You’re Not Broken -You’re Becoming
Exploring models of human behaviour to validate conflict and venture toward connection
I never set out to be a couples therapist.
But after years of sitting with hundreds of individuals — listening to stories of heartbreak, longing, and emotional disconnection (including my own) — I started to see something…
Many of the most painful relationship patterns — the ones that loop endlessly through conflict, shutdown, or mutual blame — may feel like it’s “the other person.”
However, they’re almost always about something deeper.
Something older and embedded in the nervous system and in the stories we carry about what love is supposed to feel like.
Some of the most helpful maps for this work emerge from frameworks that integrate developmental psychology, attachment theory, trauma healing, and what couples therapist and author Terry Real calls relational living — where love isn’t just a feeling, it’s a set of skills.
One of the clearest frameworks I’ve found comes from The Quest for the Mythical Mate by Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson.
When Love Feels Like War: Trauma, Repair, and the Hidden Dependency Beneath Conflict
When a couple is stuck in what Bader and Pearson call a hostile-dependent system, the issue is rarely just communication or incompatibility. It’s often something much deeper:
Unprocessed relational trauma and a profound absence of effective repair can drive rupture.
In every relationship, rupture is inevitable.
We misread each other, snap under stress, forget or fail to attune.
But healthy relationships don’t thrive because they avoid pain — they thrive because they move through it. They repair.
Repair is the muscle of resilience.
However, in hostile-dependent dynamics, that muscle is weak — or never developed.
Maybe repair was never modelled in early life.
Maybe it failed too many times to trust.
The result is a relationship ruled by reactivity:
A buildup of emotional micro-wounds and unresolved injuries
A deepening belief: You never really get me
Fights that seek to be heard (eg: yelling), not to find resolution — often escalating into more disconnection
In these moments, the conflict isn’t about what’s happening now. It’s a reenactment.
The emotional brain can’t tell time.
It floods the body with old fear, old shame, old stories. And BAM! You’re right back to the experience (aka trigger).
This is when the dishes aren’t just the dishes. The tone isn’t just a tone. It’s that feeling again — of being unseen, unheard, unsafe.
Regression: Immaturity as Protection
When a couple can’t repair, they often regress.
Not intentionally — but as a reflex of the nervous system.
This is emotional immaturity resurfacing — not in a shaming sense, but as a protective adaptation from earlier developmental stages. When repair feels impossible, the inner child takes over:
One clings. The other shuts down.
One criticizes. The other avoids.
One yells. The other dissociates.
Both feel profoundly alone (and there is nothing like the feeling loneliness in a partnership)
From a polyvagal perspective, this is expected.
When safety is compromised, the nervous system enters survival mode:
Fight — Criticism, escalation
Flight — Withdrawal, distraction
Freeze — Collapse, dissociation
Fawn — Appeasement, self-abandonment
And from a Relational Life Therapy lens, we’d say: this is the adaptive child running the show.
As Terry Real puts it:
“The part of you that learned to survive your family isn’t the part that can sustain intimacy as an adult.”
These childlike defences were brilliant then — but they are destructive now.
The work is recognizing when the adaptive child has taken over — and gently handing the reins back to the relational/wise adult.
Regression is protection — but if we want to love well, the adult self must lead the relationship, not the wounded one.
Trauma-Bonded but Calling It Love
This is what Bader and Pearson mean when they say hostile dependency can masquerade as connection.
From the outside, it looks like closeness — they’re still in the relationship, still trying. But underneath, the bond is forged through rupture, not repair. It’s a trauma bond, not a secure one. Love fused with fear, connection laced with attempts to achieve a sense of security- aka control.
In PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy), couples researcher Stan Tatkin teaches that secure-functioning couples aren’t perfect — they’re mutually safe. They co-regulate. They watch each other’s backs. They soothe, not spite.
In trauma-bonded partnerships, the partner becomes the threat, not the haven. It doesn’t necessarily mean the partner is the source of the trauma but they may be unconsciously reliving a relational narrative that caused attachment injury in childhood.
This might look like reenacting patterns of conflict that modelled from caregivers, for example.
And so…
The body prepares to defend, not receive.
The mind prepares to survive, not connect.
What Healing and Differentiation Look Like
Healing from a hostile-dependent loop doesn’t happen in one breakthrough — it’s a slow, layered unraveling of behaviours, belief systems, and nervous system reflexes.
At its core is a powerful concept: differentiation. Differentiation is the opposite of enmeshment.
“You’re not me. I’m not you. We are two whole people — each with our own needs, histories, and truths — choosing to stay in connection.”
And differentiation isn’t just about identity. It’s about growing up relationally. As Terry Real might say:
“You can’t build a healthy relationship with your child self at the wheel.”
Differentiation allows us to be separate and safe — permission to be our own person. Differentiation is a gateway experience to authenticity and personal agency.
However. If we were punished, abandoned, or ignored for having needs in the past, difference can feel like danger. So we fuse, lash out, control, or collapse.
Which is why:
Healing doesn’t begin with logic — it begins with regulation.
In Bader and Pearson’s framework, differentiation is not the final destination — it’s a critical developmental stage. Healthy intimacy progresses beyond fusion into mutual interdependence, where partners stay emotionally connected and self-responsible.
It is important to note that not all couples arrive at differentiation at the same time. And, one partner can be ahead of the other in development
Regulation: Building Safety in the Body First
Before a couple can repair, they need to come back into their bodies.
Before they can empathize, they need to feel safe enough to soften.
Polyvagal theory teaches that true connection is only possible when the nervous system is regulated.
Being regulated doesn’t mean being calm all the time — it means being available.
It’s not about achieving a Zen-like state of peace. We really just need to have enough internal safety to stay connected to the rational mind, values, and relational intentions — even in the face of stress or conflict.
So one of the first step in healing is learning to track and soothe:
What triggers me into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn?
How does dysregulation show up in my body?
What helps me return to presence — alone or with my partner?
Essentially knowing yourself, how you typically react and practicing how you want to respond
When we’re dysregulated, we lose access to the part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) that helps us reflect, empathize, and choose our responses-put another way: Our adaptive inner child is driving the bus.
Repair: Rebuilding What Wasn’t Modelled
Real repair goes beyond “I’m sorry.”
Acknowledge the hurt
Take responsibility without deflecting
Offer empathy instead of explanation
Check in about what’s needed to move forward
For many, the language of repair is a foreign one. So we teach it. Practice it. Awkwardly at first. With “I statements,” deep breaths, and perhaps a blends of humour and humility.
Over time, it becomes a ritual of reconnection.
Accountability: Owning Your Part of the Cycle
Healing requires turning inward and asking:
How do I contribute to this loop?
What am I avoiding by staying in blame?
What would it look like to take responsibility for my impact?
Terry Real doesn’t mince words here:
“You can be right, or you can be married.”
Even if you’ve been hurt, your reactivity is still yours to own. That’s not self-blame — it’s self-leadership.
“The only person you can ever change is yourself. So show up as the partner you wish you had.” — Real
Attunement: Listening Beyond the Words
Attunement is emotional mindfulness in action.
It’s noticing what’s happening beneath your partner’s words — the subtle shifts in tone, posture, energy, or expression that speak volumes without saying a thing.
It begins with interoception: learning to read our own body’s signals — tightening, heat, holding the breath — not as noise, but as information.
It includes neuroception — our nervous system’s unconscious scanning for cues of safety or threat — but attunement goes further than that.
Attunement is the practice of being present to both bodies — yours and theirs. It’s staying connected enough to yourself that you can sense what’s happening in the space between.
Attunement says:
“I care how this is landing for you — even if I don’t get it right the first time.”
It’s not perfection — it’s presence, and that is what creates the conditions for safety, even during difference.
From Fusion to Freedom
When couples begin to heal, you often hear things like:
“I don’t feel like I’m disappearing anymore.”
“We can disagree and still feel close.”
“I trust that even when we rupture, we can repair.”
This is the movement Bader and Pearson describe: from symbiosis to differentiation.
From fused fantasy to functional intimacy. Not perfect. Not conflict-free. But real, regulated, and resilient.
Or, in Terry Real’s words:
“You don’t just have a great relationship. You do one.”
You’re Not Broken — You’re Becoming
If you’ve found yourself stuck in the same argument, wondering why love feels so hard — or why the person you love also hurts you the most — it doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It may mean you’re becoming.
Many of us were never taught differentiation.
We weren’t all modelled repair.
We carry trauma that shaped how we love, defend, retreat, and reach.
These are explanations, not excuses. You can learn to calm your nervous system, to listen without losing yourself, and to speak from truth instead of fear. You can learn to fight for connection, not against each other.
Healing inside relationship is some of the hardest work we do.
It asks us to grieve the fantasy of perfect love, to meet ourselves with the same depth we offer our partner, and to grow the parts of us that love is calling into maturity.
So if you’re looping, stuck, or scared — pause here:
You are not failing.
You are in process.
You are not broken.
You are becoming.
Love, Lisa
References (and recommended reading):
Ellyn Bader & Peter Pearson — The Quest for the Mythical Mate
Terry Real — Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship
Stan Tatkin — Wired for Love
*Originally published on Medium April 20, 2025
