Relational Safety and Repair: Moving from Dysregulation to Connection

What does it actually take to move from dysregulation to connection, especially in the moments when repair feels hardest to reach?

In this episode, I expand the conversation on relational repair by exploring what happens when conflict is more intense, reactive, and harder to navigate. While repair may feel more accessible in lower-stress moments, it becomes more complex when nervous systems are activated and safety feels out of reach.

Building on previous episodes on intention, impact, rupture, and repair, this conversation widens the lens to a deeper truth: repair is not one-size-fits-all. It exists on a spectrum, and the path back to connection depends on the level of dysregulation, the depth of impact, and how much safety is available.

Through both personal and professional reflection, including my relationship with my husband Ben, I explore how disconnection can become entrenched when partners are stuck in self-protection and how repair becomes possible as we slow down, regulate, and co-create safety.

Through an Imago and nervous-system-informed lens, this episode centers a key shift: repair is not about proving who is right or wrong, assigning blame, or fixing a moment. The deeper work is restoring relational safety, creating the conditions that allow two nervous systems to move out of protection and back toward connection.

We also explore how safety is not something one person can give or demand, but something built through awareness, accountability, boundaries, and ongoing relational effort.

At its core, this episode invites you to understand repair as a process of movement, from dysregulation to connection, one that may require time, space, and deeper work, especially in moments of higher activation.

In this episode, we explore:

• What it means to move from dysregulation to connection in real-life relationships
• The difference between low, moderate, and high dysregulation
• Why repair is not always immediate
• How nervous system activation can make repair feel unsafe
• Why defensiveness, shutdown, or reactivity are forms of protection
• How disconnection patterns build when partners are stuck in self-protection
• Why relational safety is the foundation for reconnection
• How boundaries support regulation and safety rather than rejection
• The shift from individual ethics to relational ethics
• Why both partners are responsible — but not always at the same time or in the same way
• How capacity impacts who can move toward reconnection
• The role of personal responsibility and inner work in breaking patterns
• Why unresolved patterns often repeat without awareness
• How meaningful repair supports healing of past wounds
• What it means for partners to become a resource for each other
• How repair becomes more accessible as safety is built

This episode brings the series on rupture and repair to a close by expanding the conversation into more complex relational dynamics. It highlights that repair is not always quick or easy, and that moving from dysregulation back into connection depends on enough safety to turn toward one another. Over time, as safety is co-created and reinforced, that movement becomes more possible, consistent, and meaningful. 

If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat! 

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Transcript

Welcome And Series Context

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Hello and welcome to the When Depression is in Your Bed podcast. Over the past few episodes, I've been talking about rupture and repair. What happens when people hurt each other, even when they don't mean to, and why repair has so much to do with what truly shapes the health of a relationship. As we begin to close out this series, I want to widen the lens a little bit because repair isn't always so simple. It's certainly not a one-size fits-all. And it doesn't always happen in the moment, especially when nervous systems are very dysregulated and safety just doesn't feel accessible. So today I'm going to take a deeper dive into repair in real life and think about how to make repair possible, even in the moments of life when it seems the hardest to reach. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. I want to wrap up what has become a series on relational repair by expanding the conversation a bit. Up until now, I've been talking about and using examples of situations where the person didn't intend to be hurtful, but the impact of what happened landed in a hurtful way. For example, I talked about a situation where my son pushed behind his sister's chair trying to get out of the kitchen table and accidentally hurt her. And Ben and I had a complete imago intentional dialogue in which we both expressed our own experience and intentions and gained more awareness of the impact that we had on one another in that particular circumstance. And in those examples, the level of our nervous system dysregulation was relatively low. Repair in those situations can often feel more clear, more straightforward, and can often happen more quickly. However, I'm fully aware that that is not always the case. There are plenty of situations where one or both partners, or in the case with my son, siblings, or even parent-child, where one or both people are more activated, more dysregulated, less able to find their ground, and therefore acting in more reactive ways. What if, for example, my son and my daughter had gotten in an argument at the table, and that is why he got up, and when he got up from the table in anger, he pushed the chair in frustration and still, though not intending to hurt his sister, had acted from a place where he didn't have clarity to be able to think about his potential impact and what pushing the chair in such an aggressive way might do. Or in my relationship and the example that had come up through the dialogue that I had with Ben, if I was more dysregulated, perhaps I would have been more directly insulting or critical of Ben. Or perhaps if he had been more dysregulated, he may have acted out in a more physically aggressive way himself. With more dysregulation, we're often looking at greater reactivity, lesser awareness of your impact or the potential consequences of what your action or behavior may have. And we are often looking at a very different type of overall experience and a different level of rupture and repair. Now, before I go any further, I want to be very clear about this. In today's episode, I'm not talking at all about anything that could be considered domestic violence or coercive control or instrumental violence, where violence is used as a power tactic. That is not what I'm discussing at all. And those kinds of situations are very important to acknowledge. I myself am not an expert on domestic violence. And so I'm not going to speak to those circumstances, but I do want to say that if you or someone that you know is involved in such a situation or you're worried somebody might be involved in that kind of situation, or you yourself are needing help, I highly recommend going to get support because support is absolutely needed. And in the US, you can contact something like the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE. And internationally, you can look for resources that speak specifically to those kinds of situations so that you can get the help and support that you need to ensure your physical and emotional safety and well-being. What I'm talking about today are circumstances where one or both partners experience moderate to even severe or high levels of dysregulation, but there is not the same abuse of power. And both partners want to still remain in the relationship and figure out how to work together in partnership, even if they're not quite sure how to do that, or even if they don't know if it's possible. It's very important to understand that conflict, rupture, repair, it's not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. All of that exists on a spectrum. And to really figure out how to make an appropriate repair for a particular conflict and level of rupture, you have to be aware of a variety of different things and look at one's level of dysregulation or activation, the level of impact and the level of safety that was accessible in the moment, and also what made it feel like safety was not accessible in that moment. And as I referenced earlier, when there's low activation or relatively low impact, you potentially may be able to make a quicker repair. If there's moderate dysregulation, before you can even initiate a repair, both partners need to make sure that they're in a state of more grounded regulation so that they can move forward with the repair process. And in instances of higher dysregulation, repair may not happen right away. It also may not even happen for a very long stretch. And what repair looks like and means might be much more complex. There will probably be behavior changes that are necessary, some inner work for probably both partners to understand what's really happening, an understanding of what healthier boundaries may be for the couple, and even maybe redefining what their boundaries are relationally with each other, and sometimes outside support, like a therapist or a coach, so that you can get the skills that you need for communication and for the repair process, and also sometimes to deal with deeper trauma. And all of this can certainly take time and effort and may not be a linear process. I can tell you for Ben and I, we have gone through this for many years, and I think that we're certainly at a much better place in our repair and rupture looks very, very different than what it was years ago. But especially when deep depression or high anxiety came into play, and that was very present for us for a lot of our relationship, there was a high level of dysregulation involved. It was not so quick and easy to make repair, even to really understand what was leading to the ruptures in a really deep way that allowed us to heal the underlying and often unconscious pieces so that we can actually move to a place where we are able to come back together and create enough safety in ourselves that we could bring a greater level of safety to our relationship. So it's very important to know that what works in a lower activation or a lower level of dysregulation is probably not going to be the exact same fit or the exact same process for something that is occurring at a higher level of dysregulation. And again, for people like myself and for Ben, our nervous systems are relatively quick to go to a higher level of dysregulation because our history, and also I would add my neurodivergence and probably Ben's as well, leads us to interpreting situations in a way where we often have a lot of cues of danger and we can go into overwhelm really quickly, which can create higher levels of dysregulation. And repair has absolutely not been something that was immediately available to us for many years. And although, like I said, and I've been talking about in the last few episodes, that has shifted enormously over the last several years. There were many situations that went quote unquote unresolved for sometimes years. And that certainly was hard because I felt like we weren't addressing things and we were stuck in a cycle. But in reality, we were both trying to do our work and we were kind of, I think of it as building our relational repair muscles to be able to do the heavy lifting that was required for some of our deeper and more challenging patterns. But we were both always committed to that process. So, no, depending on where you are in your process, this might not be something that comes off so clean and effective in your first go-around or your first attempt at repair. Because as I've been talking about, in order for true relational repair to happen, safety needs to be present. And when there's a high level of dysregulation, often because nervous systems are communicating with one another, if one person is experiencing a high level of dysregulation, then the other person is likely to also go into their own self-protective mode because it doesn't feel like there's safety available for either a partner. If you think of the space between them, it feels really dangerous. And then again, that has certainly been the experience that Ben and I have had. And so to begin this process, to think about how to slow yourself down in those situations. And I've mentioned this before several times. And I think that this is one of my key approaches to dealing with depression and dysregulation and challenging circumstances in my life, I think about how do I not make this worse before I can think about how do I make this better. Because sometimes the answers to how do I make this better, how do I feel better? What do I want? What would repair even look like to me? How would I make this better for Ben and I? What would this look like if this was going more the way I wanted it to go? Sometimes I've had no idea. And that felt overwhelming and bad too. So to be able to slow things down so that you're not adding to the rupture, because then of course, then you're adding to the repair process, or it feels like you're adding to the repair process that there's so much conflict, there's so much rupture, there's so much pain and hurt that's unresolved that eventually sometimes it can feel like I don't even know how to move forward from this. And I know a lot of couples that I've worked with have felt that way, and I certainly myself can identify with that feeling. And in my own experience, looking back, I see how our nervous systems, Ben and I, got into such deep levels of dysregulation and we're just trying to protect themselves. And oftentimes when we protect ourselves out of biological necessity, we're not thinking about the relationship or reaching out, certainly often not thinking about making repair because it's the relationship itself that feels threatening or scary. So to self-protect, we move away from the relationship. And we're not thinking necessarily or even biologically able to think, how do we make this better? How do we reconnect? We're just thinking, how do I survive this? And the process, if you can start to really understand it and see it, even if you can't quite intervene or do something differently yet, if you can start to build awareness about what's actually happening, then the conversations can start to shift and change as well. And we can start to move away from blame and shame and criticism and judgment into a place of understanding and compassion, both for yourself and for your partner. But if you're stuck in that dance of dysregulation, again, the idea of moving towards relationship doesn't feel safe. And so it's really no wonder why you can get stuck in that pattern. And again, looking back, Ben and I have absolutely stuck in that pattern of not being able to make deep and meaningful repair because we were both in self-protective modes. And I've also been referencing this, and I just want to pull it in because I think it's incredibly important. And I also think it's something that is also significantly different when you do think about situations of instrumental violence or domestic violence, something that makes these kinds of exchanges, which can be very painful and can be experienced as abusive. There's been certainly times in my history with Ben where things looking back, I've been like, wow, was this emotional abuse? And those weren't situations where Ben was trying to exert power over me, but it was actually situations where he was so highly dysregulated and trying to protect himself and what he was doing to try to take care of himself was really hurting himself, but also hurting me. And it wasn't safe for either of us. And we both contributed to those dynamics, often getting worse and more dysregulated rather than them getting better. But for me, what separates our experience out from many other situations is that we were both coming to the table together, realizing we need to figure this out. Even though I certainly had plenty of years blaming Ben, I also was at the same time looking at myself and doing my own therapy and doing my own work. Both of us felt a sense of accountability and responsibility when it came to taking care of ourselves, repairing ourselves, doing our work and taking care of the relationship together. It didn't always look 50-50 by any stretch. In different moments, we both had different levels of capacity. And at this point in our relationship, Ben's capacity sometimes far outweighs my own capacity. And sometimes I'll be like, I can't handle this right now. I can't come to this conversation right now. I'm feeling overwhelmed. And he's grown into a place of being able to step up and create a container for my emotions or really come to me with a high level of empathy and understanding, giving me the space that I need, or taking a first step towards offering a dialogue or asking if I want to reconnect. And so it's really been a lovely shift to see, I have to say, over these years, because there certainly was an experience of me feeling overly responsible for many years and me experiencing him as having a sense of under responsibility. But all of that also was very deeply tied up in dysregulation. Because when you're really dysregulated, certainly if you're depressed and you're immobilized, you're not in a physical and biological place to be able to take action, certainly not to take care of your relationship, but also not to take care of yourself. And if you're stuck in that sympathetic charge, a lot of anxiety, a lot of anger, a lot of overwhelm, a lot of chaos, you're also not taking very good care of yourself. And so you're not really available to take good care of your relationship and make the repairs necessary. However, if you think about repair as a shared process and you think about this relationally, then you can start to move towards who has capacity to take a step towards reconnection. And I think that that's a really helpful thing. And again, I will say that there were many years where I felt like I was overdoing. And I think what's key here, just one piece that I'll mention, is that if you're taking a step towards reconnection, but you're also feeling resentment about it, then that's a time to think about how to do it differently. And I that's a whole episode. I'm sure I've touched on some of these concepts before in the podcast as well. But I just want to say if you're feeling like you're always the one taking the step towards repair or towards helping your partner, supporting your partner or supporting the relationship, then you're actually probably adding to the side of the scale that's cues of danger for you because feeling resentment towards your relationship is really not going to support you in taking care of you or your relationship. So again, another branch of this very important topic. But if you are in a headspace and your nervous system is in a grounded, safe enough place and you can say, okay, I actually have capacity to take a step towards repair or reconnection, then by all means, I highly recommend you do. If that's something that feels like it makes sense to you in the moment and you're not feeling angry or resentful about it. I also want to touch on something that I think is a really important shift that I would say is necessary. Other people might not agree, but from my perspective, I see it as a necessary shift to make in order to really be able to have true, meaningful relational repair. And that is a shift on a concept of individual ethics to a perspective of relational ethics. And again, this is also probably well worth its own episode, but it's something that I see frequently and experience myself, specifically when it came to me being in individual therapy versus my experience in couples therapy. And then as a couples therapist working with a couple as my client, knowing one or both partners might be doing their own individual therapy with another therapist outside of our relationship. Because sometimes individual ethics and relational ethics can conflict. And I think that they are important to at least mention for today in thinking about repair. Because when it comes to personal ethics, there's often a strong sense of boundaries and what is right and what is wrong and who is at fault. And I'll just talk about my own self and individual therapy. Before Ben and I got separated, I was with a therapist who I think was an excellent therapist and we did a lot of great work together. But at that particular point in time, I was doing so much to support Ben in his depression or anxiety, or at least I thought I was doing so much. And the feedback I was getting in therapy, or at least what I was taking away from my therapeutic experience, was that I was, in fact, putting in so much time and effort and care into my relationship. And I wouldn't say that I was being praised for doing that level of work, but I felt validated in that experience of like, yeah, I'm trying so hard. I'm doing so much for this relationship. And it was a very black or white individualistic perspective. And again, I think my therapist at the time was wonderful. And it's not a knock on her as a therapist. It's actually more reflective, I think, of the fact that I think that a lot of therapy tends to be individualistic as opposed to relational. And that's why I'm mentioning this incredibly important shift. Because had I been in couples therapy and talking about some of these same things, which at different points in our life, Ben and I certainly have been in that experience. And that's how I know for comparison, I would have been able to get a lot more information about his experience. And I would have had a deeper understanding of how what I thought was helpful was not always landing as helpful for him. And again, eventually I came to have a much deeper understanding of that through our couples' work after we were separated in Imago relationship therapy work, where I started to really understand my role and responsibility in a very different way. And looking back, I started to realize how my own boundary setting of what is okay and what's not okay, and the situations and circumstances that landed as hurts for me, and me needing repair about them and me wanting Ben to understand what the problem was from my perspective, all of that often came with a huge amount of judgment and criticism. That created more threat and more of a lack of safety, which created more rupture and more need for repair from me that I wasn't even seeing. I felt so completely justified in having my needs met and having my hurts repaired and having him have empathy for me. And I wasn't wrong to want those things, just to be very clear. Of course, my needs mattered, and of course, repair needed to happen for circumstances that transpired between the two of us. And of course, all of that was important. However, the way I was going about it was often from this individualistic stance that I took and unintentionally that came with messages of my needs mattered more than his. And it was only when we did relational couples' work that I started to understand this dynamic and really deeply understand the shift that needed to happen. And before the last several podcast episodes about repair, I also was talking about what it means to be a relational. And so this very much goes along with all of that. And it's a core piece in Amago work, and it's certainly a core foundational piece of how I work, both personally, how I work in my life and how I work with Ben and our relationship and how I try to support my family as well. And of course, also how I work as a therapist and as a coach and how I move in the world in general. And it's something that I'm always working on. I've been raised in this system that is highly individualistic. And so the system and being an individual and fighting for my needs is also part of me. And so it's certainly a level of ongoing work to be able to shift this. But it's something that I truly believe in and feel much more aligned with. And that's because I've gotten so much more value, so much more growth, so much more healing and so much more connection and more of what I wanted in general by thinking about what happened between Ben and I. What hurts did I have and what hurts did he experience? And what do we both need to be able to return to experience safety within ourselves and also safety and reconnection in the relationship? And that has just been a far more powerful experience for me to think about what we need and what the relationship needs. And again, not blurring our identity and experience as individuals, but being individual in relationship, where we shape the relationship, and the relationship also shapes us, has been a much more profound experience. And that's why I take this position. It allows everyone to be heard and it creates the environment where individual and relational growth is possible. And that has been my personal and professional experience. Because as I've been saying, repair is so much more than just saying sorry. It's truly about co-creating enough safety that both partners can come back into connection with one another. And it's not something that you can give or make happen for somebody else. It's not something that you can demand or feel entitled about getting from somebody else. It's really something that must be, again, co-created and built together. And I mentioned boundaries earlier in the conversation. And I wanted to circle back to that idea because I think that boundaries are something that can be complicated, maybe overly complicated. And I think that there's a lot of misinformation about boundaries out there, certainly on social media. And if you think about it in terms of individual ethics versus relational ethics, I think that there's a lot about the idea of boundaries under what I would say the umbrella of individualistic ethics that often are really unhelpful because those boundaries can be very one-sided. They could be punishing, rejecting, shaming, and they don't necessarily always work for the relationship. Whereas boundaries, which are important, of course, people should not have experiences that don't feel comfortable and authentic to them and safe to them. Obviously, I'm not saying boundaries are not important, but I think that there's a shift in thinking about boundaries in a way that is really helpful and supportive of the relational process and also supportive of the growth process for individuals, because I think that boundary setting done well, which again, I think this is the third time I'm saying this in this episode, but really important for another episode. Perhaps I'll take that on in the future about healthy boundaries in a larger conversation. But just for today, to think about how boundaries can support nervous system regulation for both partners. And just as an example, I can tell you there have been situations in the last few years where Ben was dealing with an extremely high level of anxiety and I can see he was suffering. And I also knew that there was sort of a line for me of, okay, I can support him as long as I feel safe enough to support him. So if he was feeling anxious, I could be present with him and hold space. However, if he got scary, if he had gone to, as I mentioned before, like physical expressions of anger or frustration or anxiety, like throwing things or punching things or yelling or screaming or insulting or something like that, there was a line for me of like, okay, if you're anxious, I can support you. If you're scary, I can't support you anymore. And that was a boundary that I was able to communicate to him, like, hey, I want to support you through this. And here's where I can support you until because then there's a point where I don't feel safe and I can't support you. And it's been incredibly valuable because it's given him the message that I intended. It was a much stronger conscious alignment of what I intended to have happen and what actually happened, because I wanted to convey to him, I want to support you through this. I just also don't want to feel scared myself. And he was able to hear that even under pretty severe anxiety. So this shift of thinking about boundaries of how to create relational safety for both partners and as a way to support growth and stretching, where in years past, Ben's anxiety may have crossed the threshold into a more rageful place. In these instances where I was able to send this message to him in a clear way and set this boundary with love, he was able to respond and actually call on his own level of self-regulation, his own tools to take care of himself in a way that allowed us to stay in connection in a way that was safer for both of us. And repair still needed to happen to some degree afterwards, but it was so much easier to return back to that place because I could see his effort. I could see that he was trying to take care of himself. I could see that he was suffering and struggling. And I understood. That and I knew that that's what was happening for him. And we were able to have both an experience of meaningful, deep repair as well as an experience of celebration of looking at how much growth has occurred individually in both of us and how we both came to the situation differently, and also relationally how we were able to interact far differently than we had in years prior. And I also want to say here that deep, meaningful repair goes so far beyond just the present situation. Deep, meaningful, connected repair in relationship where both partners can feel safe to express themselves and be heard and be valued and reestablish that experience of connection. That is such deep work because it also is healing of past hurts and things that may very well be unconscious, or if you've done therapy or other healing work, perhaps you're more conscious of some of your past hurts and patterns. But relational repair can serve to support that kind of work as well. And I think that is really, in fact, what happens because while we can't go back, there's no time machine that can go back and fix things that either happened earlier in your intimate partner relationship or back to your childhood. We can't go back and change these things. However, in the present moment when we have true relational repair, these things can be healed in our brains, in our nervous systems, in our lives, and we can become more and more of the people that we're meant to be. And it's really a process of reclamation, of reclaiming all of who we were born to be and be able to show up in relationships that are more connected and more meaningful and more satisfying. And that certainly has been my experience of Ben over all of these years. And in thinking about the idea of unconscious hurts or old unconscious patterns, it's important to note, and I've said this many times before, that it certainly can be an excellent choice for someone to leave a relationship. And sometimes that's absolutely the best thing to do. Only you can make a decision about what makes sense for you. And I support anybody who decides that that is the best decision for them. However, in truth, if you make that decision to end a relationship and then you don't do any of your own inner work and deal with this unconscious stuff, these old patterns, these old hurts, and how our nervous system was shaped earlier in our lives or in our more recent lives, and more recent relationships, certainly that our nervous system is being shaped on an ongoing and continuous way. But if we don't see how we've been kind of bumped and bruised along the way and we don't heal that, then we are likely to find ourselves in relationships where the same kinds of conflict or dysregulation or challenge with repair comes up again and again. So while I support people making the choice to leave a relationship, I also want to highlight the importance of doing your own inner work and growing through relationship, perhaps your current relationship, perhaps your next relationship or another future relationship. But relational repair is necessary for profound and deep healing work individually and relationally to occur. And whether it's in this relationship or any other relationship that you have, when you're in a place where you and your partner, or again, this could be you and your parent, your child, your coworker, your friend, it could be anyone, but for intimate partner relationship, particularly, when you think about really deep, meaningful repair at its best, so to speak, you see two partners who are equals in the fact that they're both adults. So this does change a little bit with children and parents. But if you see two partners who are able to come together consciously by choice, because that's what they wanted to do. And again, no power dynamics that I'm talking about here. But when you have this experience where two people choose to come together in repair, it can be so meaningful and so profound. And each partner can show up as a resource for themselves and for their relationship. And this is truly an incredible shift. It is in some ways, I think maybe the opposite or the evolution from helplessness to being a resource. Because for me, that that's from totally disempowered to empowering yourself to be able to take a step towards creating the experience that you want to have. And the more you're able to show up as a resource, and if your partner can also show up as a resource and you start to create this experience, this healing, this growth, then that starts to really manifest in very physical, tangible, concrete ways that you can observe and see and touch and feel. And that experience then supports further repair because the relationship starts to feel safer and safer. And you're more motivated to repair when things feel disconnected because you're like, oh, I know what this good, close, connected, safe feeling feels like. And if I'm not feeling that right now, I don't want to lose that. So I'm gonna do what I need to do to be able to get back to that. And hopefully your partner feels the same way. And then you can come back together in partnership. And that again has certainly been the experience that Ben and I have been growing into over these last several years. And I'm so incredibly grateful that that has been our experience and that I've seen some of these really significant shifts happen for us. And of course, it's why I do this podcast because I want to support people like you being able to experience these shifts as well without pressure or a supposed to or a have to or a should or requirement or thinking that what works exactly for one person works for everybody, because there is, like I said, no one size fits all approach to this. But if you understand the power of repair and the importance of repair and how to do it, and if you can start to understand how the nervous system plays into this, that we're all just trying to feel safe. And the story I tell myself is that most people want themselves to feel safe and they also want their partners to feel safe. And if something's getting in the way of that happening, then that means something. And that's where repair can start. And that's where conversations about repair can start. What do you need for safety? What do I need for safety? How can we go about figuring out how to make this happen more and more often? So, in closing, as I mentioned earlier, repair is not just about fixing the current circumstance or whatever the present moment hurt may be. It's about creating something so much deeper and ultimately creating a relationship where safety can be restored again and again and again because conflict and rupture are inevitable and they're actually important. And if we're scared of conflict and rupture, then we often don't get to experience all the benefits of true repair. And if we know that repair requires safety and safety is something that is co-created, then over time we can make the conscious choice with our partners to come back to our relationship imperfectly as we are, sometimes inconsistently, but still knowing that we have the power to make choices, to be able to come back into connection time and time again, and that we start to reestablish that being in relationship can feel safe. And that is what truly deepens relationships and connections and helps them feel meaningful and allows us to continue to create the environment where even more growth and healing and joy is possible. As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments because I want to thank you for showing up today. And I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey. In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be, the path may seem long or unclear or unknown. And I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride. And that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one. Any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action or towards rest or connection or self-care or whatever step makes sense to you. I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trish.sanders.lcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes, and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.