Relationships reveal our desire to connect and our impulses to protect

How do you habitually operate in relationships? What’s working well and what’s creating conflict, disconnection, or depletion? What strategies do you draw upon to protect your vulnerability?

Expanding our awareness about how we operate builds power and choice.

Our painful relationship patterns become juicy breadcrumbs that lead us into the underworld of our psyche to rescue exiled parts of us that have been left behind, typically during our developmental years.

Unveiling how our fears and desires play out in relationship is a delicate and intensely vulnerable process.

Sometimes we can’t see how we’re contributing to fear-based reactive dynamics through behaviors such as defending, making excuses, judging, blaming, complying or collapsing. We can’t always see our habits or the ways we unconsciously give, take, or withhold power to get our needs met.

With the power of our presence and compassion, we can create new relationship pathways. To heal and integrate, we need to feel safe and held with curiosity instead of personal agendas and judgment. We need the support of one another to unravel outdated ways of operating in order to rewire more current ones.

Identifying familiar patterns

If you find yourself experiencing repeating patterns of challenging relationship dynamics, you’re not alone!

It’s normal to feel bewildered by the stress and conflict ignited in relationships with the people we respect and love, and those who pushes our triggers and hot spots.

Our adult relationships reveal the fabric of our internal world, and the subconscious ways we attempt to repeat and repair heartbreaks and missing experiences from childhood.

The patterns of conflict and disappointment that we encounter as adults often point to unresolved pain and subconscious beliefs about love we learned as children.

If we remain unaware of our subterranean beliefs, we’ll likely repeat and reinforce outdated patterns. The good news is that we have the power to repeat and repair instead of continue to reinforce outdated dynamics and beliefs.

A few examples of how core wounds and reactive patterns play out in relationship:

1. SAFETY & SECURITY

   • When you don’t feel safe or included, what do you do? Do you withdraw and blame others? Or do you shame or isolate yourself?

   • Do you withdraw when you feel anxious? Do your relationships suffer as a result of this attempt to self-soothe alone when stressed?

   • Do you feel an inner conflict between your longing for connection and your need for primal safety, which you only find alone?

   • Do you feel despair and isolation when you’re not being attuned to?

   • Do you take refuge in your inner world or become invisible when you feel overwhelmed by social environments or intimate relationships?

     
     

2. CONNECTION & SUPPORT

   • When your needs are dismissed, neglected, or minimized, how do you respond?

   • Do you become paralyzed when fears of abandonment arise?

   • When you fear rejection or loss, does your anxiety drive you towards controlling or grasping behaviors?

   • Do you avoid the vulnerability of having needs and needing help by being self-reliant and doing it all on your own? Do you turn away help even when you long for it inside?

   • Do you automatically turn to others to soothe your anxiety? Do you demand attention from your loved ones through endearing pleas or by unconsciously triggering drama or conflict?

   
   

3. POWER & DIGNITY

   • What is your relationship to holding and expressing your power?

   • Do you manage your vulnerability by getting righteous and angry or enraged, or collapsing into helplessness, sadness and disappointment?

   • Do you avoid being vulnerable by pushing others away? Or do you covertly seduce or overtly overpower others to get what you want?

   • Do you find it difficult to trust others? Do you fear being betrayed or lied to?

   • Do you self-protect by building rigid walls around your emotions and vulnerability? 

   • Do you seek distractions from feeling your emotions? When emotions arise, do you blame others or become excessively busy in other areas of your life (for example, working more hours to avoid issues at home)? 

     
     

4. FREEDOM & INDIVIDUALITY

   • When you feel a loss of autonomy or freedom, how do you react? Do you conform or push back?

   • Do you sneak your needs behind others’ backs because you’re afraid they’ll try to stop you?

   • Do you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’?

   • Do you jump at the opportunity of taking care of others, but eventually find yourself depleted and resentful? Do you over-give and then feel disappointed when your generosity isn’t reciprocated or appreciated to your satisfaction?

   • Do you endure jobs or relationships, and rationalize that it’s “not so bad” when, truth be told, you’re dying inside?

   
   

5. VALIDATION & WORTH

   • How much do you value yourself?

   • Do you strive to be productive in order to feel good about yourself?

   • Do you draw upon your ability to charm, entertain, or perform to ensure you’re reflected back as good enough?

   • Do you often feel ignored, unheard, or misunderstood?

   • Do you value task over relationship because your value is based upon what you accomplish and can measure?

   • Do you find it challenging to rest and neglect celebrating successes by quickly engaging in the next conquest?

Why do we repeat what’s painful?

It makes sense that we want to repeat what feels good and pleasurable. But why do we repeat what’s painful? It can feel bewildering to watch ourselves engage in the same difficult relationship patterns, over and over again.

You’re not crazy, or broken. This human phenomenon is called repetition-compulsion.

Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats or reenacts a familiar event, over and over again, in an attempt to resolve the original scenario. This "re-living" can also take shape in dreams, during which the psyche offloads memories and feelings associated with the earlier wound or trauma.

Have you ever ended a relationship, or left a job because of a challenging dynamic only to find yourself, much to your surprise, in a similar relationship dynamic with a new person or job situation months or days later? This is repetition compulsion in action. Familiar dynamics and patterns will follow us until we connect with the beliefs that subconsciously allure similar conditions and conditions into our lives over and over again.

The neuroscience of beliefs

From a physiological perspective, our brain is wired to repeat what’s familiar. This is why we replay patterns and narratives with others, even when they’re painful. This is how undesired, but familiar experiences, are often innocently reinforced. That is, until we suspend habits, interrupt reactivity, and explore new choices that are more aligned with our current needs and desires.

To learn more about the neuroscience of beliefs, visit my article Can We Rewire Our Beliefs?

To repeat is to replay history. Without self-awareness and conscious choice, we may suffer in circular cycles of repetition and reinforcement.

We repeat conflicts to find resolution and integration. With self-awareness and compassion, we can repeat and repair. We can interrupt and re-integrate what we missed earlier in life.

Attracting wound resonance relationships

A mutual attraction based on core wounds, of opposing or complementary adaptive strategies, is an energetic phenomenon called wound resonance. The phenomenon of repetition compulsion means that we tend to attract wound resonance relationships, in all arenas of relationships.

For example, imagine a child who adapted the family role of helper and caretaker of a parent, or other siblings, in order to gain appreciation, connection, and stabilize the home environment. Which dynamic do you imagine they will be attracted to as an adult? If their brain is looking for what’s familiar, they will subconsciously seek someone who wants to be rescued and taken care of. The wound resonance pattern of a caretaker seeks someone who needs rescuing. A hero needs a victim. A martyr needs someone, or something, to fall on the sword for.

Sometimes, with wound resonance, we’ll seek the opposite of what we know. In this case, the adult caretaker may become resentful and exhausted by caring for others, and choose to pursue connections spiritually, with animals, or other variations that may include a hyper focus on oneself instead of others.

Unveiling our missing experiences

As children, if our needs are consistently neglected, not attuned to, or criticized, then the fear and hurt related to these “misses” become woven into the fabric of our belief system and our sense of self-worth. This is called a missing experience. 

A missing experience is a conglomeration of developmental needs that were unnoticed, neglected or missed consistently enough throughout our childhood, leaving a gap in our psyche. A part of us became banished or fragmented into a remote compartment for safekeeping.

Each missing experience represents the loss of receiving a particular form of nourishment that we needed to feel integrated and whole.

When a missing experience occurs, we instinctually create an adaptive strategy to protect our vulnerability. As a result, we’re left with an assortment of strategies that serve to protect us from the pain of being missed, rejected, humiliated.

The key to understanding the root causes of our adult relationship patterns is through this framework of exploring our missing experiences and the subconscious adaptive strategies we called upon to get our needs met (and avoid further pain).

Developing nourishment barriers

If a child is criticized excessively, and her need for belonging, safety, and validation is missed, she will develop a subconscious adaptive strategy to protect herself from the overwhelming pain.

She might learn to numb out, withdraw, self-deprecate before others make fun of her, and other deflective tactics that serve to protect her vulnerability.

Internally, she will construct an invisible nourishment barrier to avoid being exposed and bruised.

In the future, even in safe relational environments, when celebrated and appreciated she may feel an immediate panic from the attention. If she’s praised, she may feel overwhelmed and fearful since her growing belief is that attention comes with a high and costly risk of feeling criticized and ridiculed.

This becomes a painful double-bind. She’ll want to receive the appreciation but simultaneously feel afraid of the repercussions based on her history.

A nourishment barrier prevents us from receiving more than our system has adaptively wired us to expect or hope for. It was established to manage our disappointment and protect our vulnerability.

It’s stop-gap in our psyche, attempting to defend against opening our vulnerability and heart again, for fear of a devastating repeat of the past.

Chronically missed developmental experiences cause early onset of anxiety patterns that carry into our adulthood. When our nervous system and ability to self-soothe aren’t developed as a child, we will likely struggle to self-regulate when anxiety rises as an adult.

As adults, we sometimes  cope with these activated states of arousal and anxiety through addiction, attempts to control our environment or others, denial, excessive busyness, or dependency upon others to soothe us.

A framework to reveal and heal relationship patterns

I want to share a potent relationship framework with you, which has the power to help all of us better understand ourselves as well as those we’re in relationship with. This framework helps us get to know our personal relational template and that of the people we love. As a result of this exploration, we can experience more compassion, emotional intimacy, and healing conversations.

Through my training as a Hakomi therapist, I studied a developmental model created by Ron Kurtz and his team, which is rooted in Wilhelm Reich’s body of work. Over years of synthesizing patterns and studying clients in a therapeutic setting, Ron and his team designed a map that illustrates the five universal needs we each experience during our early development.

Additionally, Ron and his team extracted the adaptive strategies we develop when these needs aren’t met. Over time, these adaptive strategies can evolve into personality styles, body postures, and patterns of beliefs and behaviors.

Over my years of work as an integrative coach, I’ve used this model, and have now included one additional adaptive strategy (The Rebel), based on my own self study and what I’ve learned through exploring with clients.

FIVE SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENTAL NEEDS

From our time in the womb until the age of seven or eight years old, our developmental experiences become wired into our psyche and body, setting our belief systems and relationship template for life. 

During this crucial time of our development, we begin to gather and interpret answers to the following questions:

• Am I lovable, good enough, and safe to be myself?

• Are relationships trustworthy and reliable?

• Is the world a safe and loving place where I can be my authentic self? Or is it trying to control me, change me, or manipulate me?

The social and emotional five developmental needs universal to all humans are:

1. To feel safety and security (0 - 6 months)

2. To feel connected and be assured that our needs matter (6 months - 2 years)

3. To feel our power, dignity and influence (2 - 3 years)

4. To express our independence and still be loved and accepted (3 - 4 years)

5. To feel confident of our worthiness (4 - 7 years)

NINE ADAPTIVE STRATEGIES

When any of these needs are missed, with enough consistency or because of a traumatic event, we innocently cope by developing adaptive strategies to protect our vulnerability. Adaptive strategies help us to manage the pain and disappointment of feeling unseen, criticized, disconnected, manipulated, pressured to be who others want us to be and so on.

These intelligent forms of self-protection are called adaptive strategies. There are nine common adaptive strategies which are associated with the five developmental needs.

1. Creative-Introvert

2. Other-Reliant

3. Self-Reliant

4. Strong-Generous

5. Charming-Persuasive

6. Responsible-Enduring

7. Rebel

8. Expressive-Entertaining 

9. Achiever

Ready to map your missed experiences and adaptive strategies?

You can download my free ebook, How To Rewire Limiting Relationship Patterns.

Why do we develop adaptive strategies?

As children, in a complex world of differing needs, agendas, expectations, and social pressures, we’re confronted with complicated decision points. When our needs aren’t met consistently, we develop adaptive strategies.

Adaptive strategies become habitual patterns of behavior and personality traits. Once we employ our chosen adaptations, we merge with them as a way of operating and being in the world. They become our worldview, our belief system, our identity. They fuel the basis of our assumptions, expectations, judgments, and attempts to ensure connection, love, and belonging. They often become invisible to us, but they are responsible for 80% of how we operate.

Each adaptation is our innocent attempt to command a swift solution to protect our vulnerability and ensure we’ll get our needs met in an alternative way.

Our adaptive strategies become the basis from which our adult relationships operate.

Some examples

Here are some examples of how missing experiences turn into adaptive strategies that play out in our adult relationship:

• If as a child, your fears or anxiety were dismissed with words such as “Stop complaining. Get over it. You’re being such a baby,” you will learn to hide or repress your stress when it arises. The absence of developing healthy strategies to self-regulate and self-soothe will drive you towards high states of anxiety, which will result in behaviors such as: addictions, desperately grasping for others to rescue you, withdrawing from the world, seducing or charming others to create connection, or being quick to jump into new relationships to help you off-load the intensity of your anxiety and overwhelm.

• If your need for attachment and bonding were reflected back to you as “You’re being too much” or “You’re so needy,” you may have learned to tame or ignore your own needs and focus on the needs and desires of others instead. This makes you a very good caregiver, perhaps an enabler, and a go-to for those who need support. Or, you may become self-sufficient so that you don’t need to rely on anyone else and can protect yourself from the potential pain of rejection by doing it all yourself.

• If your need for independence was snuffed out by excessive rules that felt confining, you may have grown up feeling resentful and confused about how to manage your need for independence and your desire for connection. You may say yes to others at the expense of your own needs to maintain connection. Or you will rebel and say no as you search for others to bond and join with. If you didn’t learn what secure attachment feels like, as an adult, you may yourself in unexplained patterns of push-pull or feeling overwhelmed by your conflicting desires for both relational connection and freedom.

• If your desire for physical or emotional affection was met with rejection or criticism, you may have learned to close your heart and diminish your buoyancy and expressiveness. Perhaps you oriented away from physical expressions and towards the safety of intellectual forms of connection to stay safe.

Studying our adult relationship patterns provides an open-ended exploration into the nuanced ways in which our missing experiences and adaptive strategies protect us, and provide us with a crack of light into the shadows of our blind spots.

Every strategy has superpowers and kryptonite — Embrace it all!

Our challenges, and perceived deficiencies, require a welcoming embrace to be fully integrated.

Missing experiences aren’t mishaps — they’re a key ingredient in our evolutionary process. Each one is part of our complex and innately intelligent human design. Each one contributes to the initiatory journey of being human. Investigating our beliefs, and habitual ways of operating, is essential for integration and healing.

The recognition of each developmental need and its associated adaptive strategies are markers on a trail. Adaptive strategies provide a glimpse into our internal landscape’s development, based on the influences of social, cultural, and familial conditioning. Each adaptive strategy is a part of our innate wisdom to safeguard our heart and vulnerability from further pain.

Most adaptations arise as a result of feeling stressed or caught in an internal double bind. As adults, when our needs differ from others’ needs, it can feel like a lose-lose, which is when our adaptive strategies often take center stage. These habitual, and often subconscious ways of reacting, move into action before we even have conscious awareness about what is happening.

Each strategy houses a superpower — a strength or gift we develop from navigating our missing experiences. Simultaneously, each one hosts our kryptonite. The light and the shadows invites us to come into our wholeness, embodiment, and integration.

Healing through self-compassion

Adaptations are born from a need to survive. They’re healed through love and acceptance — not through aggressive means of striving and fixing. Exploring adult relationship patterns is not about uncovering all the aspects of our brokenness so we can fix them and arrive at a state of completion that ensures we always feel lovable, worthy, and safe.

This healing process is about welcoming “what is” with an open heart, and observing how an earnest embrace transforms and deepens our embodied sense of self. Through an expansion of our heart, a dismantling of self-aggressive thoughts, judgments, and harsh expectations, we integrate exiled aspects of ourselves back home.

When we’re not preoccupied striving to justify our worth or collapsing in shame, then we create space to rest. We make room to be and remember who we are beyond all the noise and the chaos of addictions, striving, and busyness.

Your free ebook: How To Rewire Limiting Relationship Patterns

In this complimentary field guide, we explore each developmental need and its accompanying adaptive strategies.

The intention is to help you identify your relational patterns, their origin, and where you can intervene with conscious choice and compassion to shift from repeat-reinforce into repeat-repair.

Self-awareness is the key to updating our operating systems and integrating exiled parts of ourselves back home into our heart.

This is a hero/heroine’s journey of revolutionary leadership. Each one of us has the opportunity to further integrate our power and expand our embodiment of love and compassion.

In the field guide, you will find the following for each of the five needs: 

1. A brief description of each developmental stage and the associated age 

2. Examples of missing experiences

3. Adaptive strategies that arise in response to the associated missing experiences

4. Superpowers and kryptonite for each adaptive strategy

5. A rewiring affirmation

I hope this ebook will expand your self-awareness, help reveal your potential blind spots, and inspire you to feel empowered to create the conditions within yourself to feel more peace, love, joy, ease, and intimacy in your relationships.

Embracing our relationship patterns is a journey of power reclamation

Repeating familiar relationship patterns can be bitter medicine. It can spin us through the repetition compulsion cycle of repeat and reinforce over and over again, like it’s Groundhog Day.

The good news is this: when we discipline ourselves to create space to pause, reflect and study our adult relationship patterns, we create a crack in the armor of habitual ways of operating.

Each time we suspend operating on the express trains of reactivity, such as patterns of blame, shame, withdraw and criticism, we create potential for something new.

Sometimes we can’t catch or suspend before we said or done that thing that we regret later. It’s okay, it’s not too late. Ruptures and repairs can be the grounds for building deeper trust and safety. When someone has the courage to own their messiness without excuses or blame, miracles happen.

Each time we take personal responsibility and circle back to the person, or group of people, with humility and a desire to own our actions and repair, we create new possibilities for being messy and not needing to defend. We generate relational trust, safety, and nourishment.

Through an environment of safety, trust, self-acceptance and conscious choice, anything is possible. This process allows us to release what no longer serves us, and upgrade into ways of being that are more aligned with our essential self rather than protective patterns.

Pausing and reflecting creates evolutionary growth and integration. When we embrace our core wounds, we integrate these defended parts of ourselves back into our own hearts.

This is the power of leading from the inside-out

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