Resources

Like other relationship difficulties, a breach of trust is an opportunity for personal growth. Take the chance to re-evaluate what kind of person you’re in a relationship with, and how good you are at determining how trustworthy they are. In the end, it’s more important to trust yourself than it is to trust your partner.

Kate had a clear memory of her father's actions, but not of his internal state. Her little-girl brain had constructed a world where her father was not responsible for his own behavior, didn't know what he was doing, and was unaware of the consequences of his actions. None of this was true, but it is the way abused children see the world. When Kate reprocessed the memory with her adult brain, she was able to create a clear reconstruction of what role her father had actually played.

We don’t get the sudden ability to manage our own emotionality just because we had a kid. Parenting pushes us to become more capable of emotional regulation. Our children will always operate at a fraction of our won emotional skill level. It’s unreasonable to expect any child to exceed their parent’s emotional maturity, but that is exactly what we do when we ask our children to regulate their emotions more skillfully than we do ourselves.

Infants use intense emotional expression (crying) to get their needs met. As adults we often resort to the same strategy: using emotional intensity to manipulate others. This behavior is instinctive and hard to grow out of.

Healthy conflict is good for relationships, and most relationships actually need more conflict, not less. We avoid conflict because we are afraid of upsetting each other, but the conflict ends up happening anyway, in more harmful ways. Here are seven examples of healthy relationship conflict:

Once you have identified what you feel in your body, practice directing a string of acceptance, kindness, and love to that uncomfortable sensation. This is a counter-instinctive practice because we learned early in childhood to distract, dissociate, or tune out uncomfortable sensations in the body. As adults, our capacity for feeling intense sensations is much greater than what it was when we were children, but we still distract and dissociate because that is what we are used to doing.