How To Actually Heal Through Relationships

What if the very thing you want to fix about your partner is actually the thing you're meant to heal in yourself?

What if the urge to control, fix, or chase reassurance from your partner isn't about them at all?

What if your partner isn't the problem, and isn't the solution either, but the mirror?

In this follow-up solo episode, I'm picking up where last week's power struggle episode left off. If that episode helped you understand why the power struggle happens, this one is about what to actually do with it. Because naming the phase isn't enough. The real work is learning how to use the triggers, the activation, and the conflict as a doorway back to your own healing, rather than evidence about your partner or your relationship.

This episode is for you if you listened to last week and thought, okay, but now what? It's also for anyone who finds themselves constantly trying to get their partner to change, to validate them, to text back faster, to be more reassuring, to just be different, so that they can finally feel okay.

I'm walking through the exact reflection process I use with clients to help them metabolize old wounds instead of just managing them, plus a real client story about a "not enough" wound that almost convinced her to leave the right relationship.

In this episode:

• Why this episode focuses on your individual healing, not on changing the dynamic with your partner
• The U-turn back to self: what it actually means to stop outsourcing your safety to someone else
• Why relationships don't heal us by touching our wounds, they heal us by revealing them
• How to tell the difference between your old wounding and a partner who genuinely isn't showing up for you
• A real client story: the "not enough" wound that almost ended the right relationship
• The fork in the road: what happens when you project a trigger outward versus turn it inward
• Six reflection questions to find the root of any trigger, from body sensation to the belief underneath it
• Why metabolizing an emotion is different from managing it, and why healing isn't about making the feeling go away

Key takeaways:

• Not every trigger is about your partner, but not every trigger is only about your past either. Discernment requires doing your own work first
• You can't accurately assess your relationship from an activated, younger part of yourself
• Healing happens by feeling, not by avoiding. The goal isn't a calm nervous system, it's a flexible one
• Every defense mechanism, blame, control, scrolling, reassurance-seeking, is an attempt to avoid feeling something underneath it
• The goal isn't to stop getting triggered. It's to learn how to meet your triggers differently

Reflection question from this episode: Next time you're triggered, can you find where it lives in your body, and ask what part of you is actually activated before deciding what it means about your relationship?

Connect with Lindsey
www.lindseybournecoaching.com

Waitlist for my mini-course, How to Actually Move Through the Power Struggle https://forms.gle/PifhFf8DxwFSvAv28

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Relational Alchemy, a podcast exploring how the patterns we live out in love, relationships, and everyday life hold the keys to our deepest healing. I'm Lindsay Bourne, a relationship and couples coach, and my hope is that each episode offers you insight, perspective, and a grounded sense of direction for the shifts you're ready to make in your own life and relationships. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Relational Alchemy. Today I am so excited to be doing another solo episode as a sort of follow-up to last week's episode. So last week I released an episode on the power struggle phase of relationships, and I got a lot of really positive feedback on it. I got a lot of people saying it really resonated, it really made them feel seen. It actually made them feel a lot better about their own relationship struggles. And so I wanted to do a part two to that episode. So just as a quick recap of the previous episode, I broke down what the power struggle phase is, why it happens, why we attract who we attract, and that it's actually this beautiful portal for growth and transformation if we know how to use it as such. So the power struggle phase is a super normal phase of relationships. It comes after the honeymoon phase has worn off. This could be six to 12 months in, this could be 18 months in, but really there's no box. So this could really happen anytime. And it's when the relationship starts to get more difficult. So triggers start to emerge, there's a dynamic that starts to form, there's more conflict, or maybe you're getting into the same conflict over and over. And it just starts to get really activating. And it can often feel like wow, what once felt so easeful and so exciting and so just intoxicating now is feeling like a struggle. It's feeling really hard. But this is all happening because it's when our attachment wounds start to surface. So it is not a sign necessarily of incompatibility. It's a sign that the relationship is deepening and you are attaching to your partner. And when you're attaching to your partner, your nervous system gets involved and all of your attachment wounding from your past gets involved. And I'll go into that a little bit more later. But if you haven't listened to last week's episode, I really recommend going back, starting there, and then listening to this as a part two. And so today I really wanted to answer the question: okay, so if the power shovel is bringing all of this to the surface, now what? How do you actually use the triggers, the activation, the conflict, the emotional intensity to heal and to get to the next phase of the relationship, which is conscious love, which is where, you know, it's not a perfect harmonious phase of the relationship, but you're not kind of stuck in this gridlock dynamic, just triggering each other all the time, conflicting all the time. You have actually used the relationship as a mirror to really face and heal all the unresolved parts and all the unprocessed pain in each of you. And as a quick caveat, this episode is really focused on your individual healing. It's not necessarily on how to navigate specific relationship dynamics with your partner because that's a lot more nuanced and specific. And I'll have to do a whole other episode on that, bringing in some client stories, et cetera. But at the end of the day, your individual healing is really the only thing that is in your control, your experience and your own wounding. We cannot force healing on someone else. We can't do healing work for someone else. It's really your responsibility to use the relationship as a mirror to address what needs to be addressed in you. And I think you'll be amazed that when you do start to do your own work and address your own parts and your unprocessed pain and your attachment wounding, you hopefully will start to see the dynamic between you and your partner shift, especially if they're also doing their own work. But again, the focus is really you. Can you do the you turn back to self? It is the most normal thing in the world when you are activated in relationship to focus on the other person, that they are the source, that they are the ones that are causing all this pain and activation in you. If they could just do this differently, if they could just show up in this way, if they could not do that, then I would feel okay. But what that does is that really puts our sense of okayness or a sense of safety in someone else's hands. So if you could show up in this way, I'll be okay. If you could do this, I'll be okay. First of all, that's control. And second of all, it's outsourcing your safety to someone else. And what we really want to do is can you actually do the you-turn back to self and understand what is so activating in you? What is this touching in you? What is unprocessed in you? And can you do your own work so that you actually don't need your partner to do all these specific things just so you feel okay? So the power struggle isn't asking you to get your partner to stop triggering you, it's inviting you into a different relationship with the part of yourself that's getting triggered in the relationship. So again, it's doing the you-turn back to self and it's allowing the relationship to be a mirror for what is still unresolved in you. Because at the end of the day, when we are wounded in relationships, which we all are at some point in our lives, we heal through relationships and relationships become a mirror. So the opportunity is to allow the relationship to mirror back what is still unresolved in you and then give you the opportunity to heal and grow in a way that will support your experience in the relationship and your experience within intimacy. So most people think that the goal is to find a partner who doesn't trigger them, which isn't possible, or to find someone who finally gives them the thing that they didn't get growing up. So maybe that's reassurance, maybe that's validation, maybe that's consistency, feeling chosen, feeling enough, feeling seen or heard, feeling lovable. The thing that will finally heal all of these unmet emotional needs from childhood in you. But unfortunately, that's not really how healing works. Relationships don't heal us because they never touch our wounds, they heal us because they reveal them. And they are our most potent opportunity to heal our unresolved wounds from our past and especially our attachment wounding. And I have a mentor who always says nervous system healing is attachment wound healing. So if you are having this experience in life where your nervous system is constantly activated, especially in relationships, and this could be romantic or otherwise, then you have unresolved attachment wounding. And actually using your experience in relationships to address this attachment wounding will do so much for your nervous system and aka just your everyday experience. So before we get into it, I just want to share a little bit about the honeymoon illusion. So I talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but I want to say it again. The honeymoon phase temporarily hides our wounds, and the power struggle actually reveals them. So during the honeymoon phase, dopamine is high, differences feel smaller, or they're kind of ignored, needs are being met really consistently, and we feel chosen, we feel seen, we feel loved. And it can often feel like, oh my gosh, I finally found the person who heals everything in me, or heals all these things in me, or who gives me everything I've ever wanted to feel in relationship. And it can be so intoxicating. I so know my own version of this. But then the honeymoon ends, and then there it is again, all your familiar shit. So triggers start to emerge, old fears return, familiar patterns start to surface. And it's because we're actually not meant to outsource our healing to a partner. We can't just expect some partner to magically heal all these things that we haven't healed in ourselves. And we're not meant to heal our wounds in isolation. So relationships become the mirror and have a way of illuminating the places in us that still need attention. The very things that get activated in partnership often point us towards the parts of us that are still carrying pain, fear, shame, grief, or unmet needs. And so I want to say it again. The power struggle doesn't create the wound, it just reveals it. That's why it's such a powerful portal for growth and evolution, because it brings our wounds to the surface to be looked at. So, for example, if you have a core wound around nobody chooses me, in the beginning, it could feel like, oh my gosh, I finally feel chosen, I finally feel so amazing. They are just like the balm to this lifelong wound I had. And then as the honeymoon phase starts to wear off, your partner forgets something, they need to take space, they start prioritizing work more, they stop responding as quickly. And then all of that familiar activation returns. And then you want to make it mean something about your partner. They need to prioritize me more, they need to respond faster, they need to do X, Y, and Z. But it actually isn't about what your partner's doing. It's that these wounds are coming to the surface now because the honeymoon phase is over. So when something like that happens, you can ask yourself, is this about what happened today, aka my partner not responding? Or is this touching something much older in me? So why does this activation feel so big? Why can something as simple as a delayed text, a partner needing space, a disagreement, or feeling disconnected for a couple hours create such an intense emotional reaction in us? Why does it sometimes feel like the stakes are so much higher than the situation itself? This is because adult relationships wake up childhood survival responses and wounding. So it brings all of it to the surface. And I don't really have time to go deep on attachment theory here. So I'm operating as if you all have a baseline understanding of what attachment theory is. But if you don't, maybe take a pause, look it up, and I can do another episode on it. It's basically the idea that when we're young and children, our safety depends on being and staying attached to our early caregivers. And we are most impressionable from age zero to seven. And attachment wounding can happen anytime during your life, but from zero to seven, it's an especially impressionable time for us. So sometimes people talk about, oh, my dad left when I was one, but I don't even remember him. So I wasn't really impacted by it. Lots of examples of when people talk about when things happened when they were really young. So I don't remember it, so it didn't impact me. But that is totally untrue. We are attachment-based creatures, and our safety and survival depends on staying attached to our early caregivers. So if one of them left, if one of them was super absent because of maybe alcoholism, emotional avoidance, working all the time, anger, a temper, et cetera, you will feel that as a young person and it will get imprinted into your subconscious and your nervous system. And it will shape how you are able to show up in relationships and intimacy. And so if our parents were super distant or we experienced loss, we'll be more anxiously attached. And if they were super overwhelming or enmeshed with us, which is actually a very common pattern with men and their moms, you'll lean more avoidantly attached because intimacy actually feels too overwhelming or feels like you might lose yourself. So anxious attachment is often rooted in a fear of abandonment, a fear of rejection, or a fear of loss. And so a delayed text from your partner to your nervous system, aka where all your attachment wounding lives, can be received as rejection or loss or abandonment. The thing I tell people a lot in my work too is that we can be abandoned as children, because if we are abandoned, we can't survive. We're a child, we can't survive. But you actually can't be abandoned as an adult because you don't depend on adults to stay alive. So when you have a perceived fear of abandonment, you always know that that is a very young part of you and some very young, unprocessed pain in you from childhood. And so for avoidantly attached folks, this can look like a fear of engulfment, a fear of overwhelm, a fear of losing yourself, a fear of dependency. And so for an avoidantly attached person, if their partner maybe wants to do a weekend trip with them or wants to take a next step in a relationship, an avoidant person can perceive that as loss of autonomy, loss of independence, overwhelm, fear of engulfment, enmeshment, et cetera. So same nervous system activation for avoidant and anxiously attached people, but based on what they experienced in their childhood, different strategies to get their needs met. Anxiously attached people will come forward, avoidantly attached people will withdraw. So another thing that's important to understand is unprocessed emotions in your body. So as children, there are certain emotions that are too overwhelming to process, especially if they're big. So fear, shame, grief, loneliness, sadness. And as children, our systems, our psyches, our nervous systems developed protective strategies to not feel those quote unquote negative, quote unquote difficult emotions. So attachment patterns aren't random. They're actually highly adaptive strategies that we developed to stay safe as children. And so every child learns something about relationships. What is safe? What is unsafe? Is it safe to need people? Will people show up for me? Do I have to earn love? Am I too much? Am I not enough? Do I matter? Can I depend on others? And those questions actually become the blueprint that we carry into adulthood. Because as children, attachment wasn't just emotional, it was survival. If connection felt uncertain, inconsistent, overwhelming, or unavailable, your nervous system adapted accordingly. And these adaptations are brilliant. They helped you survive. The challenge is that many of us are still running these same programs decades later. So when your partner doesn't text you back or needs space or seems distant, you're not just reacting to what's happening now. Your nervous system is often reacting to what happened back then. So you're not crazy, you're not overreacting. It's an old alarm that's going off inside a body that hasn't fully learned that it's safe now to be in relationship and to be in close intimacy with someone. So now I want to talk about discernment. So not every trigger is yours, and not every issue is your partner's. Often it's both. And that's how dynamics get formed. It's two of your attachment wounding, or just wounding in general, getting entangled with each other's. So an important caveat before we go any further is that sometimes your old wounds are being activated, and sometimes your partner is genuinely behaving in ways that are hurtful, inconsistent, unavailable, dismissive, or unhealthy. Or sometimes both things are true at the same time. And some good questions to ask yourself are what belongs to my history? What belongs to this relationship? What belongs to both? And why I stress individual healing so much here is because when we are anxiously attached or we have a lot of this unprocessed pain, unprocessed attachment wounding in our bodies, we actually cannot really discern whether it's just my stuff getting activated or whether my partner just really isn't showing up for me. So what I tell people, and this does not apply to any sort of harmful dynamic, but if you are in a healthy relationship, what I really recommend is do your own individual work. And then from that place, can you see if your partner's meeting your needs, see if you're still deeply connecting, see if it's still an aligned relationship. But you can't actually answer those questions when you're constantly in a state of nervous system activation and all your attachment wounding is activated. You will be relating to the relationship through anxiety, fear, control, external validation, et cetera. And you will be relating to the relationship as a younger inner child self. So if you experienced really intense loss or abandonment or rejection when you were six years old and all your abandonment shit is getting activated in your relationship, you are relating to the relationship as if you're six years old. You're acting, thinking and feeling as if you're six years old. And is a six-year-old the best person to be deciding if this relationship is right for you? Probably not, you know? And so that's why it can feel so out of proportion sometimes because it's like a six-year-old is feeling all of these things and it's very activating. But if you can do your own healing work and come back to your grounded adult self, I think you'll be able to answer those questions a lot easier and have a lot more discernment. So this is very nuanced around is my partner not meeting my needs or am I projecting all my shit onto them? That is like the golden question. And it's hard to answer, but the only way you can actually answer it is to do this individual work. So my therapist has a really great definition of codependency. That term gets thrown around a lot in pop psychology these days, and people define it in very different ways. But she has a great definition that I love. And she says codependency is when two people get stuck in wounded parts in a relationship and they can't actually use the relationship experience to grow past these wounded parts. And they actually just stay stuck hurting each other. And I think that's really important here because when you're stuck in these wounded parts, you can't actually see the relationship clearly. You can't see yourself clearly, you can't see your partner clearly. You're relating to the relationship through all of your wounding and you're projecting it onto your partner. So it's so important to do the work of addressing your own wounding so that you can actually see your partner clearly. You can discern if this relationship is still right for you. And you can both actually use the relationship experience to grow past the wounded parts into more whole, integrated individuals who are not just projecting all their shit onto each other and staying stuck in a power struggle. And so I know I've been setting a lot of foundation for this conversation, but I really am about to get into how we actually do the healing work ourselves. And healing isn't convincing yourself that every trigger is your responsibility. I'm not saying that by any means, but healing is developing enough self-awareness to tell the difference. And so one example I'll throw in here quickly is that I had a client once and she was working with a deep not enough wound. And her partner just kept triggering, not enough, not enough. And she kept asking, Do you think this is the right relationship? Do you think we're aligned? Do you think I should keep going with this? I just think he's really just not meeting my needs. But when we looked at what needs were not being met, it was all around external validation. And so what I told her is maybe you're just not meant to know if this is your long-term forever partner. But what you are meant to be doing in this relationship is facing this not enough wound. And if you're consistently relating to your partner and to the relationship as not enough, then relationship will never be enough. But if you can actually use relationship as a mirror to face and process your own not enough wounds and build the worthiness to feel enough, then I think from that grounded adult self, you can actually discern, is this partner meeting my needs? Or am I just projecting all of my not enough onto him? Is this person still aligned? Do I still feel deeply connected to this person? Is this someone I still want to choose to build my life with? But that's just an example of when we're projecting and it makes it kind of cloudy and unclear of whether this really is the right person for us. It's just not the right place to make that choice from. So the fork and the road. So every activation, every trigger presents a choice. When the wound gets activated, there are one of two things you can do. You can project it outward, you can make it your partner's fault. You can blame them, you can criticize them, you can kind of try to control them. If you could never do this again, that would be great. Sound familiar. You could demand reassurance or validation, or you could rely on your partner to make the feeling go away or disappear or feel better. Or option two, you can use the moment as a mirror so you can do the U turn. So you can get activated, you could want to fixate and focus on your partner and project it all onto them as their fault. Or you could point the finger back at yourself and ask, why is this so activating for me? What feels threatening right now? What is this touching in me? So the wound isn't the problem. It's usually the unconscious reaction to the wound that creates suffering. So the unconscious reaction could be blame, projection, criticism, control, et cetera. So now I'm going to lead you through some really deep reflection work. So if you are choosing path number two and using the U-turn and using the trigger as a mirror back to your own shit, I'm going to lead you through a series of questions to really get to the root of what is happening inside of me and how can I take radical responsibility for this instead of making it my partner's fault, which will just perpetuate disconnection and perpetuate the power struggle. So first, and this is really important, I believe, because my work is rooted in somatic and subconscious healing, is where does it live in my body? So I'm triggered by something my partner did. And where am I feeling in my body? What is the sensation? Is it a tightness in my chest? Is it a knot in my stomach? Is it a lump in my throat? Anytime we are triggered, we will feel it somewhere in our body. And when we feel it somewhere in our body, it is a sign that there is unprocessed pain, emotion, or belief somewhere in our body from our past. The second question, how old does this part of me feel? So there is a part of you that carries this wounding, this belief, this unprocessed emotion. And who is that part of you? When have I felt this before? And how old does this part feel is a really interesting question because sometimes people immediately are like, oh, I'm six years old and I'm being yelled at by my dad, or I'm 13 years old and I'm being bullied and I'm sitting alone at the lunch table, et cetera, et cetera. And again, sometimes these memories aren't conscious, but there will always be a felt sense in your body that will point you towards a point in your life where this first formed or got activated. And that's why I really believe that triggers are a roadmap back to ourselves. So they really help us understand where this came from and why this is still living in my body. The third question is what emotion is underneath this? And what I really try to get you to do is not focus on feelings. So feelings is like the whole feelings wheel, there's tons of feelings, but there's only really five core emotions. And those five core emotions are fear, shame, sadness, anger, and joy. But we're gonna leave joy off of here because this is usually not a joy problem. And we're gonna insert grief. So what emotion is underneath this trigger? Is it fear? Is it shame? Is it sadness? Is it grief? Or is it anger? And the next question number four is what is this part believe about myself, about others, about the world? Some examples of this could be no one chooses me, I'm too much, I'll be abandoned, I'll be left, I'm not enough, I don't matter, no one will ever choose me. I'm unlovable. The people I love always leave me, etc. And the next question, number five, what is this trigger trying to show me? What is this feeling asking me to learn? Maybe it's wow, I really haven't processed the loss of my father when I was younger. Maybe it's wow, I haven't really processed the shame of being bullied in middle school. Maybe I grew up with an angry father who made me feel wrong and bad about myself all the time. Maybe this is revealing my not enough wound. Maybe this is trying to get me more in contact with my shame. And the next question, number six, what does this part need from me? A lot of times when you're really activated, when you're really triggered, I just put a hand over the sensation. So if it's tightness in my chest, I put a hand over my chest, I close my eyes, and I say, You're safe. You're safe right now. Because again, these triggers and these parts of us are all rooted in times where we did not feel safe in our lives. And safe covers a broad range of experiences. This can point to, I didn't feel safe when my father abandoned our family. I didn't feel safe when my mom was totally enmeshed with me growing up. I didn't feel safe when my dad's anger erupted around me. I didn't feel safe when I would have a big emotional reaction and my parents would send me to my room. I didn't feel safe when someone made a rumor up about me in middle school and ever and bullied me. And then the final question: what new belief do I want to practice? Maybe it's I choose me, maybe it's I am enough, maybe it's I can survive disappointment. Maybe it's I'm safe even when someone is upset with me. Maybe it's I no longer put my sense of safety in other people's hands. So now I want to explain one of the most important lessons of this episode. And this is this idea of metabolizing emotions instead of managing them. So the roots of our triggers can always be traced back to an unprocessed, stuck emotion in our bodies. So at some point, this big overwhelming, painful emotion happened to you. And it felt too overwhelming or too painful to process or to feel. So instead, our system shoved it down and created a defense mechanism to not ever feel that feeling again. So let's say you're anxiously attached and you have an extreme fear of loss or abandonment, and you just have unprocessed fear in your body, which is causing your anxious attachment. So say the person doesn't text you back, and that triggers you, and it triggers this deep unprocessed fear in your body. But because at some point your system learned that fear is not safe or okay to feel, or it's too overwhelming or too painful to feel, your body developed a defense mechanism, a protective strategy, whatever you want to call it, to not feel the fear. So some of those protective strategies could look like anxiety. So maybe ruminating, obsessing, fixating, just being in your head about it, making up stories about it. It could be projecting, it could be blame, it could be control, it could be reaching for a substance, it could be scrolling on your phone, it could be obsessing over something. And so I'm gonna paint this picture again. You have an anxiously attached person, the partner doesn't text you back, and it starts to activate this deep, unprocessed fear of abandonment or loss in your body. And instead of feeling it, you project outward. You make it mean the partner is doing something wrong. You want to control them, you want them to text you back, or you get in your head and you get super anxious about it, or you need a substance to soothe this, or you need to get on your phone to soothe this. But what that does when we reach for these protective strategies, and it's all unconscious, like our bodies just do it. We're not like, oh, I don't want to feel that fear, so I'm gonna get on my phone or I'm gonna project it onto my partner or I'm gonna get super anxious about it. It's just that it's a learned strategy over the course of your life. So, what you're doing is you're actually retraining your body that it's safe to feel this fear and that actually in allowing yourself to feel the fear, you start to metabolize it from your body. So if you are anxiously attached and you get really activated by something your partner does, maybe they don't text you back, and you feel this trigger in your body, that is the unprocessed emotion. And so what you're doing is you're putting a hand over it and you're breathing with it and you're staying with it. You're breathing into the tightness in your chest. And you're not jumping into story, you're not jumping into control, you're not fixating on them. You are just breathing into the sensation in your body, and you are telling yourself it is safe to be with this fear, and you are just breathing into the fear. And I know it sounds really simple, and I wish I had a more complicated answer for you. Actually, I don't, but some people can get turned off by simplicity. But that's what it is. It is can I just anchor into my own safety in this moment, allow myself to feel this fear and to process it? That is what will start to metabolize the fear from your body, and thus you will have to rely less on these protective strategies. You are retraining your nervous system and your body and your psyche that it is safe to feel fear as an adult. At some point as a child, it was not safe to feel fear. It was too overwhelming and too painful. But now, as an adult, it's safe to feel fear. Now, as an adult, the goal is to have a flexible nervous system, not a perfectly calm nervous system, a flexible nervous system that can take your partner not texting you back and saying, ooh, this brings up a little fear in me. This is my old fear of abandonment from when I was a child, my dad left. And it is, it's vulnerable. It's vulnerable to be in a new relationship. Intimacy is vulnerable, but I'm just gonna be with this fear, really anchor into it and breathe into it and see if I can really find some safety in my body instead of seeking saving or seeking validation from them. So healing happens by feeling, not by avoiding. But our whole lives have been revolved around avoiding our difficult feelings. And the most liberating thing you can do is build the internal safety and nervous system capacity to feel and metabolize your feelings instead of avoiding them. And when you process and metabolize this fear from your body, you will naturally be less anxious when your partner doesn't text you back. All those protective strategies will just naturally lessen because they don't have such a big, unprocessed emotion to protect. So most people think healing happens when the feeling goes away. But healing actually happens when you become capable of just staying with the feeling. Can I stay with this feeling without immediately needing to solve for it? Because it's so uncomfortable and we just want it to go away. So we want to just text the person or do the thing, but the goal is not to eliminate the grief or eliminate the fear or eliminate the shame. It's just to increase your capacity to be with them so that you can metabolize them and release them from your body. Every defense mechanism is trying to help you avoid feeling something. And so, again, some of those defense mechanisms could be rumination, obsessing, reassurance or validation seeking, fixating on your partner, control, scrolling, substances, numbing, making it your partner's problem. And so next time you get triggered, I want you to practice those reflection questions I shared earlier. And I also want you to notice the sensation, put a hand over it on your body, breathe into it, and just stay present with the sensation without jumping into any of your defense mechanisms. Talk to the younger part of you, remind them you're safe. I'm here. This feeling won't last forever. And this is how we metabolize our emotions. This is how our nervous system learns that it's safe to experience what we are going to experience in life. We are inevitably going to experience loss. We're inevitably going to perceive our partner pulling away. We're inevitably gonna experience ups and downs in relationships or distance and closeness. And we need to be able to be with it all. We need to have the nervous system capacity to be with all feelings and all experiences without getting so stuck in one of them. And this is how our old wounds begin to loosen their grip on us. So the goal is to not become someone who never gets triggered. The goal is to become someone who knows how to meet their triggers differently. The power phase isn't asking you to stop having all these wounds. It's inviting you to actually heal them and be with them and stop acting from them because it is the acting from these wounds that is causing the power struggle. It's causing the dynamic, it's causing the conflict, it's causing the projection. You want to be able to show up to your relationship as a grounded adult person that is tended to all this activation and all this wounding and all this unresolved pain and unmet emotional needs from your past so that you can show up to the relationship. And the relationship's not never gonna hurt you or trigger you, but it's just you have the capacity to just move through it in a more grounded, stable way rather than getting so sucked into the difficulties of it. So I hope this episode helps. I know it was dense, it was probably pretty heady, but I really hope this gives you a little bit of insight into how to use the relationship to help you heal, and specifically how to use triggers to come back home to yourself and to address what needs to be addressed in you and to start metabolizing all of these old stuck fears and emotions and beliefs in your body. And at its core, this is all very patterned behavior. So think about your patterns within this. So when my partner does X, I feel Y. And when I feel Y, I do Z. So it's starting to track the pattern because these reactions are very patterned, these triggers, these wounds, these defense mechanisms, it's all very patterned. So what you're trying to do is create enough distance between getting triggered, feeling activated, and what you normally do after that. So then if you normally get angry with your partner, or you normally shut down, or you normally get defensive, this creates a little bit of distance between the trigger and the activation and you using that defense mechanism. And in doing that, you start to break the pattern. You start to relate differently to the activation. So if the old me would get triggered by my partner setting boundaries with me, and then I would get angry and lash out with him. Instead, when my partner sets boundaries with me, I notice the hurt that comes up from me. I've traced it back to the abandonment for my dad. And now I know I actually just need to take care of this young part of me instead of lashing out or getting angry at my partner. And you are literally rewiring your nervous system and your brain into new ways of relating and being. It can be really hard to change these well-worn grooves that are just lifelong. But I think you'll be amazed if you can even just do it once in the most micro of ways. It really becomes easier over time. So, what you're trying to do again is you're just trying to break the pattern. So, notice the pattern of reactions, the patterns of conflict, the patterns of getting triggered, what sets you off. And next time, instead of defaulting to your old behaviors, see if you can just take a deep breath and stay with yourself and relate differently to what's happening. So maybe when my partner sets boundaries, I get really triggered, my abandonment wound comes up, my fear of loss comes up. And instead of lashing out, I come back to myself, I breathe into the fear, I regulate. And you know, and if you still want to communicate the hurt, you can, but instead of lashing out or getting angry, it's when you set boundaries with me, I notice myself getting this real fear of loss. I'm just want to be honest with you about that. You know, that's a really different experience with your partner than just the lashing out. And eventually you can just do that work on your own. Your partner sets a boundary, you feel all this activation in your chest, you get upset, you feel the fear, and then you remind yourself it's healthy for my partner to set boundaries. It's healthy for us to have some space and some distance sometimes. It's healthy for my partner to be able to go take his own time away from the relationship. And this is the work I love to do with both couples and individuals. And couples' work can be so powerful because both people are participating in the process. But if you're single, if you're recently out of a relationship, or realizing that there's just work you want to do on your own first, that's a great place to begin too. It is just powerful work, no matter where you are in your journey. And once you can start relating differently to your wounds, everything around you begins to change, especially your capacity for intimacy. It is just such deep, powerful work. And it's work that I hope everyone can engage in at some point in our lives, because relationships are so triggering, yet they are so meaningful. And we all want to be successful in our relationships. And so I really hope this episode has taught you how to do the U-turn and how to really address what needs to be addressed in you so that you're not constantly projecting it onto your partner and creating dynamics and power struggles and conflicts, et cetera. So please write me an email, hit me up on Instagram if you have any feedback, if you have any ideas for future episodes, and just let me know how this landed. I love creating resources for people, and I really love when I get to hear how it lands for folks. So thank you so much for joining me, and I'm excited to see where this conversation continues to take us. If this episode resonated with you, consider leaving a review, sharing it with a friend, or passing it along on your socials. It really helps the podcast reach new listeners each week. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you're feeling inspired to explore your own work more deeply, I offer both individual and couples coaching, and there's a link in the show notes to book a free consultation. You'll also find my free guide, Breaking the Pattern, which helps you understand the relational and nervous system patterns that may be keeping you stuck.