I Used to Think the Purpose of a Relationship Was to Heal

Rocks are hard, water is wet, fire is hot, and whatever we carry surfaces when we love somebody. That isn't a flaw in relationship. It's simply what happens when two nervous systems get close enough to matter to each other. The attachment patterns, the old wounds, the material that has been sitting quietly in us since long before we met, all of it comes up, gets mirrored back, and gets activated by the very person we've chosen.

That part isn't really in question. What matters is what you decide to do with it, and I got that decision wrong for a long time.

Two containers, two very different relationships

There's a version of relationship where the material becomes the work. Something gets activated, so the two of you sit down and meet it. You talk it through, you look for the pattern, you trace it back to childhood, you extract the lesson. Your relationship becomes the primary place where you both heal.

There's another version where you take the heavy material somewhere else. You find a therapist, or a circle, or a group, or a practice, and you do that work in a container built to hold it. Your relationship is still honest, and things still come up between you, but its centre of gravity is that the two of you are a team in life and you're here to enjoy the life you're building.

Let me be honest that some processing will always happen between people who love each other. I'm not describing a relationship where nothing difficult ever gets spoken. I'm describing where the weight sits.

What I believed for years

I was a heavy processor. I genuinely believed the purpose of relationship was to heal, and I thought I'd understood something most couples miss. Look at this sacred gift we've been handed. All this material is surfacing, and we get to meet it together, talk about it, analyse it, learn from it and take the medicine.

It felt like depth. It felt braver than the couples who never talk about anything at all.

Then I went and had proper therapy myself, and I described to my therapist how we worked. He didn't admire it. He told me it was one of the most unhealthy dynamics you can build, and a direct doorway into enmeshment. He said I should cut it out.

Why it doesn't work

The person who activates your wound can't be the same person who holds you while it opens. When I facilitate a circle, I'm able to hold the field precisely because I'm not inside the material. Your partner is inside it. Asking somebody to be your witness and your trigger in the same conversation asks them for something structurally impossible, and you both feel the strain of it even when neither of you can name what's wrong.

There's also no edge to it. A therapy session starts and finishes. A circle opens and closes. Home has no such boundary, so the processing spreads. It turns up at breakfast and again at bedtime, and there's rarely a clean completion, just a slow accumulation of unfinished material that both of you are now carrying.

And it quietly rearranges what your relationship is for. If the deepest moments you share are the ones where you're meeting each other's pain, then pain becomes the organising principle of your love, and it becomes the thing you reach for when you want to feel close. Desire usually goes quiet in that arrangement, because the roles start to harden. One of you becomes the one who holds and the other becomes the one who needs holding, and there isn't much erotic charge between a practitioner and their patient.

Enmeshment is what waits at the end of that road. You lose track of whose feeling belongs to whom. You stop being separate enough to actually meet each other, which is the strange irony of it, because all that closeness was supposed to bring you closer.

The blind spot in my own field

What makes this so hard to see is that in this work, everybody does it. Personal growth culture is full of couples who process together, and because it's so normal it looks like health. It looked like health to me for years, and I was teaching relational work at the time.

That's what a spiritual blind spot is. Being surrounded by people who share it is exactly why you can't see it.

So I want to say this plainly, because people in my position don't say it often enough. If your relationship has become the main place where you process what you carry, you don't need a better technique for processing. You need somewhere else to take it.

Where the material actually belongs

A good therapist is one answer, and for some of what you carry it's the right one.

But there's something a group offers that neither therapy nor your partner can, and I've been watching it happen for twenty-five years. Many of the needs that surface in a relationship were never one person's job to meet. The longing to be received, and to be met by people who aren't going anywhere, is a tribal need. It was always meant to be answered by more than one pair of hands. When we hand it to a partner, we're handing them something no individual can carry, and then we experience their inability to carry it as a failure of love.

In a well-held circle, that need gets met by a field of people. Something in the body registers that it has been received, and the pressure comes off the relationship. Couples tend to notice this before they can explain it. They go home and there's more room between them, and it isn't because they solved anything at home.

What this looks like in practice

Notice which conversation you're actually in. There's a real difference between sharing what's alive in you and opening a session. A share is short, it's about right now, and it doesn't require your partner to become a practitioner. A session asks them to hold, track and treat you.

Give the heavy material a proper home. Find the container that's built for it, whether that's a therapist, a men's or women's circle, a group, or a regular practice. Put it in the diary the way you'd put in anything else that matters.

Put edges around what does happen between you. If something needs to be met at home, meet it with a beginning and an end rather than letting it run through the whole evening. Completion matters more than thoroughness.

Protect what your relationship is for. Ask yourselves what you'd be doing together if you weren't working on yourselves. Then go and do some of that, on purpose, this week.

Bringing it into a space that can hold it

There's a version of this that people miss when they first hear me say it. I'm not suggesting you and your partner should stop looking at what happens between you. I'm suggesting you stop doing it alone, on a Tuesday night, with nobody holding either of you.

That's what Love, Relationships & You is built for. Three days in a facilitated space where somebody else is holding the field, so the two of you can meet what lives between you without either of you having to be the therapist. You learn the practices together, you try them with each other, and you take them home. What comes home with you is a shared language and a way back to each other, rather than another unfinished conversation.

People also come on their own, which is often the wiser move when the material is genuinely yours to carry rather than something you and your partner are creating between you.

Either way, the point is the same. Your relationship deserves to be the place where you enjoy your life together. The rest of it deserves somewhere that can properly hold it.

Love, Relationships & You runs at New Eden in October and at Casa Sagrada in Colorado in November.