Your relational brain is the part of your brain that is designed to help you have healthy relationships with other people.

When your relational brain is online, you care about your partner, and you also care about yourself. You’re less likely to do or say something that makes your partner uncomfortable, unless you have a really good reason to do so. 

Your relational brain sees your partner as a living, breathing, human being, just like you. It sees their love, their passion, their sadness, their longing. 

The two halves of the human brain are physically separate from each other, except for a connecting organ that is about one inch in diameter. Each half responds to the world in its own way:

Relationships are full of self-reinforcing dynamics. Each partner shows up in a way that makes it easy for the other to show up in the complementary way. 

You get to choose how far you move into each dynamic. When you move toward the center, you make it easier for your partner to do  the same. When you move away from the center, you make it easier for your partner to do the same.

The solution to these dynamics is for one person to take a step away from their instinctive behavior, and toward the center. 

Most of these dynamics show up, to varying degrees, in most relationships. 

A child’s brain has a safety filter that prevents the child from clearly seeing the worst things the parents parents are doing

We still learn to replicate those things, but we remain blind to them unless we do something about the filter. 

When you were young, your brain was hard-wired to seek connection and care from an adult. For most of us, it was one or both of our parents. As you grew, your brain learned a lot from your parents, or whoever it was who filled that role in your life. You learned about what it means to care for a person, how to get what you want, and what to do when you don’t get what you want. These were life-and-death lessons at the time. You needed someone to look after you, because you weren’t equipped to survive on your own. You also needed someone to teach you how to handle adult relationships and responsibilities.