Embodied repair for couples

Research on repair shows that repair is a foundational skill for couples who stay together the longest and report the highest levels of fulfillment in their relationships (Gottman and Gottman, 2024). Repair, or the practice of coming back into connection after rupture or misattunement has occurred, builds trust and intimacy. Repair communicates care in relationship and demonstrates relational self-awareness, or the awareness that comes from understanding how one’s behavior lands in another person’s emotional world.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon et al. (2020) describes relational self-awareness as a “meta-skill that strengthens an individual’s intrapsychic foundation, enabling them to approach love, sex, and commitment with a growth mindset, viewing an intimate relationship as a ‘classroom’ of sorts.” Repair is not just an apology, nor a simple gesture taken after a relational injury occurs. Repair requires relational self-awareness, and in the IFS model this translates directly to the understanding one has for how their internal system impacts another’s internal system.

Relational self-awareness is a necessary ingredient for healthy relationships but this concept challenges the romance myth that much of Western society holds dear. Richard Schwartz (2021) highlights this myth in You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships, stating that most couples enter into commitment with the expectation that the other one will meet their emotional needs all the time, rescue them from their exiles or most wounded parts, and satisfy the agendas their protectors hold around what it means to be loved.

While care is an obvious and natural expectation in romantic relationships, care without separation and self-awareness warps into caretaking, and they are not the same thing. When partnership rests on the ground of caretaking, intimacy cannot blossom. Intimacy requires individuation, or strong boundaries around one’s sense of self and insight into one’s system. Without a relationship to one’s internal world, romantic relationships exist in a perpetual part-to-part dynamic, with each partner triggering the other whenever an emotional need is not met or an expectation goes unfulfilled. Part-to-part relationships are dissatisfying and exhausting, keeping couples in gridlocked stances that take them further from the intimacy they deeply crave.

Parts work is an essential practice that ensures embodied repair and healthy intimacy is possible in committed relationships. By getting into relationship with their parts, a person understands their needs, fears, and values without projecting their internal world onto their romantic partner. They become their own “primary caretaker” or “inner healer” in Richard Schwartz’s words (2021), which frees up their partner from having to live up to the standards of relentless, demanding protectors and soothe overwhelmed, distressed exiles.

By developing this Self-to-part relationship, one tends their internal world responsibly and thus approaches their partner’s world of parts with more curiosity and tolerance. Intimacy happens when one can see their partner’s internal experience with clarity and sit with it in compassion, versus engaging all the tactics of caretaking, rescuing, and fixing that modern romantic ideals uphold as standards of love. These tactics breed dependence and inadequacy; parts work cultivates intimacy by deepening the bonds of one’s internal relationship first.

IFS-informed repair practices rest on the skill of the “you-turn,” or going inside to explore what parts are activated around the relational misattunement (Schwartz, 2021). For the person who experienced the misattunement, this might look like spending time with exiles who perceive rejection and abandonment in their partner’s actions. By offering these exiles Self-energy and compassion, these parts “un-blend” and take in the nourishing presence of Self-energy. The person who experienced the misattunement becomes less blended and able to speak for these exiles with their partner with more clarity and less reactivity from triggered protectors.

This allows their loved one to hear them from a space of Self, for their triggered parts aren’t leading the conversation. For the person who engaged the misattunement, they can sit with their system and explore what protectors may have been dominating the interaction with their loved one and unknowingly created harmful impact. They can help these protectors express their needs and fears and listen with Self-energy, which encourages the protectors to step back. With more access to Self, they can respond to their loved one’s experience with empathy and acknowledge the impact their parts had on their loved one’s exiles. This acknowledgement of impact is made possible only by connection to their internal experience. The demonstration of relational self-awareness and a commitment to nurturing the Self-to-part relationship ensures the repair process is continuous and connected to the landscape of a couple’s attachment bonds.

In my Level 1 IFS training, I remember someone saying that they believed IFS could change the world. While I appreciated the hopeful sentiment, I didn’t have enough experience with the model or have the same conviction they had. Years later, I find that I resonate with the belief that IFS changes lives, but more specifically, through transforming relationships. I believe the biggest gift one can give their partner is the gift of connection to their internal experience. Connected, balanced internal systems nourish and create space for other systems to flow, find harmony, and access expression.

We often think of parts work as something we do for ourselves, and logistically, this is true in relationship to “going inside”—I can be the only person who truly goes inside myself, because only I have full access to my system! Yet the more I do this for myself (and the more I facilitate this work for my clients), the more I see how beneficial this practice is in relationships. “Going inside” helps us move “outside” with confidence in knowing who we are and what we have to share. It helps us connect to others without caretaking their parts, take responsibility for how we impact others without taking on negative messages about ourselves, and show up with a full sense of who we are instead of letting someone else’s experience define us.

Parts work is a radical act of love—an act of love for ourselves, and an act of love for our loved ones.

For more reading on this topic, see Gottman, John and Gottman, Julie (2024), We’ve studied over 30,000 couples – here are 6 phrases you’ll hear in the most successful relationships; and Solomon, Alexandra H., Martinez, Carolina J., and Eric W., James (2020), Becoming what you are seeking: Building Relational Self-Awareness in emerging adults.