Healing in relationship
Have you ever felt like you’re making real progress on your healing journey, feeling calmer, clearer, more together, only to find yourself completely triggered when you enter into a new relationship? You’re not alone.
Relationships have a way of both inspiring us and unwravelling us. They activate old patterns, trigger pain we thought we’d outgrown, and uncover emotions we thought we’d processed long ago. We can spiral back into old defences and start to question the other person’s love, sometimes instead of looking where we really need to, into ourselves.
This is where most of us begin to distance. Each small inner resentment, shame, or shutdown creates a greater gap. It feels like the relationship is shrinking instead of growing.
The good news is although we were wounded in relationship, we also heal in relationship. Our partnerships aren’t obstacles to growth, they’re actually where the deepest growth and transformation can happen.
Much of our wounding happens in our earliest relationships through neglect, rejection, criticism, betrayal, or conditional love. Our nervous system learns to protect us by building patterns like people-pleasing, withdrawing, controlling, or shutting down. When we start doing inner therapeutic work, we begin to recognise and soften these patterns.
On our own, it can feel like real progress: we’re more self-aware, less reactive, more compassionate with ourselves. Then a new relationship begins, and suddenly all the old triggers come rushing back.
When connection feels insecure, we feel triggered, and often revert to the strategies that once kept us safe. Ways of being that softened the inner pain, like distance, shutdown, scrabbling for affection, anger or blame.
The beautiful gift here, if we can see it, is that we’re being shown the parts of ourselves where we still don’t feel seen, loved, safe or valued. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also sacred information. Without these relational triggers, we might never access those deeper parts of ourselves in need of healing.
Of course, it can be rare to meet someone with the depth of awareness not to take our reactions personally. Someone safe, grounded, and secure enough in themselves to walk alongside us through the messy parts. But when you do find that person, or become that person for someone else, the growth and healing accelerates in ways solo work never could.
A post-therapeutic relationship is a wonderful thing. And the real beauty is you can have one of these with your current partner. As long as you’re both willing to look in the same direction (inwards), and hold space for each other to grow, healing isn’t just possible but inevitable.
