test it out in the wild myself, I had listened to Terry Real, a relationship therapist talk about it. The video describes how healing happens in relationships and is really worth a watch.

I very quickly got to put this to the test. Not long after watching the video, I spent a weekend in Barcelona with my boyfriend Alex. For most of the weekend I felt fixated and annoyed about a work related matter. My mood had been affected by work before on another weekend we had together. As I felt that this was a pattern, I brought up how worthy it was to continue the relationship since I felt like this wasn’t the first and would surely not be the last time. There was probably a part of me that feared this realisation on his part would eventually happen and preferred to have it end earlier and on my terms. At least I could control the pain and brush it off as it being better off this way.

Thankfully he didn’t take the bait, we were standing under the sun when he patiently shared his thoughts. As we conversed, we were moved into the restaurant and towards our seats.

His reaction continued to be expansive and he sought to understand. He never once agreed with my suggestion and he opened the conversation up for collaboration. I remember having an out of body observation where I saw that in that moment between laughter and tears over lunch, we were healing in the battlegrounds of a relationship. I laughed at the ridiculousness of my suggestion and cried at the pain that led me to make that suggestion in the first place. I watched myself lean into belief that he had the capacity and this wasn’t going to shake his resolve in my worthiness as a life partner. And in that tiny leaning in, I found myself rewrite a narrative I had held onto about my fears of relationships and how being single would be better for me.

Later on I reflected that healing happens when after we feel hurt, we choose to hold ourselves, we hold our pain and we choose to not call quits. Healing happens when we can accept the flaws within others and ourselves as not personal or malicious but rather the culmination of traits through nature and nurture.

Caryn