I am so excited for this week on The Balanced Parent Podcast because we will be having a unique "combo" episode! The first part is a replay of a Facebook Live I did where I discussed some "subconscious" reasons we choose our partners. And then a community member reached out with some awesome follow up questions that really took things to the next level, so I asked if we could record our conversation so that you all could listen in!

Here is the summary of our conversation:

Five Subconscious Reasons we choose our partners
How & why our partners invite us to heal old wounds
Understanding our wound language
Deepening our relationship through mutual healing

And if you are looking for a way to be more connected and aligned with your partner, here are some of my resources that would help you (it's FREE to download!):

Partners in Parenting Workbook: www.laurafroyen.com/partners

Random Acts of Connection Game: www.laurafroyen.com/random-acts-of-connection

You may also check my website www.laurafroyen.com for more resources. I also have a Partners in Parenting course so go check that out!

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hey my dears, this is Laura and I have a really special episode of the balance parent for you this week. So, this episode is kind of a two-parter but all in one. So, we start off with a replay of a video that I made last year on the five subconscious reasons why you chose your partner. And in that segment, we really dive into kind of the psychology behind why we choose our partners. And there's a little piece of it that one of my listeners was really interested in and wanted to dig further into. So, she reached out to me and asked if we could sit down and have a session to discuss it further. And I thought, you know, she was asking such amazing questions. I really thought that it might be helpful for everybody to get the answers to her questions. So, I invited her to come onto the show with me and ask those questions. So, in this episode, you're getting that first video on those five reasons and then a deeper dive Q and A with one of our community members. So, I hope you enjoy it.

Please let me know if you have any questions afterwards. I love hearing from you. I love getting your emails. I love getting your messages on social media. And so, if you do have any questions or if this resonated with you, if it was helpful for you, please reach out. I would love to hear from you.

And if you're looking for a way to feel more connected and in alignment with your partner, I do have some resources for couples. I have both my partners and parenting workbook that's free to download. I have a course by the same name that helps you get a line in your parenting. And then I also have just a fun game that the two of you can play that can help deepen your connection called Random Acts of Connection. It's a little bit of a silly game that I used to play with my couple clients when I was still a couple’s therapist. So, you can check those resources out on my website or here in the show notes.

Alright, here we go. Let's dive into this episode. Enjoy!

PART 1 [LAURA]

So, today I wanted to talk to you about five subconscious reasons we choose our partners.

Early in my relationship with my husband, you know, in that kind of those early honeymoon, super romantic stages of love, I remember telling him that I felt like we fit together like a puzzle piece. There are parts that were hurting and missing in me that were so well complicated and healed by the parts that were hurting and missing in him. And that we're together, we could do anything, that we completed each other. And it really felt that thing.

In those early days of love, we’re kind of blind to all of the bad things about our partners, all of the things that annoy us and you know might get under our skin. We tend to really overlook them, any negative traits or even any negative traits about the relationship. In those early stages of love are really good. Kind of making us unaware of maybe some of the harder things that are coming up in our future.

That early stages, the romantic stage of love or the honeymoon stage of love fades, and we all know that that's true and it's supposed to fade. We can't maintain that type of intense romantic kind of feeling over time. It just is impossible, it's too much. And so, as we got deeper and deeper into our relationship, all of those pieces where we kind of fit so perfectly together, those pieces started to emerge as points of conflict for us. I mean it felt like we were puzzle pieces and we still fit together beautifully but we were like puzzle pieces that like when they came together, and those edges touch those edges were like live wires, and when they touched there were explosions. And that is the kind of the struggle or the conflict stage of love.

If we're thinking about love in three stages, so there's a honeymoon stage, there's the struggle stage and then the third stage is the conscious stage, conscious love, and this is all coming out of the Imago model of relationships. And I'll put a link into kind of linked to some of that information. But in order to get out of that struggle stage and into the conscious stage, we have to understand why we chose our partner and the purpose that they serve and that their relationship serves in our own individual personal journeys towards wholeness. And that's what I want to share with you today because we're drawn to the partners that we choose for a reason, and I wanted to share a few of them.

So, I'm going to share five today, and understanding this, understanding these reasons and why they're there can really open us up to accepting the work that our partners are inviting us to do. Work that will crack us open and invite us to grow and heal wounds that we carried with us our whole lives and that maybe our families have been carrying for generations. I mean, we get to be the person who heals that for ourselves and for our families through our relationships with our partners. But first, we have to understand why we chose the partners that we chose.

So, I'm going to give you five reasons. The first three are kind of more surface-level reasons that our subconscious to us that kind of support the last two that I'm going to share.

Okay, so the first one is that we look for people who are similar to ourselves. We look for people with whom we share commonalities and interests. And there's a lot of research to back this up. So, it mainly has to do with the fact that when we have similar personality traits or background or values, or experiences, we can share more mental and emotional space. And it creates this instant feeling of intimacy with someone. When we have those shared experiences, or values, or backgrounds, it increases our ability to feel like you have this deep knowledge of the other person. Finding that can be really attractive to us.

We also tend to choose someone who is very much like us in a subconscious effort to learn to love and accept ourselves. So, if we are choosing someone who maybe is a perfectionist to super driven or motivated and has some of these other traits that maybe make us a little bit hard to feel positively towards ourselves, we can sometimes subconsciously choosing someone who's like that in an effort to feel more loving and accepting towards ourselves.

So, the second one is familiarity. So, we look for people who feel familiar and comfortable, it could be that they remind us of our family growing up and so they might feel comfortable in that way. And I'm going to dig more into that in a minute. But it also could be simply that we are around them more and exposure and kind of time spent together is a big predictor of whether or not a couple is going to get together, the more exposure we have to, the person, the higher chances are that we will grow to like accept and eventually fall in love with them.

And this is why so many relationships bloom during things like at work, at the office, in college courses. Like maybe if you had the same major as someone, you see them in a few different courses over the course or of your college career or maybe in a shared experience. Like if you're both in a play together as an extracurricular and you've been that time together and it kind of works together with the similarity in the office, and company for a reason and the same courses for reasons, you're doing the same activity for reasons. Dissimilarity and familiarity often work a lot together.

The third one is that there's often a physical attraction as it's very ground basic human level or animal level is also important. This is often sometimes nebulous and differs from person to person and is really informed by culture and cultural standards of beauty. And even anthropologically speaking, there are certain things that we find more attractive. For example, men tend to prefer women with long hair. Anthropologists believe that the reason for that is because your hair can be a health record. I mean, so for women with broad hips for childbearing, kind of deeply, kind of animal pieces to this and there's cultural pieces to it and it's a major factor in choosing our partner.

And so then, whether you call it chemistry or spark, this often comes from some combination of the last three things: similarity, familiarity, and then that physical attraction all works together to create that spark. Now there's a piece of it though that is less well understood and less talked about too. So those three are the kind of the most commonly understood reasons why our subconscious might drive us to choose a certain partner.

The last two I'm going to be getting into are a little bit different and kind of take things to the next level. Okay, so they go a little bit deeper.

The fourth reason, our fourth subconscious reason that we choose a partner is because they bring about in us, they make us feel a familiar form of love. Let me clarify what I mean by that. So, we learn how to love in childhood in our closest relationships. In fact, this is one of the most powerful aspects of the attachment relationship. The bond between parent and child that we form in early infancy and throughout our young childhood. This bond serves to keep us safe as we all know, but it also helps us subconsciously form our internal working model of ourselves, of others, and of relationships. And these models inform the way we view ourselves and how we expect to be treated within the context of loving relationships.

So, when we go out looking for a romantic, intimate partner, we go out with this model of love that we learned in early childhood. We go out looking for the person who is going to replicate those patterns and is going to help us feel love in the way that we're used to in a way that feels familiar. So unfortunately for most of us, while our parents were doing the very best that they could, they often have their own wounds that they passed down to us. And those wounds mean that the love we learned to expect and co-regulate within in childhood likely wasn't built completely out of generosity or compassion, kindness, or consciousness.

And so, we likely came away from childhood with some sense of not being good enough or lovable enough, which means that when we go out looking for an intimate partner, we are subconsciously looking for someone who elicits within us that same, not good enough, unlovable-ness, that unworthiness, whatever wound we're carrying. We go about looking for a partner who will bring that out in us.

Now we don't feel that in those early stages of love, we talked about the honeymoon stage, We don't feel that at all. We don't start to feel that until we're in that struggle phase. And it is the act of reconciling those feelings that brings us into the conscious stage of a relationship. I learned about Imago Therapy when I was a graduate student, getting my Ph.D. in couple and family therapy. But I didn't have the chance to learn from someone who is an expert, and I didn't have the chance to experience it personally. And so, my husband is so wonderful. He is so willing to do experiments with me and to engage in learning with me so I can better serve the folks that I work with and so we can grow too. So, we've been working with an imago therapist, and I've been learning this firsthand within my own relationship and it's so exciting. I wanted to share it with you.

So, the fifth subconscious reason, we choose the partners we choose. We go out and we look for the people who are uniquely suited to partner with us in mutual healing. So, we go out looking for the person who's going to elicit this feeling of unworthiness, who feels familiar in terms of the love that we came to expect growing up. And we go out when we find this person with the subconscious knowledge that they are going to be perfectly suited to elicit that feeling and allow it to be healed. And that's something that's mind-blowing and powerful.

And I want you to really think about what that could mean for your relationship with your intimate partner, your romantic partner, the person that you chose. So, if that is true, that we went out seeking the person, you know, subconsciously, the person who is perfectly suited to bring us to our highest self to heal those wounds that we carry with us in childhood, what would that mean for you? What could it mean to like, do that? And partner with your partner? And it's not like they're gonna magically heal you and you're not going to magically heal them.

You're going to create a scenario of an attachment relationship that provides a secure context for that healing to happen. You're going to have to do some change, you're going to have to do some work. You're going to have to recognize when you're having childlike responses to kind of what your partner is bringing out. When that's harkening back to when you were a hurting child. And then choose conscious adult responses. And in doing that, you will heal. You'll heal those wounds, those fears of being unworthy, you're unlovable. In my case, the fear of being too much or too emotional, or too sensitive.

And so, like in my case, that's my deepest fear. I am too much and too sensitive and I beautifully and wisely subconsciously chose to partner with a person who is afraid of emotions, afraid of getting too deep, afraid of getting too close, and throws up a wall when too much emotion is coming at him.

And so, my work is learning to love myself and learning that I am lovable no matter how much or big my feelings are. And his work is learning how to be safe and feel safe within those big when those big emotions are coming at him. My work is also to learn to regulate so that we can co-regulate. I need to down-regulate some of my feelings in order to create a safe environment for him to be able to step in it with me.

Whoever we partner with, we have these pieces that totally true. We are like puzzles. We fit together. And at the beginning of puzzles where we're like magnetically fused and then in the struggle phase it's like where these puzzle pieces with livewire edges that elicit explosions.

And then as we move into the conscious phase and we move towards more conscious coupling, having a really intentional, deep, intimate, and conscious relationship with our partner. Again, we're fitting together in these puzzle pieces in exactly the spaces the way that we need in order to be able to heal ourselves.

And in order to create the context, we're healing of each other, healing happens within attachment relationship. If we're looking to heal ourselves, having a partner to engage in that process with the growth is so much faster and so much more powerful.

So those are the five reasons that we choose our partner. The subconscious reasons that we choose our partner, I'm just going to say them real fast in case somebody is coming on. So, there’s similarity, familiarity, physical attraction, how we learn to love the model of love that we learned in childhood. And the fifth reason, the most powerful, mind-blowing reason is that we subconsciously choose the partner who is uniquely suited to partner with us in healing.

Okay, so I have a question. She says, what if your spouse doesn't feel that they have anything they need to heal? This all sounds so complicated, and my husband also puts up the wall.

You're not alone. So, most men in our culture and in cultures across the world are not taught how to handle their feelings or the feelings of others when they're coming at them. They are taught that anger is the only acceptable feeling for them to have and that all other feelings, especially soft ones, must be shut down because they're not safe. Because if they have those feelings or if they start connecting with those feelings, they will lose love. They will be unacceptable, and they'll be unworthy. That's the model that they, many men learn in their childhood. That's what we teach our boys when we tell them to man up or boys don't cry. That's what we're doing.

And there's this legacy of harm that's been done and not just a minute, that legacy harms women too. It harms our entire society. When we limit the range of emotions that are available to men, I mean, it makes it nearly impossible for us to be in a conscious relationship.

So, I'm going to share an article that maybe will be helpful that… think that will maybe help, but we all have work to do. And I think that that's the thing. I really like the “Passion Doctor”, it's helpful and then this one too, I really love this article is a great synopsis. I'm putting these in, I would just have your partner read them and just see what they think.

It's a really vulnerable thing and it's hard to do. If they're willing, get yourself to a therapist. Most therapists help partners own their role because that's a big piece of changing a cycle of communication - is owning your role. And so, if you can get them in, that therapists will form a relationship with your partner and allow great safety so that they can acknowledge their role and that really is like the thing that needs to shift. If a partner is having a hard time acknowledging their role in a conflict, it's likely because they don't feel safe doing so. So, you can do the work of having a soft startup of making sure that you are approaching them on something that you are softened and vulnerable and that you frame what you… The request you need to make in a kind of a bubble of love.

And that you know you're not mad and all of those things kind of framing it properly. And then invite them in but until they are ready to lower their defenses and look at the work and growth that they have to do, there's not a lot we can do, we can't make a partner change. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use your partner and the unique gifts that they bring to your relationship to grow and heal yourself.

So, I really want to empower all of you who are listening, that we have a lot of power in these circumstances. And we do not have to wait for our partner to agree to change, to take the first step, we can do that. So, if we are committed to staying with someone, we're in the struggle phase and we want to move more towards consciousness, we can lead the way to that. We can recognize when we're having a reaction that's grounded in a childhood wound and choose a different response. And oftentimes when we start showing up differently, the other person shows up differently too. That's one of the first rules of relational dynamic.

And that when we change the people in our system change by simply stepping into that place of feeling empowered, that I can do this. I can be different. I can show up differently within my relationship and recognize the patterns that I'm repeating from childhood, from the model of love I got growing up and I can use my partner as my greatest healing teacher, as my guide who's showing me where I have room to grow. When we feel defensiveness flare up for the same fight that we're having over and over again. We have the same disagreement. Your partner is wisely clueing you into where your wounds are, and you have healing. And we have to take responsibility for that within ourselves. And hopefully, as we do that, your partner will agree to partner with that because co-regulation is super powerful.

It's a super powerful way to learn, but you can take ownership of that yourself and without anybody else having to agree to do it. You can own that.

If I divorced a long-term partner who helped me heal and become conscious, am I likely to seek a different partner to heal with area? Yes, that's such a good question. I love that. Yes. Oftentimes we will continue fine-tuning our healing and seeking partners. We can also be re-wounded. So, if you're within a relationship and you've done a lot of healing, you've healed with them. But the rupture of that relationship and losing that relationship has kind of re-wounded you or has wounded you in this new way, you might also seek a partner who will help repair that wound. And that happens a lot for survivors of sexual assault in an adult.

Sexual assault represents a significant wound and we often search out partners who will help us heal that wound. So, wounding, uhm, that doesn't necessarily always happen in childhood. Oftentimes our primary model for love comes from childhood, but we've been partnered with multiple people, and we kind of moved into that conscious stage. Absolutely there can be new wounds that come out of that, like the rupturing of that relationship that need to seek and heal too.

Yes, it is so hard when you're triggered and hurt. Yes. It's really learning to practice self-compassion and good, nourishing self-care in order to be able to stay present with that. It's so important.

Let’s see. Mary says when I start holding strong boundaries, my partner got serious about healing himself. Things are very difficult for a while, but so much better now. Healing together is very intimate. You're so right. The intimacy that's generated in that that's where our long-lasting, like the long-born passion, comes from. So many couples who have been married seven or 10, 15 years are wondering where that passion is. When are we going to get that fire back? Where is that spark? That's where it is. This that burn that like long, slow, juicy burn comes from healing together. That's where you'll find it. That's beautiful Mary, thank you for sharing that with us.

And Julie says, how do we start making those changes on your own? Really? It's about heating the call, what your partner is inviting you to heal and grow and change. We're not talking about being a doormat to them. I'm talking about like, you know, when you get triggered, when you're defensive, swell up, looking at those, what is going on for me? What is my soft point? What is my pain point there? What is the deep insecurity I have? What is the truth that I think about myself? What is my deepest fear about myself and my love ability and how is my partner bringing that out in me? And how can I soothe that on my own? How can I know deep down that I am lovable and worthy of love and gentle treatment and compassion by the simple virtue of my humanity? And how can I go about knowing that?

And for me, a big piece of that practice for me is a self-compassion practice, a consistent, gentle, compassionate holding of myself. That's been the most powerful thing that I've been able to do in my own self-healing. When we're talking about co-healing with our partner asking for that and receiving it from my partner. You know, there's this way that I asked him to hold me, he holds me in that way, even sometimes when he doesn't even know why I need it, but when I recognize within myself that I'm needing it, he been able to come to a place where he can kind of put other things aside and hold me in that way so that I can kind of be surrounded by compassion and grace, that's what I need. But figuring that out for yourself is the first place to start.

And so, I think we're going to wrap up now, but I really loved getting to talk with you about this topic and I think I'm going to talk more about it. I love this. And if you have questions and other things you'd like me to talk about or speak to, please never hesitate to send me a message and I will definitely add that to my roster or you know, because this is all about, I'm really looking to serve you. So, if there's things you want me to speak to, please let me know.

Okay, and you guys have a wonderful day. Hold yourselves gently and your partner gently. Impede the call towards healing. Don't just focus on healing your relationship. Heal yourself in the process and this beautiful thing when you aren't managed to do that together. So, send that out to you and I'm going to send you out into the world to go do that for yourselves and for each other.

PART 2

LAURA: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and I'm here with another episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast. And today we have a guest, she's a listener and a client of mine. And she was listening to a video, I think that I did a while back on how and why we choose the romantic partners that we do, the way that who we choose kind of serves us in our own growth and healing. And she had some questions, and she was asking such good questions that I thought maybe you all would be interested in knowing the answers to. So, I invited her on to come and kind of chat about it with me.

So Heidi, why don't you introduce yourself, and yeah, we'll get started.

HEIDI: Sure. My name is Heidi and I've known Laura for a couple of years now and I've listened to her podcast. And I followed her through the University of Wisconsin Madison and a few different occasions. She's made some references to Imago Theory and some of the unconscious reasons we choose our partners. And I was interested in what she had to say about that and interested in her deepening that conversation.

So Laura, can I just start with a general question, why do we choose the partners we choose?

LAURA: Yeah. So, it's interesting. I think we have our conscious reasons why we choose them. The things that like when they ask us, you know, why did they pick us that we would say it louder for talking to our kids. You know that we would be able to pick up on and really kind of articulate well.

But there's these unconscious reasons too, and very often they are partners that they are echoes of the important relationships that we witnessed growing up and experience growing up that our partners kind of hold a mirror to or shine a light on. There are ways that they remind us of what's comfortable. Kind of what we're used to, even if it's we actively want a different relationship than what we saw growing up or you know, what we experience growing up, we still, we only know what we know.

And so, we unconsciously find people who feel comfortable. Some of those patterns aren't really what we want to actively, consciously choose. We find people who feel familiar and in their familiarity, they trigger us. Sometimes they do things that sound just like the way our dad would say it, or just the way parent would say it, or that bring up some of the stories and the narratives that we have from childhood.

And what's beautiful about that is that when we are triggered, every time were triggered, no matter when or where it's happening around what topic, it is always a trigger that is a call to healing. And trigger is a way that our brains work towards our betterment, towards our wholeness. Our partners do this in us. They awaken old wounds. They shine a light on old wounds. And in doing so, they give us the opportunity to heal them too.

HEIDI: So, they're offering kind of like a map that you can use these little signposts? That you can go back to and reflect on childhood wounds and how those relationships may be affecting your adult relationships?

LAURA: Yeah, I mean, and we know that's true, right? So, when we're young kids, the relationship that we have with our parents and the relationship that we witnessed between our parents, if we are growing up in a family that has multiple caregivers, those provide the information. The map that we build for, how we think relationships work is they're called internal working models, and kids are building them all the time and draw conclusions about our worth based on them. We draw conclusions about love based on them.

So, if we see conditional love happening between our parents for example, and we experience conditional love from our parents towards us, then we start to think things like certain behaviors mean that people don't love us. Like one of the classic ones that I have internal working model, a story, a map in my head is that when somebody loves you, they pay attention to the things that you pay attention to. They care about, the things you care about. And if you tell them that you care about something, then they disregarded that means that they don't care about you. So just as an example of my, you know, I care about where things go in our kitchen, like where a spatula goes, where the spoons go, I kind of care about how things are organized because it makes my life easier to find, be able to find them. And when my husband puts things away in the wrong spot, it makes like that the story I start telling myself about that is that he doesn't care about me. If you cared about me, he'd know where they went.

I make a spatula mean something about my relationship, that it doesn't mean at all, and that meaning is all based on what I witnessed growing up and the love stories that I experienced growing up, you know, do you have those too?

HEIDI: I think so, but it's becoming aware of them I think, and making those connections. And then also I think just accepting the idea that what you're drawn to in familiarity sometimes might be negative and you're drawn to that because it feels familiar, even if it is something that creates conflict or even if it's something that leads to misunderstandings, it's still like a familiar space that's hard to process I think,

LAURA: Right. Like why would we seek out something that causes us pain? And so, one on the one thing, even though it's negative, it does feel comfortable. That's what we expect because that's the map that, you know, that was the programming that was uploaded and that's this kid. But it also gives us a window and an opportunity to change it, right? So, it gives us an opportunity to do something different, you know, to recognize, hey, this is a story that probably was never true to begin with, but certainly doesn't have to be true now.

So now, like when I find the spatula in the wrong drawer, I talk to myself about the spatula doesn't mean anything about how my husband feels about me. Spatula being in this door represents that he was taking care of the house and taking care of our family and it's put away, you know, and focusing on that piece of it, that effort of it that really is at the heart of his, you know what he wants to convey when he is putting away the dishes. You know that he's taking care of our home and our family and that is an act of love whether or not the spatula makes it into the right drawer. You know?

HEIDI: When you do something like that, you're reconciling with your husband. But are you also reconciling with your caretaker from where this, this issue originated or is that not necessary? Is that not part of it?

LAURA: Yes, I very much think it's important to recognize that we can't change the past, right? We can't change what happened to us. We can set boundaries in the future. You know, or in the present we can hopefully he'll relationships if we for example, have a strained relationship with our, with our parents. Now we can do that work here in the present. But really what it's doing is about reworking your thoughts and your feelings in the moment so that they are grounded in what is actually true of your relationship.

And so, with this special example, I know it seems superficial, but this is something that we actually went to therapy over, not the spatula specifically, but it's something that we've discussed in therapy several times because it was so meaningful to me. So, part of this is recognizing that I have a faulty story from my childhood growing up. You know, so part of the work of this is reworking that story, rewriting that story, learning to soothe myself and reassure myself and talk back to that story. But the other part of it is it happens in the space between the two people who are in the relationship. So, part of that is explaining why a spatula so meaningful to my husband. I can see the deep hurt and fear that underline it that I witnessed growing up.

My mom do so much and very rarely have my dad respect what she'd done. You know it was very important to her that the house was tidy and he would kind of come in and just like push like put everything everywhere and disregard that and witnessing that. And so explaining that story to him and actively asking him making a change request is what in imago therapy that it's called where you are talking about the story, you're letting them know the story then validate this.

So, when I put the spatula in the wrong drawer it really makes you question, you know, whether I love you and that makes complete sense. That reminds you of what it was like in your house growing up. And it, I mean, and it just makes complete sense that, that you would be worried about that. And then reassure that it doesn't mean what it is and then, then you make a change request.

So, the change request in this scenario for me and my husband was that it would really mean a lot to me that if you don't know where something goes that you leave it in this special spot on the counter and that by leaving it on this special spot on the counter, that is an act of love. Putting it in that spot is like the little spot where he is recognizing in me, the wound in me and meeting that need, that unmet need, in a way that I've requested.

And so, in doing that, by actively meeting my change request, he is showing me that I'm lovable. That his love for me is not in question and you actively start healing that wound you know and so it's not just you who's doing the healing your relationship is allowing the healing to happen when you've got someone who's willing to do that work with you, you know?

So, who's willing to hear your stories, witness them validate them and then make those changes, do their best effort to make those changes. Those change requests and then you swap roles too. So, it's not just, this is never just one-sided, right? So, we might choose the partners who awakened and alert us to old ruins and old stories that need healing and retelling. But they have them too. We’re awakening in them at the same time.

And so, there's this back and forth, this mutual willingness to create a space where healing can happen.

HEIDI: Yeah, it sounds like it requires a lot of vulnerability to a safe space where you can open up and tell a story like you did. And it sounds to me like a very far away from what many couples do in situations like that, which would be like criticize each other and blame each other. This is a totally different way to go at a conflict.

LAURA: Oh, it totally is. But Heidi, I want to make it clear that the conversation I just described between me and my husband was not our natural way of doing this. The natural way would be for me, what would come naturally and unconsciously out of me in those moments would be to say something like, oh my God, how can you not know where this goes? We've lived here for five years. How can you not know where this goes? Like, why do I have to do everything myself? You know, all of those kind of unconscious thoughts and stories would come out.

And what is amazing about this is that I partnered with someone whose dad spoke that way to him when he was a kid. My unconscious words that come out when this wound is activated in me perfectly mirror the same one of his wounds. That fear of not being good enough, you know, that he remembers from his own childhood. Like in those moments when you're unconscious, it's just wounds talking to each other. It's just all those old stories, all those old fears about, you know, for me, like, you know, looking for evidence, that somebody doesn't love me enough and for him, looking for evidence, that he's not good enough.

And, you know, speaking each other's wound language there in those moments, it took help to slow down and it's hard to do in the moment. It's much easier to do outside of the moment and proactively versus in the moment, you're activated in that way. It's very difficult. It takes a lot of self-regulation and practice to come down and say, okay, something old coming up right now. For me this has nothing to do with what's happening in front of us in the moment, you know?

HEIDI: Yeah, so it's about the spatula but it's really not about the spatula.

LAURA: Oh, it's never about the spatula. Sometimes, like there's just like yeah, it would be nice if the spatula was on the right drawer. It's very rarely about the spatula. And I think every couple has their own spatula. You know, whether there's a million different ways, every couple has their own spatulas. And I mean this is something too that research shows that every successful couple has a few things that they are going to consistently disagree on their entire relationship. And it's the way they have those disagreements, not whether or not that disagreement ever gets resolved because we all have perpetual problems that we will disagree on in relationships.

But the way we disagree about it, that's what makes the difference. And what some theories of couples therapy tell you is that by actively choosing new ways to handle those disagreements, you can actually heal deeply ingrained attachment wounds with each other.

HEIDI: And that doesn't take like one conversation, a process over a long period of time.

LAURA: Like if you're lucky, it is a process of our long period of time. So, in Imago theory, there's three stages of a relationship and most couples never make it out of the second stage.

So, there's this first stage where it's super passionate, you're kind of willing to forgive everything. You just lit up and vibrant. And then in the second stage you're coming to realize like, oh, there's all of this stuff under the surface that we fit together like a puzzle piece, and we perfectly trigger each other, that my triggers are built to trigger his triggers, you know. And many couples don't make it out of that stage. They either stagnant there and just decide, you know, just kind of stay distant and not connected and don't do the work, or they separate, and the relationship ends, and they repeat the process again. This is why until you do your own internal work, no matter who you get into a relationship with, most of the time you're going to end up with a very similar person. Because we are called to the people who wake up in us, the parts that need to be healed. Were drawn to them for our higher good for our own healing. We are called to them.

And then until you're ready to do that work, you're going to keep finding the same person over and over again.

HEIDI: You repeat a pattern.

LAURA: Again, it feels familiar, it feels comfortable even if it doesn't feel good, it feels predictable. We, we know what to expect, we know what's going to come up, you know? And it's hard work. The healing can be hard, but it's also good, especially if you have a partner who's willing to do it with you.

HEIDI: And I like what you mentioned earlier, being aware of your wound language. So, it sounds like each couple has their own specific wound language. Is that what you would say?

LAURA: Once you start thinking about how you talk to yourself and the stories that you tell yourself, they're not hard to find, they're pretty easy to find. You know, like even just asking the question of like what am I making this mean? When you feel really angry, really incensed, really upset, really hurt by your partner asking yourself just to slow down for just a second, what am I making this mean? And you just ask yourself and that tells you, you know where we're reacting from. You know? Because oftentimes we have these stories that are deep-rooted in deep wounds, are deep fears about ourselves. And our partners do to.

Just the other day, my husband and I were, I mean, it wasn't really a disagreement. I said something to him, and I had attempted a kind of a like, funny soft start up, you know, to have a like, because there was something I wanted to get. I don't know, I wanted to have a conversation about, and I went for a little bit of levity, like totally flopped. My soft startup did not go well for him, and I could see the defensiveness bristle in him. I just said, I can see that I hurt you somehow. I can see that your defensive and I'm wondering, you know what that meant to you? What I said, you know what did it, what I say said mean to you? And he was able to just go to the story of, you know, you think I'm not a good husband, I'm failing you.

And when you say it out loud, like of course we get defensive, when we have, when we are we realize that we're talking to those deep fears like the fear of failing the person you love most of not being good at one of your core identity pieces, getting it right. Not being lovable, of being unworthy of someone's love. These are the deep fears that are talking, and it makes sense then that we would be defensive and push back against those things. Those are big, you know?

HEIDI: So you empathize with where he's coming from.

LAURA: And the thing is so like in our pattern, because of my skills as a therapist, it's always tricky because then I go with him and then he's feeling better. We never actually got to talk about what I wanted to talk about, you know? And so, I have to be really good at holding that boundary of like, okay, now it's my turn because I have emotional needs, just like he doesn't.

Just because I'm well versed in how to handle them doesn't mean that I don't need the support from…

HEIDI: That's a very important piece of it too, to make sure that both childhood wounds and both partners are asking questions remaining curious about the other.

LAURA: Oh, I love that you brought up curiosity. The curiosity piece I am starting to really think is so much more important than people realize how important it is to just be genuinely curious about your partner. It's hard to get into curiosity when you're feeling criticized or you're feeling defensive and where you have to protect yourself, it's hard to shift into curiosity. But once you do, it opens up a conversation. It makes people feel really safe to be vulnerable. Again, like you said before, the vulnerability piece of it, you have to be willing to be vulnerable with each other. You know?

And sometimes, like, you don't have to do this alone either. It's okay to need support, to need someone to hold the space for you to encourage you to do this work. My husband and I go to a therapist for that because it's too hard sometimes to do, do it on your own. Like to hold these vulnerable spaces a lot, especially when you got two wounded people trying to talk to each other. You know?

HEIDI: I was going to ask, do the wounds ever get healed completely? Is there any resolution that ever feels that was resolved or just get better or worse this time goes on?

LAURA: Well, I think like if you're not doing anything about it, then changed really can't happen. Like you can't just expect like, oh, I know about it now and not going to make any changes and you really can't. You have to actually doing the work.

This spatula example, you know, that we've been talking about, like now when I see a spatula in the wrong space in the house, I just mov it. It means nothing. But that's over years of kind of reconditioning almost. Like lots of self-talk, lots of conversations, lots of seeking reassurance, you know that even if the special is in the wrong door and I like it just seems so like silly to say it out loud. But I mean whatever, we all have our own spatulas. I mean it's conscious effort in restoring what it means too about me and about our relationship when those things happen.

But yes, it absolutely gets better. But it's not without effort. It is definitely effortful.

HEIDI: Okay. So, there's an awareness. It’s kind of the first piece and then the doing something about it, addressing it.

LAURA: Yeah, and it's I mean it's a cycle. So, there's like awareness coming to understand the story, communicating the story to your partner, having it be heard and validated and understood by them, making a change request too where you are asking for them to do something a little bit differently kind of as a gift to you as a part of your own healing process.

So, like I'm going to reassure myself that you're putting the spatula in the wrong spot, doesn't mean anything about how you feel about me, but you're also going to put it on this place of the counters that I can put everything away, you know, like where I wanted to go if you don't know where it goes, you know?

So those change requests are important and then over time the consistent meeting of needs is what changes it, right? So, if we think about this from an attachment perspective, children build secure attachment bond with their caregivers when their caregivers are sensitively attuned to them and are consistently responsive to their needs. You can be well attached and securely attached to a caregiver if they are, you know, if they miss some things, we don't have to be perfect. They do need consistency. You know, we do need to be able to consistently rely on our needs being met.

And so, then when it comes time to change an attachment-based pattern, which is what these all are. They're all patterns that are grounded in the attachment bonds, the attachment style that we have that we built in childhood. Then we need similar consistency. Consistently kind of meet, like meeting of that need up having a partner who's sensitively attuned to our needs and is responsive to our needs and doing that over and over again. That's how thought patterns are. Patterns is through consistency in that way. I don't know if that makes sense.

HEIDI: Yeah, that's just making me think about the idea of changing and when partners ask their partner to change, but your reframe is can you change as a gift to me to help meet my unresolved needs from childhood.

LAURA: Yeah.

HEIDI: Totally, totally different.

LAURA: Absolutely. So, changing as a gift, but it's also mutual. So, like we talked about before that my kind of unconscious reactive mode in this moment also triggered him. He also makes a change request like about this interaction because it's awakening a wound in him too. He made a change request about how I bring like the tone of voice, my posturing, the words I used when I bring those things up. And I make that change as a gift to him and in making us, the two of us making that change together, we work together to heal our own wounds.

So, we are both making the change request. So, before when it's unrecognized, when it's unconscious, we are engaged in a pattern that is confirming wounds and worries and fears about us. And so, when we make these change requests, we are actively subverting those like our behavior towards each other, is confirming each other's narrative and in the process doing the healing. So, we do this together. Like this is not something you can separate from your part. I mean you can do some of this work yourself, but it is far better and far faster to do it with your partner. Because again like this change is happening within the context of an attachment relationship and if we're talking about attachment-based wounds, then the very best place to heal those wounds is in an attachment relationship.

HEIDI: Yeah, that makes sense. It paints a whole new picture of what conflict means and what being triggered means and what happened an argument with your partner means. You're saying this is an opportunity to discover more about yourself and to reconnect with your partner in a different and deeper way.

LAURA: Absolutely. That's how all conflict is an opportunity to connect and deepen a relationship, deepen our understanding. It's all conflict as an opportunity to be more compassionate and empathetic with the people that we love. All conflict is and if we can shift to seeing that way, we bring an energy kind of in a tone to it. That's so different.

So when my husband and I find a place where we are puzzle pieces together, like we, you know it's funny when we were first dating we felt like we were perfect compliments to each other and we describe each other as that we were puzzle pieces. You know that we fit together like the things that I was good at, you know and the things that he was good at, like we just fit so perfectly together.

And like as things got harder and we kind of came out of that first stage and we're in the second stage we realize like the things that are triggering in you are also triggering in me and like we again, we fit together in this beautiful, perfect puzzle piece way and there was resistance to that, like why can't like why can't it be easier? Why can't it be like it was before? And it can be on the other side of the work, right?

So, if you are doing that work and I don't know, so like when we find a new place where we fit together, where my story so perfectly matches his story and his story so perfectly brings out my story and mine brings out his, we're like, oh man, there's another place. Good. And we feel excited about it.

I mean maybe he doesn't [laugh] he’s so conflicted by it. But I feel excited about it because I'm going to get to know him and I'm going to get to peel something in me and that, just that's going to be better for everybody.

HEIDI: Would you say that you are at the stage three to go back to the stage two? Do you reminisce about the stage one, or is that the, that you've arrived at the… the stage three destination?

I think we're in stage three now because stage two is very, there's a lot of despair there, there's a lot of like, this is not going to work, you know? So we’re not there anymore, and that's good, but it's important to know that all couples have to go through that stage. You have to understand that struggle. That feeling of not working is what tells you okay, now you're ready. And you just have to heed the call to it. You just have to be willing to kind of as would say, you have to be willing to step into the arena together, you know, and do that work because there's something beautiful and deeper on the other side of it.

And that's not to say that, you know, couples can stay in stage two and be fine. You know, they can suppress their feelings and feel disconnected or like that their partner is never really going to understand them and learn to be okay with that. But I don't know, I don't know about you Heidi, but that's not what I want out of my marriage. I want more.

HEIDI: Right.

LAURA: Yeah.

HEIDI: Yeah, absolutely.

LAURA: Yeah. Well Heidi thank you so much for asking these good questions. I really hope that this conversation was helpful both for you and for the listeners today. I really appreciate you being here to help me kind of dig into these topics.

HEIDI: Yeah, no problem at all. And thank you for being a resource for many of your listeners, including myself and sharing your information you have but also your personal stories in such an open and vulnerable way. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.

LAURA: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that means a lot to me. I hope that everybody listening knows that I am imperfect and learning being right alongside all of you and I'm so glad that we get to do this together, this growing up and showing up together.

HEIDI: Yeah, thank you.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.

Laura Froyen, PhD

Laura Froyen, PhD

Balanced Parent Podcast

Laura Froyen, PhD

Welcome to the home of The Balanced Parent Podcast!

Episode 68: Why We Choose Our Partners & How to Engage in Mutual Healing with Heidi Biancat