What does it mean to have relationship resilience?
When you have resilience in your relationship, you no longer experience constantly intrusive thoughts about what your emotions “mean,” or when the other shoe is going to drop.
You no longer feel like you HAVE to be constantly thinking about, talking about, and working on your relationship or else something bad is going to happen.
You no longer project unpleasant emotions and experiences onto your relationship or your partner.
Space feels safe.
The natural ebb and flow of emotions feels safe.
Conflict, disagreements, and moments of disconnection feel safe.
Part of this whole “healing” thing is getting to the point that, when something goes ‘wrong’ in your life, you can allow yourself to feel the emotions you feel about the obstacle or discomfort without projecting it onto your relationship.
In other words: Allowing the sucky thing to be the sucky thing, without taking the suckiness and displacing it elsewhere in your life - such as your partner or relationship.
This is something that tends to happen when you don’t have a firm foundation of relationship resilience.
Something goes wrong in your life, or you experience something unpleasant that has nothing to do with your relationship, but your brain makes it mean something about your relationship anyway. Your brain starts desperately scanning your relationship for something that could be causing the unpleasant emotions… and before you know it, instead of giving yourself space to feel the discomfort and allowing your relationship to be a warm, safe place to come how to at the end of the day, you’ve created an issue that wasn’t even there in the first place.
I want to share an example of how I explored this with an individual client recently:
This client shared with me a really difficult work challenge she was dealing with, and then when we started talking about her relationship she said “my brain just keeps telling me something is wrong, and it’s trying to scan everything and figure out how to fix it, even though my partner isn’t doing anything.”
I asked her to zoom out a bit, and look at her life as a whole. Something WAS “wrong” (the work challenge she was experiencing), and her body was having a justified emotional response to that. But because she wasn’t fully allowing herself to acknowledge, feel, and move with the emotions this work challenge was bringing up, they were getting displaced elsewhere.
We worked to be with the discomfort, and I asked her to imagine the resilience that she and her partner have built in the relationship supporting her in this discomfort. If she could feel and move with the emotions in her body, and allow her relationship to simply be a safe container for her to feel that, what would happen?
She said: “It feels so free. I can feel like shit, but that doesn’t have to mean my relationship is shit. My relationship can just be my relationship.”
So much of anxiety comes from unprocessed emotions, and not knowing how to be with and move with emotional energy. If something is going wrong in your life, emotions like anger, sadness, annoyance, or fear are all very valid and justified emotional responses to that. But what we often do when faced with these emotions is avoid them or desperately try to get rid of them, and they end up getting displaced elsewhere.
Such as…you guessed it…your relationship!
To shift this pattern, we need to help our bodies learn how to actually MOVE with and hold unpleasant emotions, and heal whatever past wounds are causing your brain to be hyper-vigilant around love and relationships. When we can do this, then we get to bask in the resilience of the relationship. We have space to safely feel and move through the discomfort that’s coming up in life, and be supported BY the relationship (instead of projecting that discomfort ONTO the relationship).
This is exactly what we help you build in our group program, Trust in Love. If you want to feel SAFE and SECURE in your relationship, TRUST in the love and foundation you’ve built, and learn to move WITH your emotional energy instead of against it - this program is for you!